[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson...
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Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
I guess no body is doing this, everyone talks about making money.
So, let's use this post to share our failed projects and the
learnings with other founders.
Author : NithurM
Score : 236 points
Date : 2021-12-24 14:11 UTC (8 hours ago)
| [deleted]
| pskisf wrote:
| https://pski.net/2011/11/01/parkshark/
|
| ParkShark was a parking space sharing iOS app. The technology was
| sound but the market timing was a little early. We were even
| talking to some larger delivery companies about a business-side
| component. The product failed because the two founders, myself
| and a friend, are engineers through-and-through. We just didn't
| have the passion for the business side of things to really make
| it happen.
| x1ph0z wrote:
| Me and a few friends made a web app to calculate property
| investment returns. Lots of time sunk in but the app got no
| traction. Lesson learned we need to determine if there's a market
| need before starting development, and a better effort on
| marketing wouldn't hurt either.
| boffinism wrote:
| https://storymancers.com/
|
| High acquisition costs and high churn meant the unit economics
| made no sense.
|
| If you have a subscription model and you're dependent on ads for
| acquisition, it's not enough to believe that with enough
| optimisation your business model will start to make sense. If it
| doesn't make sense from day one, it's highly unlikely there's a
| viable, reliable business there.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| http://ledenboek.be/
|
| It actually works pretty good ( member management for sport
| clubs), but I'm going to turn it off.
|
| Only 1 club is using it consistently, while i didn't have to do
| anything for it since 2014 ( except moving it off Azure to reduce
| costs).
|
| Failed to gain any traction, had an email list of prospects but
| it didn't have any results.
|
| Sad thing is, sport clubs don't have much to spare. So I gave up
| on this project.
| ehnto wrote:
| > Sad thing is, sport clubs don't have much to spare. So I gave
| up on this project.
|
| I had the same conclusion working on a motorsport app. Most
| people in grassroots motorsport put all their money into
| getting onto the track, and there really aren't any needs they
| would want solved for ~$15/month on a phone that they can't
| solve with a spreadsheet.
| throwaway01zo wrote:
| jpomykala wrote:
| https://placeflare.com
|
| I wanted to gather cool and unpopular places from a neighborhood,
| like old castles. I started this project in 2015 and I'm still
| maintaining it, and from time to time I'm doing fixes.
|
| What I learned?
|
| Technical: SPA got terrible SEO, only a few crawlers executes JS
| on page to actually read data from the page (or at least show the
| place image instead the app image from og:image) I tried many
| times to add some pre-rendering and make it hybrid, but I failed.
| Eventually, I converted app to NextJS and I added dynamic
| og:images (using my other project: https://bannerly.io) and
| number of impressions and clicks increased mostly thanks to
| sharing places by people on social media. I also plan to use no-
| code automation tool (probably https://integromat.com it's
| cheaper than Zapier and probably more powerful) to post places to
| Instagram every day.
|
| There is no money/revenue in this project but I like to play
| around with it anyway. It would be cool earn at least for
| maintenance costs on it but I don't have any idea. I was thinking
| about selling tickets online for places where the tickets are
| required but no one is interested in this idea.
|
| Non-technical: There is a very small subset of people who would
| like to use travel apps. It's easier to use Google or local
| guides to find great destinations.
| munib_ca wrote:
| http://liveworks.app
|
| An app that would let hospitality workers pick up any shift from
| any venue at any time. The problem with that is, since its a
| platform I needed a lot of supply (restaurants) to encourage the
| demand (workers) side. We even decided to pivot to a 3 staged
| launch (stage 1, we'd let restaurants come on board for free,
| stage 2, we'd let them pay their own workers through the app,
| stage 3 we open the flood gates and let the workers pick up
| shifts from places other then their own restaurant)
|
| What did I learn?
|
| - Don't work on problems that you are not 100% passionate about.
| I met the other co-founder through a work/equity deal where my
| agency would take some $ plus percentage equity to finish the
| app.
|
| - Before trying to solve a problem, ask if the problem is worth
| solving or not (product design), being a technical person, its
| easy to jump straight into the bells & whistles of a product
| without thinking about _who_ is going to use it, and if there is
| even a need for it? We can pick the shiniest tools and the best
| tech, but if no one is going to use the product, none of that
| matters.
|
| - We ignored competition, thinking was since we are not _just_ a
| scheduling app, we can ignore the biggest competitor in the space
| and still make a scheduling app. Turns out the competition just
| rolled out a new feature that lets venues handle the HR side of
| their business as well.
|
| http://shareablekitchen.com
|
| A platform that would let kitchen owners rent out their un-used
| kitchen space for some $$ on the side. Kind of like Airbnb, but
| for kitchens (I know that should have run alarm bells). I joined
| the project after it was already started by the 2 previous co-
| founders (both non-technical). Idea was to let new business
| owners that were just starting out, easily rent kitchens from
| other people for a couple of hours, days, weeks at a time.
|
| What did I learn?
|
| - Market research is important, don't skimp over it. I realized a
| couple months into the work that most restaurant owners don't
| want to deal with renting their kitchens anyways. There are
| specific ghost kitchens in almost every city now so it's
| cheaper/easier for people looking to start their culinary
| experience to go through them instead of renting a given person's
| kitchen.
|
| - After doing some back of the napkin calculations, ghost
| kitchens on their own was a small industry to be in (don't
| remember the exact numbers, but it was peaking out around 1
| million / year)
|
| - You can not steamroll health/safety restrictions, and every
| state, city, county has their own permits for renting kitchens to
| handling food. This often times requires the person seeking to
| rent a kitchen to have their own business permits, to keep track
| of all those things and enforce them was too much to handle.
|
| - Competition already exists out there, and its mainly catered
| towards community kitchens. - Don't become partners with people
| that are not going to have skin in the game. Although I will
| digress going into details here, but if they don't have skin in
| the game (even as non-technical co-founders), they will treat it
| as a side project.
|
| Main takeaway: - Trust your gut, vet ideas, vet people
|
| - An mvp glued together is better than a highly
| scalable/distributed/serverless/${new_shiny_tech}
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| As I was known to drink a lot of Diet Dr. Pepper and had people
| who timed my code production in 'cans per hour' :-) I thought it
| would be fun to convert an old 47" Fresnel lens that came from an
| old big screen TV into an aluminum can melter.
|
| The project consisted of a frame on an alt/az base to hold the
| lens, arms from teh frame to position it's focal point on can
| that had been crushed vertically and then slid down a rack on a
| couple of steel rails. And the whole thing held over a bucket of
| water to catch the melting aluminum and make aluminum "drops".
|
| Unfortunately, the aluminum oxidizes way faster than it melts and
| so my contraption basically turned cans into a crushed can with a
| black dusty hole in the middle!
|
| It wasn't until I saw the King of Random video on making a
| smelter out of a bucket that I actually had something that could
| melt aluminum in a reasonable way (at the cost of a few gallons
| of propane)
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Please tell me your Dr Pepper consumption could not be measured
| "cans per hour".
| ok_dad wrote:
| Right? Sounds like a recipe for diabetes.
| ultra_nick wrote:
| Wasted a couple of years building a dating app without shipping
| anything usable. You should try to ship asap and get feedback.
|
| datingchances.com
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| It's like giving up smoking - None of my projects failed, the
| gaps between commits just get longer and longer.
| zomglings wrote:
| Haha, if it were truly like giving up smoking, the gaps between
| commits would stay the same. :)
| SNosTrAnDbLe wrote:
| I converted a DSL query language to SQL and learnt antlr and a
| lot about compilers and languages.
|
| I never did anything with the SQL that was generated
| dividuum wrote:
| https://geolua.com (On mobile it gives you a "consumer" view.
