[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Failed project you spent 15 hours/week for 5...
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Ask HN: Failed project you spent 15 hours/week for 5 years on?
Hello HN, There's a popular post up today - "The unreasonable
effectiveness of just showing up everyday" -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27833064 Some commenters have
point out that this very well could be just an example of
survivorship bias. Did you put in 15+ hours a week for several
years on a project that never went anywhere? Please add a comment
about it - we'd love to hear about your experience.
Author : TimTheTinker
Score : 43 points
Date : 2021-07-14 21:10 UTC (1 hours ago)
| rozenmd wrote:
| I spend 10 hours per week (since about 2017) working on side
| projects while employed full-time, the longest time I spent on a
| "loser" was roughly a year.
|
| It wasn't a total failure though, as the learning I gained from
| each project compounded into a sort of "platform", and led me to
| build an MVP of https://OnlineOrNot.com in 7 days - profitable
| within the first couple of months, slowly but steadily growing
| MRR.
| HackerNewAddict wrote:
| This is mine https://appointmenthelper.net.
|
| My dream sauce (SaaS ;)) was this application which I
| consistently worked about 2 hours every day for one year and when
| everything was ready, the guy refused to use it. Though I still
| keep it hosted even though no one uses it :-)
| rbanffy wrote:
| My most successful project, by far, is a font. As a software
| engineer, I find that slightly amusing. None of my software
| projects for anywhere near its traction.
|
| Except, maybe, an Emacs plugin made as a joke that adds IBM
| Selectric typewriter sounds to your text editor.
| amozoss wrote:
| Mine is https://pushback.io/.
|
| It wasn't for 5 years more like 3 and wasn't consistently 15+
| hours/week but definitely got up there when the passion was
| burning bright.
|
| I've failed to implement a winning conversion plan (need to
| iterate my pricing, just never got around to it) and do
| marketing.
|
| I've since moved on to another side project, but my passion
| certainly calls me back to Pushback from time to time.
| okwubodu wrote:
| This is really cool! It would make a lot of my ideas easier to
| build.
| [deleted]
| achillean wrote:
| I worked nearly full-time for about 2 years using my personal
| savings on a project management software for labs ("Labengine").
| The big hook was that it let you run common bioinformatics apps
| on your data and it would automatically convert the input file to
| the expected format (there were lots of competing bioinformatics
| file formats at the time). I had a few of my old professors use
| it and "love" it but nobody ended up paying. It was a good lesson
| for me to not work on a project in isolation too long; release
| early release often is the motto now.
| xnyan wrote:
| You could have made the best software in the world, but as
| someone who now works as an in-house developer for a medical
| research university, there's almost no way for individual
| researchers to have significant influence on IT budgets. Sure,
| there are always a few rock stars who pull in huge grants and
| thus have some control over institutional spend, but in general
| the operations side of academia has little influence on what
| software is bought/used. Because of this, I've found there's
| quite a bit of (understandable) apathy among researchers with
| regards to anything related to IT - you have no control over
| it, it's a miserable necessity for your real job.
| clusterhacks wrote:
| I work in the medical research space and we have LIMS (lab info
| management systems for people outside this niche) and am
| consistently amazed by the number of companies trying to get
| into our IT systems with lab management packages.
|
| It's a very tough space to break into it and my recent
| experience is that the big EMS/EMR vendors are increasingly
| trying to offer "modules" to do LIMS and bioinformatics
| analysis pipelines.
|
| Every now and again I start thinking about unsupervised
| learning projects in this space but look around and see just
| how little spend on analytics software there is for
| bioinformatics tools and settle down to focus on helping folks
| with our cluster and general reporting needs . . .
| rglover wrote:
| Multiple times. The perspective I've adopted is to look at what
| you learned in the process of each failure and how that improved
| your ability to do a better job on the next venture.
|
| The truth is that many don't have the stomach for "sticking with
| it," doing whatever is necessary to keep going in the down phases
| (I highly recommend the poem "If" by Rudyard Kipling and see if
| it resonates).
