Failed Startup, Useful Product – Free Publishing Platform for You | Hacker News Reader

Failed Startup, Useful Product – Free Publishing Platform for You

11 pointsjasonsaeho8 comments

When we started our startup, it was our second company and first startup. And we didn't know anything about startups so we made pretty much every single mistake in the book.

Of all the mistakes we made, one sticks out the most which is spending an entire year trying to convince companies from the likes of Coca Cola to medium enterprises to do something they're already doing differently or doing something new they aren't doing yet.

We now learned the difference between making something people "need" vs "want". When you are not making something people want, it doesn't matter how polished you make your product or how much they need the product.

We now accept our failure. However we have a useful and polished product in our hands that we really want to see used by people. So we're finally opening up our platform to everyone, not just companies (we restricted access to companies and about a single topic only).

It's a publishing platform. I haven't finished transforming the product from the first idea/product, but it's well-tested and ready to be used.

It's completely free for now until one day we have enough demand for a paid model. But there will always be a free option.

If anyone's interested, please visit https://goodethos.com. I'm also going to release almost all of my code to open source hopefully in a month+ time.

DEMO TO SEE: https://goodethos.com/bdqworks

DEMO LOGIN: username: demo-public, password: demo-public

Things holding me back from releasing it open-source now are:

1. I'm still developing parts of the product;

2. Lots of the text/words are still wrong (I need to convert the words to be consumer-centric);

3. I have to remove signup option in order to make it a standalone product;

4. My fonts providers are not open-source so I have to find alternatives.

Sorry to hear that, but hey! You get to walk out with bruises and patches from the front-line, that's the medal of honor and you get to tell the story....."kids, this earth exhaled us out when we tried building X..." well at least thats what I will tell, I've been in your shoes two or three times.

Also, need help with those things to open source it? like working on it before open sourcing it! I'd be happy to help.

Also, it looks cool, very cool to me.

Thanks for the offer. I... probably will want some help. But I want to build the product the way I want it first.

Once I finish making the product look and function exactly the way I want it, I don't think I'll care at that point whatever people want to do to it. But until then, I think I want to restrict people from straying away from my vision of the product.

Also, now that I'm not working on this startup anymore, I'm just kind of creating whatever I want without any regard for what people may think of the product or use it for.

For example, there's really no direction any more. I'm just freestyling. And that means I don't want it to be just another publishing platform when I'm done with it.

P.S. There was a spike in traffic over the past few days because I've been posting the link in different places. If the application didn't work for you, please try again, it will work now, I've upgraded the server to handle the load.

If anyone uses what I built for their own personal use, I appreciate any feedback sent to me by email at hello[at]goodethos.com or jason.saeho[at]gmail.com.

Also if you're using the platform and want a new feature inside it. You let me know. I'll probably build it for you as long as you make good use of what I made.

One more reason why I'm doing this is because I'm a huge Meteor.JS advocate. Meteor.JS is great. You should use it.

Lastly I'm now looking for new cool projects to participate in or even a job. Please contact me if you're interested.

It looks really great and am sorry to hear that it didn't take off. However, it sounds like you were trying to go after too many different sized companies. I do admire your tenacity and I'm sure that the learnings will pay off in the future.

I'm also working on trying to develop B2B software. I may need help in the future but would love to connect with you regardless. Will send you an email later in the day.

So you tried to sell a blogging platform to companies? I am curious as to what was your value proposition. What did your product have that was so unique and useful in your product that you felt companies would pay for it?

No, we weren't trying to sell a blogging platform. What we created was not what we wanted to create either. What we ended up creating was supposed to be a tiny piece of a much bigger overall vision.

I don't really want to go into a lengthy explanation right now but basically companies (especially the bigger companies) all do something called social responsibility. My co-founder's idea was to provide a different way of reporting their activities and a create a new standard for reporting and become the center of it.

Our vision/mission was to increase consumer awareness; bring 100% transparency and honesty to every single company; and motivate all companies to do honest social responsibility activities.

Looks like a very similar product to Medium. It's a great concept, but Evan Williams is tough competition!

Ya, it's a long story but we never intended to compete with Medium. We are now, kind of. This product was created accidently.

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