| Check it out on a desktop for a complete impression of what was
| possible)
|
| I built a programmable and multiplayer capable way of doing
| geocaching. I keep it online because I still think it's neat, but
| back then I didn't think of any reasonable way to monetize or
| market it. It got some interest from the geocaching community,
| but IIRC links to it got banned from some geocaching forums
| because they wouldn't allow third party tools. -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| So I guess: 1) Think about what you build before you do. 2) Make
| sure the possibility to make money exists at all. 3) Don't rely
| on third parties. 4) Use what you've learned in your next project
| Doches wrote:
| I'm sure you'll get a fair number of interesting stories here,
| but you'll find a _ton_ at IndieHackers
| (https://indiehackers.com) which is a sort of spin-off community
| from HN that's focuses more on bootstrappers and solo founders.
|
| For me, I launched a five projects in 2021 that were a mix of
| total flops and sorta-flops, and they all flopped for the same
| reason: * Saascast.io (https://saascast.io/) --
| revenue forecasting for Stripe-based SAAS businesses *
| Offramp (https://offramphq.com/) -- Get automatic feedback from
| unsubscribing customers * Donel.ist (https://donel.ist) --
| like a TODO list, but more motivating * Sandpiper
| (https://sandpiperhq.com) -- inventory tracking for people who
| hate inventory tracking * Rent Robin
| (https://sandpiperhq.com) -- automatic rent collection for small
| businesses
|
| Saascast and Offramp are more or less total flops; I keep them
| running because I use 'em in all my other projects and I find
| them useful. They're flops almost entirely because I don't know
| how to market them, and I'm not convinced that they have enough
| value-add or PMF to be worth pouring money down the search ads
| sinkhole.
|
| Donel.ist is, arguably, a total success because it got me out of
| a moderate depression (being fired and immediately going into
| lockdown sucks) and back into the habit of building things. It
| actually has a fair number (50ish) daily users, but it's not
| monetized at all so in that sense it was a failure at launch!
|
| Sandpiper and Rent Robin are spin-out projects from another, not-
| failed project -- and while they're not setting the world on
| fire, they see slow-but-steady growth and the folks who use them
| seem to love them.
|
| The running theme between all of these is that the projects I
| build where I already had an audience -- even if that was just
| myself! -- are successful, and the ones that I built because I
| had a clever idea but no committed users are failures.
| munib_ca wrote:
| Very cool insight, I also came to a similar conclusion after my
| short stints.
|
| Can you update the link for rent robin? A quick google search
| points to a property management company from Kansas.
| tablet wrote:
| I always believe in focus. I spent 14 years on my first
| product, then 5 years on a second (still working on it). Why
| not take one and iterate?
| EamonnMR wrote:
| My project was a 3d in-browser escape velocity clone (think
| Endless Sky.) It ended up with an impressive feature set,
| mediocre graphics, not nearly enough world, no real game loop,
| and no players: http://flythrough.space
|
| My mistake was building it totally in secret for most of its
| life. I worked on it for years focusing on adding features that
| maybe nobody wanted without validating the product/market fit or
| generating any buzz. By the time I was "ready" someone had gained
| way more steam on their own EV remake, even getting the author of
| Override to endorse it, so the fact that I had a working
| prototype didn't really matter, the community that I thought
| would be receptive wasn't interested.
|
| I learned that you need to build something worth playing first,
| including some kind of game loop, before you try to get people to
| play it. Turns out noodling around with a hacky prototype isn't
| something people find exciting even if the whole community is
| centered around noodling around with mods and hacking. People
| won't mod a game they don't love in the first place.
|
| Since this project, I've committed to building smaller prototypes
| and validating concepts before I go all-in on building something
| polished and content rich, and thought I haven't shipped anything
| this big since, I have met my personal goals.
|
| Full retrospective: http://blog.eamonnmr.com/2020/08/flythrough-
| space-retrospect...
|
| The conclusion: http://blog.eamonnmr.com/2020/04/dont-remake-an-
| old-game/
| Rinum wrote:
| I have many, but also some that had some level of success -
| https://rinum.com
|
| My lessons:
|
| 1) Keep your day job, most projects fail
|
| 2) Fail fast, 20% effort gets you 80% of the project and that's
| when you ship it to see if it works, doesn't have to be perfect
|
| 3) Don't hang on to failures, move on
| amozoss wrote:
| kingcharles wrote:
| Created a site in the early aughts and tried to charge $1 a piece
| for people to make their own avatars. Nobody paid. Had to make it
| free about a month later. Now Flash is dead, so site no good.
| http://www.dudefactory.com/
|
| Spent about a year building the absolute best text-message short-
| code system that let you run groups, competitions, surveys, take
| payments. Kept adding features and yak-shaving and forgot to
| actually sign up any customers. First month the product was
| finally "finished" we ran out of money for our connection to the
| SMS network and that was the end of it.
|
| One more.. does this count as a failure?
|
| Made a torrent site for TV shows. Took $13m in revenue. Law
| enforcement said "naughty, naughty". Closed site. No more
| revenue.
| wanderingstan wrote:
| Inspired by my dad scanning 20,000+ old photos, I created
| "Smallest Day". Photo organizing apps didn't (and still don't)
| handle old scanned photos well.
|
| For example, Google Photos would not allow any photo to be dated
| before the 1970 unix epoch. Picasa required an email address for
| anyone tagged, which was problematic for nineteenth century
| photos!
|
| Short demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAObvfnDso4
| Presenting at the Personal Archiving Conference:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzBkuXvqEo4
|
| In hindsight, I really needed a co-founder, especially someone
| more of a "hustler". I also should have committed more fully to
| reaching a GO/NO-GO decision instead of letting the project peter
| out over a year while I gradually took on more consulting work.
| Should have bought some ads to determine market appetite.
|
| Still, I'm mostly happy that I didn't pursue it too far. 1000
| Memories (a YC company) was also in the space and had an only
| mediocre exit. I'm relieved that no other company seemed to knock
| it out of the park. But a little sad that so many old photos (and
| the stories behind them) are _not_ getting digitized and may not
| get preserved.
| benwilber0 wrote:
| I built Boltstream [0] over the course of a couple years and got
| burned out. I wouldn't say it was actually a failed project
| because in the back of my mind I never really had any intention
| of trying to turn it into a Twitch/YouTube/Facebook Live
| competitor anyway. And it's proven to be somewhat popular on
| Github. The project was fun to build and learn about but
| ultimately it was impossible to actually run it as a consumer-
| facing website. The problems were never the actual software/video
| streaming tech, but rather the extreme bandwidth costs of live
| video streaming, and the content itself. I launched it several
| times under different site names/products and it always just
| turned into a cesspool of pirate streaming live sports and other
| copyrighted content. The DMCA notices were regular, but were
| never really that onerous to deal with. Just turn the stream off,
| ban the account, and then reply to the email. But it just got too
| annoying. I built a little mobile web app so I could just do it
| from my phone while I was out at dinner. After awhile I just
| decided that it was time to give it to someone else to play with.
| So I did a big code dump on Github and haven't touched it since.
|
| I'm actually planning to start working on it a little bit more
| since it seems that "self hosted video streaming" is still pretty
| in-demand. I'm probably not going to be spending too much time on
| the actual features and functionality since as far as I'm
| concerned that's done at this point. Mostly just packaging it up
| so it's easier for people to run it themselves and hack on it.
|
| [0] https://github.com/benwilber/boltstream
| mberning wrote:
| http://tiredb.com
|
| A power user tire search with affiliate links. I did make some
| money off it but got super discouraged when I realized people
| were using the site to find tires, then searching for coupons or
| discounts, and my commission was being harvested by shitty SEO
| sites.
| th9283749238 wrote:
| Not really a project, but my PhD. Did it while I was working part
| time and made a mess of it, finally dropped out. Now I have to
| explain why my CV is the way it is to every interviewer and watch
| them silently judge me.
|
| If any undergrads are reading, the short advice is - don't start
| a PhD unless you are very good or your supervisor is very good.
| Look at introductory courses for PhDs to get a feel for it.
