Show HN: Fail it Forward – you fail so others don't have to | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Fail it Forward – you fail so others don't have to

failitforward.com

34 pointsadamcanady23 comments

@OP,

You should make yourself a few "fake" accounts on your own website and then get to posting. Everything now is from AdamCanady which gives the impression that it's just you (which it is ). If It was coming from a randomized set of usernames, it would give the impression of a lively community.

Reddit did it, and ever since then I'm pretty sure it's considered acceptable by the HN community and others.

Thanks habosa! I was considering doing that, but it looks like some HN folks have submitted a few articles already. Maybe it could take off?

That's how Reddit (and probably every link site) started as well.

Wonder if it will do well. If something makes people feel sad/down, they're not likely to share it. So, visiting the site certainly did not inspire happiness.

If you could somehow mitigate the sad feeling from sad news thing, it may catch on and gain a decent bit of traction. Lord knows we need to be more open to discussing failure and learning from it. However, I personally do not like discussing failed startups from my past, and I wonder if I'm not part of the majority.

Cool idea though. Wish you luck.

I totally agree with your thoughts here. Is there a better medium to share these experiences? I know there's a similar-ish subreddit [1] but I think there should be a better service for business-related things like startups, which is why I made this site!

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/tifu

Oh wow. My guess is that you and I had the same idea following the "Started a stupid company. Failed" thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6806428

I actually started working on something similar - but quite honestly I don't have the skills to do it in any reasonable time frame. I am glad I stopped when I did because yours would have crushed mine.

I hope it works out.

FYI one of the reasons I stopped is because I knew it would be really hard to get solid content because it was based on things that most people want to never talk about again. If this platform can get them talking it would be massively helpful to the community. On the order of Quora.

I've never been a fan of the CSS and visual aesthetic of Telescope, but it is a really great platform for a discussion board.

I like this idea.

As it is though, I feel like there is too much black on the page -- and it's really black. All that black also makes it hard to read the gray content, which is stuff that I really do want to read. It also makes it harder for me to see the icons.

Sorry for the feedback on the aesthetics, just that the site is really hard on my eyes.

Can't help but think about how this site about failing will likely fail... so thanks!

Hah, I have the same fear myself. Hopefully it will succeed! Would you recommend a different format?

Years ago a friend and I hacked together iFvckedUp.org with the intention of focusing on videos of ourselves and other startup friends talking about the fvckups we made (or were currently making) at our startups. We learned that a) filming yourself was hard enough to begin with, but b)filming yourself talking about how you royally screwed up was even harder. So yeah, don't change to a video format :)

(though the storytelling/editing tools are better now, so maybe worth taking another crack at?)

PS - Go Hawks

Chad, interesting take! I can definitely see it being difficult to talk about failures on video - it's hard enough to deal with them, let alone write about them. I feel that the ease of editability (if that word exists?) of writing makes it easier though.

When you can revise what you want to say over and over (how many times did you hit backspace while writing that comment?), you can convey your thoughts exactly how you want them to be conveyed. It's more difficult and time consuming to do this with video, so the 'pain' (if you will) would last even longer.

Go Hawks! - Are you from around here?

Spent 4 great years at the University of Iowa...like half the school, I'm originally from the suburbs of Chicago.

Awesome Adam, I think there's a lot of value in cataloging/discussing people's failures like this (so much so that I started working on something very similar a while back :) Good luck!

Thanks a ton, franl.

What did you work on before to discuss things like this?

Just a simple web app for people to checkin with failures and the key lessons. I wanted to have tags for different topics, and a feed based on tags you were interested in. Pretty basic. I didn't take it beyond the checkins because I couldn't envision myself checking in very often.

Kind of cool. What makes it cooler than e.g. a subreddit about failure experiences?

Because it's more focused and comprehensive (at least in theory).

The site fails to load without javascript.

Sorry about that! It uses Meteor, which is built on top of Node.JS, so it requires JS on both the front-end and the back-end. I felt it was appropriate since 99% of users have front-end JS enabled, and it was easier to launch a site without dealing with edge-cases.

nice use of meteor! :)

Thanks! It's just a quick port of Telesc.pe[1] with a few subtle modifications.

[1] http://telesc.pe/

Awesome to see that you're using Telescope! :)

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