Ask HN: I keep trying and failing at startups, what am I doing wrong?

You're not selling to people who buy things with money.

Looking at your list, they seem to be handy things that consumers could use to solve a problem that bothers them a little. What you want is a product that fixes the immediate existential threat that an otherwise wildly successful company just discovered they have (ideally as a result of reading the copy on your homepage.)

I made a list of things my next SaaS product should have. No particular order, but give yourself a point for each one you can tick:

- Business: Purchased by businesses as opposed to consumers

- Aspirin: More like aspirin (takes an existing pain away) than a vitamin (nice to have)

- Valuable: Immediately saves >$100/month by using it

- 50x500: Market to quickly sell 500 subscriptions at $50/month

- Paid: Paid from day one as opposed to Freemium

- Recurring: Continues providing value every month, not just one time or occasionally

- Immediate: Useful straight away by user #1

- Network: More useful the more users in the Org use it

- Supportable: Low instance of customer support. Few emails asking for help

- Fun: Interesting enough to keep working on

- Buildable: Not to huge in scope. Can be built as MVP, then iterated

List out your ideas, add up the number of boxes they tick, and that's your score. I've had a lot of ideas for a lot of things I wanted to build, but thus far none that score more than 10.

My existing products get a 6 and 7 respectively, and they still bring in enough to live comfortably, so it's certainly possible to succeed without all those bits above. But if you can meet most of those requirements, you'll find yourself on a much easier road.

Good luck!

Not only is that one of the most helpful comments I've seen in point form recently, but it's also inspirational to know you've got the results to back it up. Thank you for sharing this.

Nice list, thanks. If you don't mind what are your existing products? I'd be curious to see how they are checking the 6 and 7 items.

S3stat (https://www.s3stat.com/) gets a 7 and Twiddla (http://www.twiddla.com/) scores a 6.

I use TransferWise regularly, so I am a potential client for TransferCorp but frankly as soon as I open the page alarm bells start going off in my head and there is near zero chance I am giving you any of my financial information.

The UI is a giant mess, there is tons of strange yellow dead space (70%+ of the entire screen), menu items are for no reason unreadable unless you mouse over, when you click on them you get an animation glitch, when you shrink the browser window the entire middle element (yellow/orange thing) disappears but the "Send Money Now" button doesn't and starts corrupting the green right side. I really cannot stress enough that the UI experience on that entire site is just awful, and that alone would put me right off letting you dick around with my money (if you cannot get the UI right I just assume security, reliability, etc are as bad or worse).

I also hate the complete lack of information. When I click on anything I get this silly login box (with a different colour theme) and need to click again to sign up. The track button and dashboard buttons are demos, but the send button requires login(?) for some inconsistent reason. The login and sign up button in the bottom left keep disappearing (WHY?!).

Honestly you know the scene in cheesy hollywood movies where someone asks "What is wrong with the way I look?!" and the other person just points at all of them? Yeah, that right there. Everything is wrong with the UI of that site, just everything. I'm sorry, I have nothing constructive to say, scrap it and start again with a consistent theme and go learn about usability and UX, forget trying to be clever, save clever for when you get the 101s down. I thought I was bad at UI, but this site is like a Geocities page.

Agree that TransferCorp is amateur land in terms of design and UX.

5 years, 5 products, less than 5 users per product? What? How do you give up after one year of work on one project?

I doubt you even had one decent project if thats what your churn rate is. Do you expect these things to take off over night? It takes years to develop products and businesses.

I wonder if you are targeting problems in search of a solution, or solutions in search of a problem. There is nothing wrong with starting a business to show users that they have a problem they did not even know they had. The only real issue there is that you have to educate your user base... and that is hard.

Taking a look at your links:

Online Money Transfer -- This seems like a solved problem. Maybe I don't understand but is money transfer online something I can't do from my bank or 100 other reputable entities? Why should I use yours? Are your rates lower? Are you more secure? Can you get around some pain I am having? From your site it seems like you are giving a simple way to transfer money but frankly, in a very saturated market.

Get Power Help -- Now this is more interesting. I had no idea there were rights involved with NPower. However, I bet very few other people knew that either. Now the question is, do they have rights to make money from their complaint? Which complaints will make them money? I don't want to pay you GBP30 for an apology (no offense). I want a chunk of GBP10000! This is an education problem. If you can solve that it might work. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that the Ombudsmen gets a whole lot more written apologies than they do GBP10000 rewards.

Stop Lost Transfers -- Again, very interesting! Seems to work well. When transfers are slow or stopped do they have any idea to even check if their name is on the list? If they transferred with a reputable transfer service and something happens will that transfer service tell them why it was slowed or stopped? How do people even know they should check their name before they initiative a transfer? Again, education.

I don't think you are bad at founding. I think you just haven't found a niche to found in yet which has high growth potential without massive education. On top of that, even if you did educate people on the need for your services, would you make enough money to make them useful? For example, if I were an investor looking to invest in your ideas I would have to ask, what is the upside potential of get power help and stop lost transfers? Right now you have no way to even monetize stop lost transfers. And I have no sense of how much people can win from NPower in disputes. I would pan the online money transfer as an investor because I think the market is too saturated.

I have also had a startup that had few customers. And another that never launched.

I think people misrepresent the reality: startups are hard. There is a lot of competition to get attention. People who are complaining about your site design are probably right -- there is always room for improvement. Standards are very high.

I think marketing and networking are key, but so is everything else. A fair amount of luck is involved.