| Research is a whole different ball game than studying for exams
| etc.
| rozenmd wrote:
| I do a yearly post of my failures, this is the first year I had a
| success:
|
| - https://maxrozen.com/2018-review-starting-an-internet-busine...
|
| - https://maxrozen.com/2019-further-reflections-trying-to-star...
|
| - https://maxrozen.com/indiehacking-3-year-review
|
| - https://maxrozen.com/2021-strangers-paid-my-macbook
| permalac wrote:
| Congrats. Worth the effort?
|
| Any lesson to share?
| rozenmd wrote:
| Shared a few lessons along the way in the articles.
|
| Definitely worth it from my perspective - not in a revenue
| per hour sense, but I learnt things that I wouldn't have
| otherwise without going full time on a startup (imo).
| dls2016 wrote:
| I finished a NASA SBIR before Thanksgiving with my buddy. Mixed
| results on the technical end and, after lots of discussions with
| potential gov/industry customers, we realized the market is
| probably not big enough if we could productize it.
|
| I learned a lot about myself. Was previously in a stagnant job,
| in my opinion due to management. After managing my own project I
| am even more certain this was the case.
|
| Besides my partner, there was no one else to get things done. I
| wrote the proposal and most of the budget, selected and
| integrated many hardware components, learned to use a CNC and
| pour foam and solder 17-pin connectors. Constructed and operated
| an off-grid sensor site for a few months with great uptime.
| Lashed together an ETL system with Python and Postgres. Wrote and
| delivered briefings to potential gov and industry partners who
| knew A LOT more about the topic than I did. In the middle of the
| thing we were selected as finalists in a pitch contest, though
| didn't win.
|
| Gave me back a lot of confidence lost in that other job. I know I
| can jump into a relatively new area and do decent enough work as
| judged by experts in that area. I doubt we'll get a Phase II (and
| sort of don't want it as I'd pay myself dookie for two years with
| questionable payoff), but will crank through some leet code or
| something for a few weeks and have a eye-catching project on my
| resume!
| syngrog66 wrote:
| very cool! I once wrote a proposal (for a proposal) for a
| NASA/FAA SBIR phase I grant. we didnt end up
| submitting/competing based on mine. but it was a great
| experience.
| ezekg wrote:
| I've had a couple failed projects I can share:
|
| - https://web.archive.org/web/20190528152755/https://www.theme...
| desktop app for local WordPress development, built on top of a
| CLI I made. Had a few hundred MRR within a couple weeks. It used
| Vagrant under the hood (right when Docker was blowing up), app
| was built on React (in Coffeescript <3). But ultimately I left
| because of conflicts with co-founders and burnout. Fun project --
| probably could have gone somewhere.
|
| - https://web.archive.org/web/20180809151636/https://alpacaget...
| web app to discover and book pre-planned weekend getaways w/
| itinerary. Couldn't get traction or sales. Probably needed to do
| content marketing, but my wife and I had just had our first child
| at the time, so we ultimately shut it down due to lack of time
| (she did most of the getaway hunting, I automated price
| discovery.) It was a 5k line index.js Node app. XD
| lisper wrote:
| I've launched six failed startups.
|
| FlowNet (early 90s), a high-speed (500 Mb/s) local area network
| designed to compete with FDDI, Fast Ethernet, and mainly ATM
| which was supposed to be the Next Big Thing. Offered QoS
| guarantees back when that was a big deal. Died because gigabit
| ethernet happened instead.
|
| IndieBuyer (2003-2006) - a marketplace for independent movies on
| DVD. The angle was that we would provide recommendations, and
| anything you bought from the recommended list would come with a
| money-back guarantee. Recommendations would be provided by an
| algorithm that matched people with similar tastes in films as
| measured by the ones they returned. Died because streaming.
|
| Evryx (2006-2008) - reverse image search. We held the patent.
| Died because the tech founder went non-linear and vetoed a
| funding round in 2008 right before the crash.
|
| iCab (2008) - a competitor to Uber, launched at the same time as
| Uber and for much the same reason. But Uber thought of using
| black cars and I didn't so they won and I lost.
|
| Virgin Charter (2008-2009) - Originally called Smart Charter, it
| was on-line marketplace for charter jets, acquired pre-launch by
| Richard Branson. Failed because Virgin didn't understand how the
| business model was supposed to work and tried to remake the
| company in its own image as a popular consumer-facing brand.
| Interesting aside: our bizdev guy was Jody Sherman [1].
|
| Founders Forge (2009-2013) - Like Angel List but with financial
| services that were intended to be a wedge to launch a digital
| currency. (This was before BitCoin was a thing.) Failed because I
| couldn't find a bank that would work with me.
|
| Spark Innovations (2014) - Launched with a product that slurped
| up large Excel spreadsheets and let people manipulate them like
| databases using an intuitive web interface. Failed when all three
| of our launch customers rejected the MVP without telling us why.
| Tried pivoting with a crypto product (a small cheap HSM), but
| turns out that's a very hard market to penetrate.
|
| Bonus failure:
|
| In 2007 I decided to diversify my risk by investing in real
| estate. Got into a New Zealand condo development in Queenstown
| and learned the hard way that you _can_ lose all your money in
| real estate if you are leveraged and a historic market crash
| happens right as you are ready to break ground.
|
| Despite all this, I have a great life. I've met some great
| people, learned a lot, built some cool shit, and generally had a
| good time despite learning the hard way that I'm not a
| particularly good entrepreneur. Main lesson learned: don't let
| failure get you down. You never know when the odds are going to
| tilt your way. The only ting that guarantees failure is not
| trying.
|
| ---
|
| [1] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/jody-sherman-
| ecomom-2013-...
| suyash wrote:
| awesome on keep going and trying again and again, best wishes
| for future!
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| I wrote an app where users could create their own "nano" apps by
| writing a few lines of JS-like code. Many things like clock,
| reminders, weather, stock quotes don't really need a separate
| 50MB app, they could be written in 2 lines of JS. In 5 lines, one
| could create an app to notify about arbitrage opportunities on
| various crypto exchanges.
|
| Included mobile IDE, run-as-you-type debugger, and an app store.
|
| Google blocked it, for the reason I never got to investigate,
| because by that time I got rich from other projects.
| pdimitar wrote:
| That sounds like a super good project! Any links?
| philliphaydon wrote:
| About 12 or so years ago I created a competitor to eBay in
| Australia with a few friends. TradeCity. We had a slick clean UX,
| no stupid bid sniping, $1 listing fee only if you make a sale.
|
| In 1 week of launching we got around 5000 registered users, 1000s
| of items listed, and steady flow of traffic.
|
| Made the mistake of using a VPS provider in Australia, a week
| after launch... bam servers died.
|
| Went to restore the backup only to find out the "backups
| included" from the hosting provider was not "backups included
| unless you tick a hidden box".
|
| They claimed that they paid $1000s to a data recovery company to
| restore the VM images but I doubt it.
|
| Will never trust someone else to do what I should have been doing
| on day one.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| That's a big lesson to learn about backups.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| I was a cofounder of a fashion and consumer startup, it was sort
| of like a focused Pinterest. We had a very enthusiastic user base
| before taking on SV money, but unfortunately never grew much
| beyond that.
|
| I was the engineer (and briefly CTO), and the foremost thing on
| my mind was marketing and promotion. I was constantly told that
| word-of-mouth and natural virality was how things worked in the
| Web 2.0 era, so put it out of my mind and focused on the
| technical stuff.
|
| I eventually got fired (justly so; I was good enough to get a
| personal project off the ground, but not FAANG material at the
| time), and watched as they squeezed out a redesign and an app and
| eventually sold out as an acquihire. (I'm told that means it's
| "not a failed startup" but sure doesn't feel like it.)
|
| If I had it all to do again, as soon as it was apparent that I
| had reached the limits of what I could do as an engineer, I would
| have flipped to being the hype man for the product. Someone
| should have been hitting the pavement every day making
| connections at GQ, Supreme, HypeBeast, etc. My partners say we
| crumpled because we couldn't build another round of funding; I
| say we couldn't get the funding because of dumb naive belief in
| word-of-mouth.
|
| --
|
| coda: after that, I returned to another side project, a visual
| RSS reader for graphic designers and artists. Same problem, no
| plan to promote the damn thing.
| Winterflow3r wrote:
| Would it be ok to email you to find out more?