|
| You only truly "fail" when you quit. If you can make the
| necessary sacrifices to struggle through the dark days, your
| chances of succeeding increase greatly. I'd argue "survivorship
| bias" is just an excuse made by people who give up (I know that
| will sting some of you, but really marinate on it).
| arduinomancer wrote:
| > You only truly "fail" when you quit.
|
| Or run out of time?
|
| You don't have infinite time to keep trying things.
| rglover wrote:
| You have every second available up until your last breath.
| rozenmd wrote:
| > You only truly "fail" when you quit
|
| 100% this - my project is in a _highly_ competitive space
| (think hundreds of SaaS alternatives). The only ones that
| "fail" are the ones that come in copying competitors, expecting
| overnight success, and get upset when the money doesn't come
| pouring in.
| eplanit wrote:
| I love the Kipling poem. A (lesser) companion for it is
| Wintle[1]
|
| [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1033193-if-you-think-you-
| ar...
| lhnz wrote:
| > You only truly "fail" when you quit. If you can make the
| necessary sacrifices to struggle through the dark days, your
| chances of succeeding increase greatly.
|
| People give up when they realise that continuing a grind will
| require then to sacrifice more meaningful opportunities they
| have.
|
| It's not always good to keep going. Sometimes you're throwing
| your life away.
| rglover wrote:
| > It's not always good to keep going. Sometimes you're
| throwing your life away.
|
| That's a conditioned response. "Throwing your life away" is
| subjective.
|
| Edit: https://nav.al/kapil <-- Worth listening to.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Not over five years, nor as much time.
|
| I created an app. It functioned fine, but never made any money.
| It was a lack of marketing. I spent time looking into marketing.
| I think I spent $10 on Facebook ads and went to a local college
| campus to put up posters with QR codes (I had quite a few hits
| for my one design, so I'm proud of that). My problem was
| targeting the wrong demographic and/or making the interface too
| bland. I should have targeted event planners instead of college
| kids. Even after releasing it for free it never really took off.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Sure, I've had four projects that I spent years on and never went
| anywhere (at least in the way that was planned).
|
| But that was certainly not wasted time and effort. Not only did
| it improve my skillset, but large amounts of the code written
| could be repurposed for other projects, giving a head start on
| them.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| I poured 40-60 hours a week for a decade into a programming
| language that we open source and then flopped:
|
| https://gosu-lang.github.io/
|
| I was paid during that time, and the language is still heavily
| used internally, but it never got picked up by the outside world
| and Kotlin arriving on the scene killed any chance it had.
|
| Was fun though.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| It is how I work usually for the past 30+ years: I spread my time
| between 3-4 projects always and most are my own. I work on them
| for 3-6 years per project until something hooks some success or
| does nothing at all. Most fail, I had a few successful ones that
| made enough to live a nice life with a family and a few turned
| into serious companies. I suspect I will keep doing this until
| the end of my life: it is a lot of fun, failed or not. But
| success is obviously a better feeling.
| legohead wrote:
| Maybe not 5+ years worth of development in many cases, but if you
| want examples, just open up Steam...
| ping_pong wrote:
| I took a year off and for fun, I spent 40 hours a week for 9
| months on a website that used OCR and other packages for some
| games. It generated around $15/month in ad revenue, just enough
| to pay for my EC2 instance at the time. I kept it around but at
| some point the ad revenue I made dropped like a rock by 90% so I
| shut it down. It was fun nonetheless and I learned a lot, but it
| was not successful by any measure.