People like you who report their failures are a rare breed, so don't be fooled. Most startups are unpopular. There are too many options out there for everyone.

Keep working on site design, product improvements, product/market selection, marketing/networking, etc. Think of it as a popularity contest partly.

Keep trying to find and build a product or service people want. Keep improving, it is very competitive in all areas and usually requires great execution and some luck.

Some people are lucky and it comes easily. That's not most people.

Marketing, networking and feedback loops are probably key. Integrating in existing social groups.

It sounds like you do not provide enough apparent value and hence people do not pay!

I am not talking about there "real" value you provide but what value you are able to communicate to those who actually lands on your site.

My advice would be to talk to customers, either those who have signed up or alternatively you could go out in the real world, find some target customers and talk to them.

This could be in a coffee shop (ask permission from the manager) where you could offer to pay for the persons coffee, then let them use the software and get them talking about what they see, their experience and thoughts - take notes of everything and most importantly shut the f*ck up, do not explain nor complain!

Take what you learned and use in your copy writing and development, then go back out again and repeat until you either has proven that people do not get value from what you are building or that they do!

Oh, I forgot

Get into a mastermind group (or two) Listen to "startup for the rest of up" podcast Listen to "the startup chat" Attend MicroConf Europe Read books like "the lean startup", traction, smartcuts, the war of art, the dip, etc...

I think that "never had more than 5 users" is really the center of the problem.

You just need to remember that customer/client opinion matters most. Try not to be too revolutionary and make sure you listen to feedback from potential customers. Do not ask your friends, they are a super unreliable source of product confirmation (because they like you).

If you cannot get 100 users, you really shouldn't put much time into that specific idea. I know others will give you their unicorn story ("It worked for me"), but if you have given it five goes, I would focus on what your potential customers are saying.

Hope that helps!

I think that "never had more than 5 users" is really the center of the problem.

Exactly. Start with the potential customers and figure out what problem they need to be solved, and then figure out a way to solve it. Then you go to them an show them a mockup of your solution. So for getpowerhelp, ask people in the complaint line down at the power company if they would use this app, and show them a mockup on a tablet, and collect an email. Or ask people waiting in line at the Western Union office if they would use transfercorp instead, and show them mockups. The screenshots or mockups would only take a few hours to make, and you might find that the people in line at the power company really just want to get in someone's face and scream, not fill in a form, and the people at Western Union need to send cash, so an app won't help them. Those are questions it would be great to get answered before you invest too much time building anything.

It sounds like you haven't had enough people visiting the websites (50-150USD isn't much on Google Ads... provided the product itself generates enough revenue to pay for them in the long run) I mean, money transfer and claims consultancies are real enough business models, but your rivals have large ads in Tube stations and daily automated calls. I'm not suggesting you should go that far, but the trouble is I don't see much evidence that you've actually done much to get people to your sites - there's not much in the way of content and I doubt you show up in search even for relatively niche queries like "npower overcharge refund".

Since you're keen to improve your skills and domain knowledge, SEO and marketing are what's going to make you money.

The same goes for tweaking the wording. npower being forced to refund £70m customers should be on the front page, not halfway down the FAQ below a couple of sarcastic comments. (I didn't know that, and I once had a £2.5k sorry-we-haven't-billed-you-on-time gas bill from npower land on my doormat, which fortunately was not my debt) Similarly, I don't see a mail address, company registration and details of FCA registration in the footer for Transfercorp, which is a pretty massive red flag for a site promising to handle my money. Your site on the theme of lost money transfers doesn't link to your actual money transfer site. It's not the technical behaviour of the app that's holding you back.

I get the impression that you want to design stuff, and it's incidental that startups let you do it how you want. Judging by the "I've spent 1000s of hours (I kid you not) designing my products", you're doing the same as what I do with development, and I'd be wary of that.

Maybe, start by trying to let your tech/design be a means to an end and start by solving a problem for users. The launch websites for so many successful startups were super ugly[1]. 100's of hours per project with less than 5 users each, sounds like alarm bells to me. If you haven't already, read The Lean Startup[2]. Build MVP, validate and iterate or pivot accordingly.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6125914/How-20-popular...

[2] http://theleanstartup.com/

You should spend more time talking to customers first. If you talk to potential customers before putting pen to paper or writing code you will either have a bunch of people interested and ready to sign up when you launch, or you should find out that nobody wants what you plan to build.

I think you need to spend more time and money on marketing. You need to split test various ads to see what actually gets people in, then spend good money to that. $50-150 can be gone in no time if you aren't targeting correctly/using the right creatives.

Without good marketing none of your apps are going to take off. You can't just make them and hope it fills with users

> Is this typical?

Your individual experience may vary. May I suggest James Dyson's autobiography a useful read on overcoming failures and set-backs> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/955045.Against_the_Odds

Personally I failed about 10 times before I built something that made any money. Over time your batting average gets better, mostly because you learn to see a failure coming and kill the losers before you've spent any significant time on them.

But yeah, 5 fails doesn't seem out of line at all. Keep at it man!

At least one of these sites would do well on Martin Lewis's Money Saving Expert site ... Seriously you should contact his team.

clickable links to current products: transfercorp.co.uk, getpowerhelp.com, stoplosttransfers.com

Your meta-description is either severely lacking or non-existent. You need to add more content describing who you are and what you do on your pages. Among other stuff...

Maybe the best thing to do is to head over to seomoz.org and get their free SEO manual so that you can learn more about online marketing. Inbound.org is considered as the HN for SEO, so check that out too.