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| sure
| Winterflow3r wrote:
| Thank you!
| abraae wrote:
| If you're both technically accomplished and also have an inner
| urge to hustle doing marketing and promotion then great things
| probably await you in life, that's a valuable combo indeed.
| quaffapint wrote:
| How about the multitude of ideas I start - get all excited by
| this great new idea, start working on landing page picking just
| the right colors and font, look into the coding and hosting, all
| the while researching and checking out the competition only to
| say to myself there's no way this will work, look at all those
| features the other players have, I can't market, don't have a
| following...Fail. Next idea - rinse & repeat.
|
| Then only to see a month or whatever later a similar idea posted
| to HN with them saying how they have customers and inflow. Could
| I have done the same? Maybe. Was it just because they could
| market well? Maybe. Will I ever really know? No. Cause I never
| tried. Will I ever learn my lesson? I can only hope.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Not exactly a fail, but something I expected at least comments:
| https://github.com/marcodiegomesquita/rtti
| nunSpQyeJR wrote:
| I built an app to help people create balanced teams during pickup
| games for any sport. The app had every player register
| themselves, then each player ranked everyone, including
| themselves, from best to worst, then the app would spit out n
| number of (probably) balanced teams.
|
| It turns out that complaining about team balance after the match
| is a feature, not a bug, of the experience for most people and
| our app was just extra work.
| VLM wrote:
| > our app was just extra work
|
| Just this week my kids basketball coach is trying get all the
| parents to "use the app" for scheduling and announcements and
| its just NOT working so back to email which works for everyone.
|
| As both a player and in the past as a coach, my experience with
| "sports team apps" has been that nobody wants to be the end
| user's IT department and on any team with more than X players
| the odds of someone's phone being messed up approaches 100%.
| "Oh I have an android and you have an iphone so I can't help
| you" and its just infinite headaches.
|
| If you could find a way to "do the sports team app" thing but
| over multiple incompatible messenger chatbots or over a web
| page it might get more traction.
|
| If apps "just worked", which they certainly do not, it would be
| nice. An app-like experience over a web page might work.
| tator22 wrote:
| Could you give me some examples of what you would think would
| be needed? Have a sister whos kids are going to be getting
| into sports and feel like this would be a fun side project
| throwawayboise wrote:
| It won't be. I've run youth sports league websites on a
| variety of platforms. The platforms all suck in one way or
| another (most actually suck in many ways), but that's not
| the real problem. The real problem is that some portion of
| the user base/parents are hopelessly incompetent with
| technology and will consume your time with their problems
| or questions. Another segment will feign problems to try to
| get you to do their work for them, and at some point you
| will do it because it takes less time than spending time on
| a back-and-forth of questions and getting nowhere.
|
| Just use email and/or text messaging.
| VLM wrote:
| throwawayboise is not wrong in any way, but if you want an
| answer anyway, I think it would be some kind of multi-
| platform massive automatic fusion. Good luck not
| accidentally creating, or automatically detecting,
| forwarding loops LOL.
|
| So if you're one of the minority of parents smart enough to
| import a calendar into their google (or other) calendar,
| they can get the game schedule there, but the less
| competent (to put it nicely) can continue to get a stream
| of emails or even plain old text messages of upcoming
| games. Or they could join a FB group or a different
| platform.
|
| Or there's people out there whom could never handle
| installing or using slack, but if you could spam them text
| messages maybe they could still participate, or even
| participate fully.
|
| Nobody wants to work in IT, especially not for free.
|
| We went thru an internet era, then a social era, then the
| era of notifications, and I have a gut feeling the next era
| is going to be something like smooth automatic operations
| across semi-hostile deeply silo'd platforms, but it'll have
| a cooler name. FB wants to replace the internet with FB,
| but literally nobody else wants that, repeat for all
| platforms, meanwhile you get 5 users together somehow
| you'll get 6 preferred platforms, the next era will be
| anti-vendor lockin. People old as me will remember when Ma
| Bell provided both your phone service and your physical
| phone and times were better post-divestment and that's
| probably how we're going to look at the past once we're
| beyond the era of the social media silo. Rather than "the
| world is viewed thru my website for my profit" the future
| will be something like "the world is viewed thru my REST
| API or maybe many other API providers" And where the profit
| comes from is mysterious. Likely the gateway tech will be
| workable microtransactions. Such that every time Sally
| Softball Mom checks the team schedule she will get billed
| and you will get a hundredth of a cent, which isn't going
| to scare away 10M daily users but would be a nice side gig
| for you personally. Assuming you get 10M DAU of course.
| codazoda wrote:
| How to Lose Money With 25 Years of Failed Businesses
|
| https://joeldare.com/how-to-lose-money-with-25-years-of-fail...
| garbagecoder wrote:
| All of my failed projects have the same problem. For some reason,
| my interest just switched off. What was an intensely interesting
| learning experience that I would work on in every spare minute
| just stopped being interesting. Quite often, this happens before
| I have a working thing made. In fact, my successful projects all
| have these same discontinuities they just come after it's
| working.
| suyash wrote:
| It's a very common problem unfortunately, I have many side
| projects that are unfinished but next year ...focus and
| shipping is my mantra :)
| subinsebastien wrote:
| Me and one my acquaintance built a online grocery delivery
| service from scratch. We launched it in a small tier-3 city in
| India. It was ahead of time compared to all the services which
| later became successful. We had things like automated phone
| number verification as a first in apps launched in India. What we
| have learned is that:- do not do things that are ahead of it's
| time. Launch a mobile app, when pretty much everyone has a smart
| phone for themselves.
| edent wrote:
| Last year I tried building an animated laptop sticker business.
|
| People loved the idea! People paid for stickers! Profit was
| reasonable!
|
| But, on the downside...
|
| The equipment is horrifically expensive. Minimum order quantities
| from 3rd parties means that every idea has to be a killer. They
| are a novelty, and quite pricey, so you can't rely on repeat
| custom. Zero barrier to new entrants.
|
| I was glad that I did it - and I learned a lot. Perhaps when I'm
| a tech-billionaire, I'll work on getting the price down ;-)
|
| More details at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/06/building-a-
| minimum-viable-l...
| kingcharles wrote:
| Those were a great little product. I can see you easily
| saturating the market, though, and selling to basically
| everyone on the planet who wants one and having no possible
| customers left.
|
| I had some custom shirts made once (same as the one Marty wears
| in Back to the Future) by the original manufacturer. I'm glad I
| only had 500 made because selling the last dozen was a real
| chore. I absolutely and totally exhausted the entire market.
| edent wrote:
| Cheers mate. It was fun for a lockdown project but, yeah,
| nothing long term.
| thrwy_918 wrote:
| Made a tool to help suggest domain names
|
| Learning - no one really needs help doing this :)
|
| https://domainemu.com/
| junon wrote:
| I was building a competitor to Steam.
|
| Our tech was genuinely better. Didn't matter. You can't compete
| with Steam.
| [deleted]
| muzani wrote:
| I tried to do this, didn't get past validation stage. A lot of
| developers were hostile to the idea. This was around 2010
| though. I didn't expect Steam to survive with that kind of
| hostility but it did. It's not even a shitty incumbent like
| WhatsApp, it's genuinely changed how we purchase and own games.
|
| You'd probably have to do the Epic approach to even have a
| fighting chance: give out AAA games every month. Or the itch
| approach: lower the bar completely.