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| I've spent the last decade doing this. Building up my savings,
| draining them on an idea. I put in 40+ per week for a couple
| years on my last startup in the real estate space. Poached some
| top level VP's from the biggest firm in our country, but we ran
| through our capital too quickly due to too many pivots and
| licensing costs, I could only do no salary for so long, tough
| when your rent is $2.5k/mo.
|
| Now I am back at my parents place far away from any city working
| on my own projects in the productivity space, a space I'm
| intimately familiar with. Theres a few tools I'm missing from my
| daily arsenal that I am building now.
|
| I was too greedy in my goals and while we got funded and it was
| fun, ultimately it turned into nothing. I was of the "first to
| market / build a unicorn" mindset which as someone who doesn't
| come from money or connections, is pretty much impossible.
|
| I am now trying to build a lifestyle company with a suite of
| tools in the productivity space, trying to hit $10k/mo MRR which
| doesn't scare me and I know is doable, as I've done it before
| (but unfortunately sold my stake to use that money on the venture
| I mentioned that failed). Bad move but hindsight is 20/20 I
| guess. I am focusing on building tools that solve my own
| problems.
|
| So I'm 28 now, have under $1k in total net worth, but I am not
| going to stop until I am free from working a salaried job. 2 of
| my projects made money (sold them, dumb move, too bright-eyed and
| greedy), 11 of them didn't see a dime. I have never been more
| depressed in my life but I refuse to believe I can't hit at least
| a couple grand a month as I've done before, which is all I need
| to live my life. If only I realized this sooner. The reason I
| will keep doing this even if I don't succeed is because the
| regret of having not tried as hard as I can will haunt me every
| second of every day if I concede and hop on a salary. I don't
| want to spend the rest of my life on "what if?", and a life of
| sitting behind a glass wall consuming fine things does nothing
| for me. I don't want to be at the orchestra, or a restaurant, or
| a show. I want to be on stage, or be the chef, or be the
| conductor and for that you need time and money.
|
| I know quite a few people with graveyard projects like this. Feel
| free to ask me anything, I'm an open book.
| elanning wrote:
| Sounds like you have both the experience and talent necessary.
| I'm guessing it's only a matter of time until your next
| success.
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| Thank you! I sure hope so. I'm focusing on things I actually
| know. I knew this one guy who worked at a GM plant for two
| decades and started his own company manufacturing a part
| nobody would ever know exists, and now he's doing super well.
| So I'm taking a similar approach of building things that are
| useful to me and that I've had experience with on the job as
| it's all I know.
| metalex wrote:
| Admirable. Keep pushing -- I admire the grit and grind. I
| believe in you.
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| Thank you I really appreciate it.
| erjiang wrote:
| It's only a "failure" if you look at your net worth, right? It
| sounds like you have the experience, knowledge, and even resume
| of someone much older than 28. If you had instead spent ages
| 22-28 on a PhD, you'd still have no net worth, but people
| wouldn't see that as a failure.
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| That's a great point you're right, I'm still young. I'm not
| about net worth at all, I just want free time. If I'm working
| on my product 10 hours a day with a tight knit team and
| sustaining myself, that is success to me. Everything from
| there on is gravy.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I was of the "first to market / build a unicorn" mindset
|
| I'm not dissing that mindset at all, but it is essentially
| gambling. Over the decades, I've warmed to "the pioneers get
| all the arrows" mindset: that from a business perspective, it's
| better to be the second or third in a new area, because you can
| learn from the pioneer's mistakes. It's rare that the entity
| that invented a thing is the entity that makes the most profit
| from it.
| jabo wrote:
| Context: I'm the other co-founder of Typesense, mentioned in the
| article you linked.
|
| Kishore and I have worked together on about 12 different side
| projects over the course of 13 years, and we've tried to adopt
| this mindset of consistency, persistence and long timeframes for
| each.
|
| A few of these projects got good traction, but most of them
| didn't do well (at least revenue-wise). But here's the thing:
| working on all these projects consistently over the years, has
| also helped us learn about things like how to pick a market, how
| to validate our hypotheses, how to choose technologies when
| building products, how to maintain codebases over a decade, how
| to stay nimble, etc.
|
| I would say that the sum total of our collective learnings
| through all these projects, have helped us _significantly_ in our
| Typesense journey.
|
| So I would say, showing up everyday is not a magic bullet to
| making a project successful. Instead, it's a magic bullet to
| continuous learning and building up a wealth of experience, that
| might just come in handy when you're working on your next
| project, which then increases your odds of success.
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(page generated 2021-07-14 23:02 UTC)