| ehnto wrote:
| It's the streaming service problem. Entrepreneurial me wants
| competition and a free market, but end-user me wants
| everything on one service because bugger having 10 different
| game launcher/library apps installed.
| junon wrote:
| Yep. It's the classical critical mass problem: no users to
| attract publishers, no publishers to attract users. You need
| money to jump-start it, and we didn't want to seek
| investment.
|
| Our plan was instead to create a solid client that integrated
| all of the other platforms into one, without even needing to
| have them installed. But out of the hundred or so people we
| asked, I could count on one hand how many actually cared.
|
| If it had been successful wed introduce our own store as just
| another backend, low dev cut so we'd compete, and then
| subsidize sales with some investment later on.
|
| It just didn't pan out. Steam has a death grip on the market
| despite having terrible software.
| tester756 wrote:
| >It just didn't pan out. Steam has a death grip on the
| market despite having terrible software.
|
| But what software do they need?
|
| Personally I just need to buy, download and play some game
|
| it annoys me when I buy games on steam and want to play it
| and it tells me to create some ubisoft / epic games
| account, like what the hell.
| inasmuch wrote:
| I ran a solo branding and web, product, etc. design shop,
| prematurely took it full-time and bet my livelihood on it, and
| effectively dead-ended my career.
|
| The small number of clients I got were--according to them--happy
| with my work, but the only word-of-mouth inquiry that ever came
| in was a coke-addled soi-disant "tech visionary" with little
| money and no plan. Everything else came through exhaustive
| outreach and prospecting. After a couple years, the whole feast-
| or-famine freelancer thing went full-famine and sent me running
| back toward full-time/in-house work with my tail between my legs
| and--evidently--a stink of desperation that took a couple more
| years to dissipate enough for me to actually find a job. A job
| that paid significantly less, had worse benefits, and put me in a
| much lower, less respected position in a much less interesting
| company, doing much less interesting (and much harder) work than
| the one I left years earlier. An objective professional regress
| from which I've yet to recover.
|
| If I've learned a lesson it's that there must be reasons I'm
| unable to find good work that are too close to me for me to
| identify myself, and therefor frequent and informative feedback
| should be sought in high priority.
|
| I saw a number of my peers take the same leap I did and find
| enormous and continuing success despite having less experience
| and, in some cases, what I felt was much lesser work to show. Of
| course their success has since enabled them to eclipse me, as my
| development has been retarded by several years of bad or no work
| now.
|
| I want to move toward self-employment again, but have virtually
| no professional network after so much failure (again, despite all
| of my few customers verbalizing that they enjoyed working with me
| and were happy with what I did for them), and have no reason to
| believe I'd have greater luck in another venture.
|
| I'm commenting to share my story, but am really here to read
| about what others have learned that I might be overlooking.
| bckr wrote:
| This is going to be a weird suggestion but have you thought
| about your "aura"? You mentioned "stink of desperation" so I
| don't think this is too far off the mark--maybe you would
| benefit from doing things that look totally unrelated to your
| career development and get that "MOJO" (Magic Of Job
| Opportunities) flowing from your unconscious.
|
| Anyway, I appreciate your candor.
| inasmuch wrote:
| Thanks, I appreciate the suggestion. Aura/vibe really is the
| only thing I haven't been able to test and account for.
|
| The irony is, I spend almost all of my 'free time' pursuing
| other things, as my design career has always been the rather
| practical backup plan to the long-shot stuff I'd really like
| to do and am more passionate about.
|
| I've often wondered if it's /that/ attitude that's actually
| hurting my cause, despite my best intentions, efforts, and
| positive professional demeanor, as one consistent trait among
| most of my peers is that they seem to live and breathe the
| biz. Tech design now is a lot different from when I first got
| into it, and I'm not really on board with the current
| direction of the industry. I try to 'be the change', but ...
|
| Anyway, thanks again for your thoughts. Definitely something
| for me to think about.
| divyekapoor wrote:
| Self confidence and marketing - you seem to be doing fine on
| execution. Focus on PMF and sales.
| inasmuch wrote:
| Yeah, the confidence started strong and has definitely waned.
| I have to assume that comes through, and am always trying to
| coach myself into a better mindset. I know I'm good at what I
| do, I'm just not good at convincing people of that. Doesn't
| help to have a portfolio of mostly outdated work for
| companies no one's heard of.
|
| I did what I could for product-market fit and sales efforts,
| but I'm sure there's a ton more I could learn. It's difficult
| to fight the impulse to roll over and try to be anything-for-
| anyone when the work I want isn't coming in, even if I know
| that makes my offering unclear at best, unappealing at worst.
|
| Thanks for your thoughts.
| nonplus wrote:
| Sometime after 2009 I started working on a data mining app that
| allowed a user to enter medications and cross reference drug
| interactions. At the time opendata was one of the main
| information sources, now I think those datasets are managed by
| openfda.
|
| I brought one person in to work on that with me, they proceeded
| to buy a domain for the top product name we were considering
| (canitake.com) within the first day. It was wonderful to get that
| red flag so soon, I stopped working with them, and abandoned the
| project. Losing the project was a little unfortunate, the data
| brought good questions someone might want to ask their doctor
| about; but knowing what I know now about "doing your own
| research" a lot of people would not have used this as a way to
| prepare to talk to a professional and would have interpreted the
| data themselves.
|
| Not working with that acquaintance again was invaluable, they
| burned their way through the industry for the next decade. They
| could have messed up projects I actually cared about.
| bckr wrote:
| > they proceeded to buy a domain for the top product name we
| were considering (canitake.com) within the first day
|
| I understand this may be a meme, but did you actually take this
| as a serious red flag, and is this why you stopped working with
| them, or were there other factors?
| nonplus wrote:
| Personally buying ip for a project you just started working
| on as someone expected to be a contributor? Yeah I'm serious
| (That I take that as a flag now). There were accounts and
| avenues to buy a domain when ready for that.
|
| It showed they couldn't communicate well, couldn't work in
| stealth mode, couldn't focus on building/proving out the mvp.
|
| Other factors are just hindsight/observing them the decade
| after. Two of those factors might be. 1. Repeatedly quitting
| contracts (if it's not a good fit fine, if it's never a good
| fit maybe you're missing skills to complete a project).
|
| 2. Comments/behaviors that illustrated they would have been a
| poor manager if we scaled/inability to be wrong.
|
| For me, other developers and contributors have been one of
| the most important factors for success/completing
| projects/keeping clients (in the contracting space). So I
| consider this an important lesson I was fortunate to learn
| early. I don't know who I would be working with now if I had
| failed to keep great talent around me (or for that matter,
| what skills I would not have developed).
| bsenftner wrote:
| I wrote and globally patented Automated Actor Replacement in
| Filmed Media, a fully automated visual effects based actor
| replacement and automated digital double creation pipeline. I
| started working on the idea in 2002, had it globally patented by
| 2008, with a startup team of Academy Award Oscar winners for VFX,
| the VFX Supervisor and VFX Producer from the talking animal film
| "Babe", with a custom built server cluster capable of 125K new,
| unique 3D digital doubles of real people per hour, and a
| rendering pipeline capable of 12x real time for video clips less
| than 1 minute in length.
|
| However, I launched during the 2008 financial meltdown. The only
| serious investors I could gather would eventually realize the
| tech could be used to create Deep Fake Porn, which I refused to
| pursue. VCs thought the tech was science fiction and suspected
| fraud. (Remember, this was '08 - the term deepfake has 7 years
| before going mainstream.) Every film studio and music label I
| contacted, all already familiar with VFX technology, wanted to
| use the tech for promoting media products, but none wanted to
| invest to create a production scale studio (because they were
| familiar with the lack of VFX studio success stories). I got
| letters of intent from every studio & label to use the production
| system once a public scaled system was in place, but anyone
| willing to finance the studio insisted in also producing porn.
| Once again, I refused.
|
| By 2015 I was personally bankrupt; I tried to pivot to making
| game characters of real people, so gamers could realistically be
| themselves or look like celebrities if they wanted. Previously,
| I'd been on the OS team of the first PlayStation. I know a lot of
| people in senior places in the game biz. Every game studio and
| publisher I met, except one, simply wanted the tech for free and
| refused negotiation. Managed a few clients, continually adding
| features, but never breaking even. My income was primarily from
| doing other startups financials, business plans, and software
| contracts. Towards the end of 2015 I sold the patents to escape
| bankruptcy, and took a job writing facial recognition software.
| I'd been principal engineer for that company through three
| generations of their enterprise FR system until last spring when
| I quit to return to school and deep dive on machine learning.
|
| The twitter feed is all that is left for the public:
| https://twitter.com/3DAvatarStore/media I still have all the
| tech, and I'm working with a new startup to bring all this back
| to life.
| [deleted]
| bsenftner wrote:
| Here's the video for the failed Kickstarter campaign, only
| raising 25% of the goal.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f2Eah3bofk
| cjcenizal wrote:
| http://atomicarmies.com/
| zomglings wrote:
| Thank you for this very honest account. I enjoyed reading it,
| and empathized with much of it.
| et1337 wrote:
| I worked solo for three years on a 3D cyberpunk shooter all in a
| custom C++ engine. It was a hybrid single/multiplayer idea, where
| you would progress through the campaign and encounter other
| players at the same time. The twist was, in keeping with the
| cyberpunk theme, once you got to the end it would be revealed
| that all the players were actually bots the whole time.
|
| At first I was going to commit 100% to the deception. There
| wasn't going to be real multiplayer in the game at all, it would
| all be fake. But then I realized the riot I would have on my
| hands if I actually tried to sell it as a multiplayer game and
| there wasn't real multiplayer. So I wrote real multiplayer. By
| the end, the project was big enough for a team of 100. I was
| making cinematics, running a Discord server, trying to figure out
| how to train an AI to play my increasingly complicated game, it
| was insane. I ran out of money.
|
| Trailer: https://youtu.be/QnMz27nPbB4
|
| Code: https://github.com/etodd/lasercrabs
|
| Dev blog: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=49277
| rafale wrote:
| That's an amazing trailer!
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| A game where bots turned out to be real players would have been
| fascinating though.
| tacon wrote:
| So these games are versions of the book "Ender's Game"[0]?
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender%27s_Game
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| I don't remember which iteration it was, but there is a game
| in the Dark Souls series where one of the bosses is a player
| that invades your game to be the boss.
|
| It's a cool twist on the PvP of the game where you can be
| invaded by a player at almost any time but you can usually
| opt out of the PvP but this particular encounter is needed to
| progress.
| darepublic wrote:
| There is such a boss in dark souls 3 but if you are offline
| an AI will play as the boss
| stirfish wrote:
| I played a game like this before. The whole journey took
| about 6 hours to complete. Realizing who I was interacting
| with was one of the best moments I've had playing a video
| game.
|
| Edited to add: I think I've played two games where the bots
| turned out to be people. The second game was much longer, and
| I never finished it - I only learned that the bots were
| people from a YouTube video later on.
|
| This is a good idea, and it is under-explored!
|
| Spoiler: VGhlIGdhbWVzIGFyZSBKb3VybmV5IGFuZCBOZWlyOiBBdXRvbWF0
| YS4gVGhlc2UgZXh0cmEgY2hhcmFjdGVycyBoZXJlIGFyZSBiZWNhdXNlIEkga
| 25vdyB5J2FsbCBjYW4gcmVhZCBiYXNlIDY0IGluIHlvdXIgaGVhZHMu
| soneca wrote:
| Wow, great spoiler hiding trick!
| 7steps2much wrote:
| Base 64 encoding spoilers is next level smart!
| Xavdidtheshadow wrote:
| Riot Games did this one year for April Fools in League of
| Legends. Normally you can play a 5v5 match against other
| players, beginner bots, or intermediate bots.
|
| For April Fools, they rolled out "Advanced Bots", which were
| actually another group of 5 humans, but with their username
| replaced with "<Character> Bot". Word got out pretty fast,
| but it was super funny queuing up for a game you'd normally
| win easily and being surprised at how smart those bots have
| gotten...
| et1337 wrote:
| And much easier! See, this is why a team of people is better
| than just one person with tunnel vision.
| undeadsushi wrote:
| I created a project called Knit Data (https://knityourdata.com).
| It allowed you to connect your Google Analytic with Hubspot
| automatically. Every night it would sync the CRM transactions
| into Google Analytics as an event, which gave a better viewpoint
| of attribution. We ended up making about $1200 a month from 3
| customers in ARR.
|
| The biggest learning is business partners -- choose wisely. My
| business partner is still a friend, but he didn't produce and it
| ended up me just doing all the code, all the marketing, so I
| asked myself why should I continue if I'm doing all the work and
| he doesn't have the time. The other big learning was making sure
| to do proper validation before building or spending your time on
| something. I took the word of my friend because he was an expert
| in the space. We had no problem getting people to sign up and
| literally give us their API keys (at first), but they wouldn't
| respond back to emails - which shows it's not a huge pain point.
|
| I'm now working on a few other ideas on the side but making sure
| to do proper validation before building.
| asicsp wrote:
| Related past discussions:
|
| * "Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22397720 (222 comments)
|
| * "Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that
| hasn't?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25580637 (582
| comments)
|
| * "Ask HN: Failed project you spent 15 hours/week for 5 years
| on?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27838479 (74 comments)
| tentacleuno wrote:
| Thank you!
| bko wrote:
| oh god...
|
| botrank.pastimes.eu
|
| Parses reddit comments looking for "good bot" or "bad bot" and
| keeps track of bot score. It's actually quite popular because it
| spams reddit when you write good/bad bot, where its not banned.
|
| Lessons learned: Gets a few k hits a day, but that drops off if
| the bot doesn't spam reddit. Very fickle users. How do I monetize
| this?
|
| stox.dev
|
| A stock screener terminal with auto-complete. you can write
| things like:
|
| filter profile.industry contains "auto"
|
| filter quote.price < quote.priceAvg50 * 0.9
|
| lowPe = quote.pe < 10 and quote.pe > 0
|
| Lesson learned: No market for this or didn't do enough marketing.
| It was fun to build a mini grammar parser and learn how to use
| monaco editor although I wish I built a more formal compiler
|
| chartit.io
|
| Create simple charts in browser with data pasted from excel or
| csv. Basically typed out and exposed chartsjs and google chart
| library in UI
|
| Lessons learned: I suck at SEO and marketing. Who actually wants
| to use this anyway?
|
| deep-chats.com
|
| Transcribe audio or video using aws speech recognition. Charge
| using credits.
|
| Lessons learned: Again, unable to find customers. Got too far
| deep into the output editor and should have scrapped or scaled
| that down
|
| There are more...
| soneca wrote:
| https://www.quidsentio.com
|
| A private social network ("private" in the sense that is a
| journaling web app that you share with close friends, not as
| "e2ee privacy").
|
| Zero interest on HN or Reddit or wherever. The few people who
| tried (including friends and family) never came back. The one
| paid user that I had tried to use the "import Facebook status"
| tool and it wasn't working. I didn't know how to fix (it worked
| in my machine) so I refunded them.
|
| I used as personal journal for several months but eventually
| quit. The web app is still up because it's basically using free
| tier for hosting, so I leave it there.
|
| Lessons learned
|
| Honestly, idk. Maybe that a new social network these needs a very
| clear unique spin. Generic "keep in touch with close friends and
| family" is not enough, any of the big ones can do that. WhatsApp
| and a closed profile on Instagram deliver that value already. The
| big ones that tried eventually failed (Path, famously, but also a
| recent one YC-backed, Coccoon).
|
| _"Pay a subscription so we don't have to sell ads and your
| data"_ is not enough of a motivation for adoption.
|
| For those that this would be enough, they also care about e2ee
| and decentralization (which I didn't deliver because it was
| technically hard to do).
|
| Social networks are expected to be on native mobile apps, not web
| apps, I think.
|
| If anyone likes the UI of it and wants to use the frontend
| (React) for a web3 or any sort of e2ee backend, get in touch.
| MihaiSandor wrote:
| Zero interest even in the comments section on this thread, lol.
| soneca wrote:
| It failed even at being a cool failed project.
| nso95 wrote:
| Social networks are hard because they're only useful once they
| amass enough regular users. This is not the case with a lot of
| SaaS.
| niyazpk wrote:
| FWIW IMO: This should be marketed to the twitter croud, not the
| facebook crowd. I have no interest in writing journals for my
| friends and family, and even if I did, there won't be many who
| want to read what I write (in my personal network).
|
| But I can see writing for folks with the same interests in
| tech, business, books or what not. So I am willing to open up
| my personal journals, but only to complete strangers
| (anonymously).
| dktoao wrote:
| I made a spreadsheet add-on similar to the pint library for
| python (dimensional analysis) based on my own open source JS
| library (https://github.com/GhostWrench/pqm). Website is still
| up: https://ghostwrench.net/convertplus.html.
|
| To me it seemed like the perfect way to get a solo app up and
| running because Google was going to run all the sever stuff and I
| could just cash in. The app never really got off the ground and
| by the time I realized that Big G really doesn't want to make it
| easy for any schmuck to run a profit generating app using _their_
| servers and _their_ technology and it wasn't worth the
| maintenance effort to keep up with the constant requests to
| update the app. I think it is no longer available on the GSuite
| store as of a few months ago. I think my biggest mistakes were as
| follows:
|
| 1) I needed a business/marketing oriented co-founder. I
| underestimated how difficult that job is and overestimated my
| ability to do it.
|
| 2) I wanted to charge too much for the app. I didn't want to
| undersell myself and get caught in a trap of not making enough to
| keep up with maintenance. I went too far the other way. I think
| maybe a $50-$60 on time charge would have been appropriate,
| instead of requiring a subscription. This is an easy fix, but I
| would had to re-do my marketing effort and see #1
|
| 3) Built before I tested the market. I convinced myself that just
| asking a few of my engineering friend would use it was enough.
| Again, this is probably a symptom of #1
|
| 4) I was mentally unprepared to deal with failure and I lost
| motivation to keep working on the project when things didn't go
| as I expected.
|
| 5) I underestimated how much people actually use spreasheet add-
| ons. There really isn't a thriving market and most of the really
| popular apps are a utility attached to another popular standalone
| project.
|
| 6) Probably should have targeted Excel rather than Sheets,
| because the market is simply bigger.
|
| I think if the stars align, I would like to give this project
| another go. I don't think it has totally failed rather than just
| gone dormant, but I need a better strategy for round 2!
| 1penny42cents wrote:
| [meta] questions like this are a great antidote to the
| survivorship bias that plagues entrepreneurships. Lots of great
| insights, but also just great to hear about all those ventures
| that didn't succeed.
| giarc wrote:
| I built OneKeynote.com - the idea is to create podcast streams of
| an individual you like to hear, across all the various podcasts
| they go on.
|
| My original motivation was hearing Chamath speak on Kara
| Swisher's podcast and I loved him. I wanted to hear more of him
| but realized the only way to do so was to search his name. This
| was fraught for one big reason, many, many podcasts include his
| name in the description, even if he isn't a guest (ex try
| searching Elon Musk!). So I built a quick site and used
| ListenNotes.com to create custom feeds. I started with tech
| personalities since that is my area of interest and everyday I
| would conduct a search on ListenNotes and add to the custom
| feeds.
|
| ListenNotes does allow you to track who subscribes but it's
| inaccurate. I did see people start to subscribe to various feeds.
| However it was very hard to receive feedback. The other problem
| is it was really time intensive. I would spend about 30 minutes
| each morning going through all these personalities trying to find
| new episodes. Eventually I cut the time down as there are some
| people that don't go on podcasts very much (ex. Andrew Mason) and
| some people that are on podcasts a lot (Harley Finkelstein) so I
| adjusted how often I would search. 20-30 minutes might not seem
| like a lot, but I have a full time job, a family, other projects.
| My end goal was to insert ads into these feeds but never got the
| traction to get there. I eventually stopped updating the feeds
| and I should update the site to reflect that (although the site
| doesn't appear to be working right now anyways).
|
| I still think this is a good idea but there is probably a better
| way for it to be done.
| vilvadot wrote:
| I launched ByteVitae (https://bytevitae.com/) a couple of years
| ago, got a decent launch here and in Product Hunt, a bunch of
| users the first days ~3500 and a steady influx of users over the
| following months. I didn't know how to convert most of those
| users to clients, didn't talk to them, lost all interest after
| the initial launch and moved on after an amazing -26EUR in
| benefits :P
|
| I learned so many things and was such a fruitful ride that for me
| it is far from a failure. But on the business side, definetly a
| complete failure!
|
| Even wrote a little post mortem at the time:
| https://vilva.io/blog/1-year-of-building-reflections.
|
| Lesson learned: Talk to your users. Don't neglect the
| business/marketing side, specially if you are a techie who loves
| to code. Talk to your users. It is a marathon run, forget about
| the overnight millionare launchs, the launch is the "easy" part,
| growing steady from there is the real challenge. Talk to your
| users!!
| ultrasounder wrote:
| Right!. But did you inform your customers that You were
| shutting down, what did you do with all the Datum that you
| collected(User Auth). Did You give them the opportunity for
| them to properly delete their account data stored on some DO
| droplet VPC waiting to be harvested?
| vilvadot wrote:
| Great questions! I thought a lot about those at the time, I
| didn't felt comfortable sitting on a pile of data waiting for
| an attacker to try get it. So this is what I did:
|
| Once I decided I was going to kill the project, I removed the
| option to become a paying customer to not get more, waited
| for the last of my paying customers period to finish (it was
| a yearly subscription). And released an update that made the
| app work strictly locally, user data does not reach my server
| (edit: there is no server anymore) and stays in the user's
| browser (it works like that now).
|
| Kept the data for a couple of weeks in case anyone wanted to
| recover it to help them use it with in the new "local"
| version, but enventually no one did, so finally I deleted my
| db. So right now I have no access whatsoever to that data.
| putcalltheta wrote:
| I was a regular at the options trading subreddit. Lots of
| questions about how to modify strategies kept coming up (I also
| have been thinking about it for a while) so I built
| https://putcalltheta.com.
|
| Got some buzz when i first announced it but things went cold
| after that. I still get a few user signups occasionally. Need to
| do some work on it but my mind is wandering off to other
| projects.
|
| Edit: lessons learned 1. I probably should have had a mobile
| version of the webapp at launch. 2. Marketing is hard
| syngrog66 wrote:
| I once started a computer game company without first knowing I
| could make games lots of people liked and would pay me for.
|
| Which is to say, with the benefit of hindsight, I did not do
| sufficient product-market discovery and validation upfront before
| I went "all in" on it.
|
| I/we got sales but it never came within even an order of
| magnitude of how much FT engineering salary I was missing out on.
| By some metrics it was a success but by net USD impact on me it
| was a fail.
|
| Was a great experience and I learned a ton though.
| brightball wrote:
| In 2003-2004 I was trying to start a software company to serve
| public schools.
|
| If I were making the pitch today it, you'd call it a tightly
| integrated Schoology + Teachers Pay Teachers.
|
| At the time, I was thinking in terms of a complete product to
| make the entire public school system better from the lives of
| teachers at the core. I should have separated the concept into
| smaller MVPs and we would have beaten TPT to market by a couple
| of years while having income to fund our other projects.
|
| I'm happy to see that TPT has been able to find success though. I
| think they fill a huge need and it's cool that they're using
| Elixir now.
| dharmaturtle wrote:
| I tried to build StackOverflow for flashcards (i.e. spaced
| repetition with collaboration as a first class feature.) After
| working on it on nights/weekends for ~2 years, I realized my
| architecture was shit. I started out with Blazor + F# + PostGres,
| but eventually I realized that syncing offline client DBs to the
| cloud was a very nontrivial problem. So I moved to event
| sourcing. Turns out that's not much better - I started to write
| my own IndexedDB wrapper, then said "you're a moron" and switched
| to CouchDb/PouchDb/RxDB. I also wanted to support plugins. I
| thought I figured that out with Blazor, but eventually I realized
| that more powerful plugins would want to manipulate the DOM
| directly. Blazor's virtual DOM kills that possibility. So, I'm
| off the dotnet ecosystem (I am so, so sad to leave F#) and onto
| Typescript + SolidJS. I would've gone ReScript but that's tightly
| coupled to React which uses the VDom. Perhaps I should be using
| Svelte - I'm not 100% on any of this new architecture yet. So my
| project has not yet entirely failed... I just realized I spent ~2
| years on the wrong architecture.
|
| The carcass of my attempt in dotnet:
| https://github.com/dharmaturtle/cardoverflow
| maximp wrote:
| Did you ever have any users? Or did the technical challenges
| stop you short of shipping the product?
| dharmaturtle wrote:
| No users - no launch. I have _many_ conversations with
| potential users though... I 'm 100% positive this is
| something that people want. E.g. right now the way they solve
| the problem of collaborating on flashcards is by using
| _google sheets_ to collect errata on shared decks. https://ww
| w.reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki/comments/f0bj27/o... This
| workflow involves manually checking the sheets link,
| downloading it, converting it to the correct format,
| importing it into your collection, and hope it doesn't
| override/corrupt your own customizations to a particular
| card. It's absolutely fucking nuts.
|
| I'm 100% sure it (or something like it) is desperately needed
| by the world. However, students aren't really well known for
| paying for software, so this remains a nights/weekends thing.
| quadrature wrote:
| Can you launch without offline sync ?.
| dharmaturtle wrote:
| _Great_ question. I 've thought hard about this. I
| originally built it to be online-first, thinking "you can
| add offline support later". This is the version that's
| demoed in the video on the Github - and is over a year
| old at this point. I abandoned this for multiple reasons:
|
| 1. Adding offline support is very nontrivial. It (may)
| influence your choice of DB and your data schema. This is
| a type of master-master replication, since the user is
| the master of their data, and this is quite painful in
| RDBMS-land. I'm avoiding having to migrate my schema to
| support offline sync.
|
| 2. There already exist solutions that are online-first.
| E.g. Quizlet, mochi.cards, remnote. I find _all_ their
| tools for collaboration lacking, despite being online-
| first... which is surprising. They don 't even support
| something as basic as commenting on a card. This blows my
| mind. Imagine Github without issues/discussions/pull
| requests.
|
| 3. Users have repeatedly told me that they prefer
| offline-first. This is probably due to them coming from
| Anki - a popular open source offline-first program. Anki
| is my real "competition" - not billion-dollar Quizlet.
| knubie wrote:
| Mochi is not online first, it is offline first.
| redact207 wrote:
| I feel your pain. I'm a .net guy who transitioned to typescript
| 5 years ago.
|
| If I may, could I suggest Firebase as something to consider? It
| has automatic offline sync over indexdb, and you can subscribe
| your app to data changes to sync all devices etc.
|
| It takes about a day to get your head around how it works, and
| given your use case you probably just need the Hosting,
| Firestore + Auth modules.
|
| I use it a lot now in my side projects and it has been life
| changing in terms of taking away all of the boilerplate code
| and letting my just write app code.
| rustybolt wrote:
| Not sure if it's intentional , but your post reads somewhat
| like satire.
| dharmaturtle wrote:
| Not satire, just being blunt. What do you think I'm
| satirizing? The magpie developer?
| rustybolt wrote:
| Yes, nothing wrong with learning new technologies but this
| seems like using your side project as an excuse to learn
| new technologies.
|
| Also nothing wrong with that, but personally I like to
| think more about architecture than about the particular
| implementation.
| dharmaturtle wrote:
| Fair point. In my defense, people say you should pick the
| tech-stack you're most familiar with:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29626371 Perhaps I'm
| misusing the word architecture - I guess I really mean
| tech-stack.
|
| I'm most familiar with F#, so I went with that and Blazor
| initially (to avoid learning JS). PostGres feels fairly
| uncontroversial. Perhaps I magpied from there to event
| sourcing - I still find it surprising that an indexdb-
| eventsourcing-wrapper doesn't exist. I considered
| ReScript given my F# background (the two share a similar
| philosophy/syntax).
|
| Now though, I'm trying to "pick the best tool for the
| job" instead of "use what you know". AFAIK if you want
| offline syncing, the best tool for the job is
| CouchDb/PouchDb. If you want to avoid the VDom, Svelte or
| SolidJS are the most popular options.
|
| Please let me know if I'm mistaken - perhaps I'm too lost
| in my own head.
| xvilo wrote:
| I had my own company in design and development. Too much
| administration regarding everything and taxes. And thought I
| could do it ALL by myself... (Administration, Development,
| design, getting new customers, giving support etc)
|
| Next time I would do this, I'll probably will pay someone to do
| administration and taxes!
| hermitcrab wrote:
| >Next time I would do this, I'll probably will pay someone to
| do administration and taxes!
|
| Or marry them (works for me). ;0)
| [deleted]
| mfrye0 wrote:
| I tried to start a language learning app that would use product
| placement within lessons to make it free. The idea was to have VR
| style real world lessons such as how to order a beer - "I'd like
| a Heineken please".
|
| I took it pretty far. My cofounder had a Phd in Computational
| Linguistics, we had professors from U of M as advisors, I got us
| into an accelerator, we built a working prototype, and I had
| several big ad companies interested.
|
| The problem was that Duolingo came out at the exact time. Then
| due to our concept being immersive / media heavy, it required a
| lot of funding to build a v1. Ultimately, investors didn't think
| we'd be able to compete with Duolingo and we couldn't raise the
| funding.
|
| I started the company almost 10 years ago now.
|
| Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/SavvyLanguages/
| suyash wrote:
| nice, the VR space is incredibly hard to enter in an enterprise
| setting coz you're not only selling software but probably bunch
| of hardware devices that need to be maintained etc
| muzani wrote:
| Had several: last minute airline seat bidding app with an
| interested airline. Fishing competition app with paying users.
| Housing valuation app for a city council, with the actual city
| council interested and opening up their API to us. The city
| council also wanted a parking app and water billing app. A telco
| requested a reloading app that was basically CRUD but offered 6
| digits for a few days of work. There was a diet app with
| thousands of monthly active users and hundreds of dollars in
| monthly sales.
|
| The failure reasons were all the same: business partners who sat
| on money and did nothing.
|
| These people were not incompetent. They've built companies
| before. They own a Mercedes, BMW, or Mazda RX-8. They've
| dedicated decades of their careers to building these connections.
| I personally burned my credibility setting up some of these
| meetings.
|
| The problem was they didn't show up. Why didn't they show up?
|
| "The poor and the middle class work for money. The rich have
| money work for them."
|
| Nobody is naturally too lazy to take money that's lying in front
| of them. These people have been conditioned to think that work is
| for fools. They love doing strategic shit like picking domain
| names and researching target market. They'll never actually talk
| to the target market though. One entrepreneur even hired a
| "personal assistant" to do the talking, except the assistant was
| incompetent and just pissed everyone off.
|
| Laziness is fine. Arrogance is fine. But anyone with a contempt
| for hard work will not get anywhere.
| CASHforGOLD wrote:
| eganist wrote:
| > They own a Mercedes, BMW, or Mazda RX-8.
|
| I'm not trying to be glib, but what quality of a person or
| partner were you looking to assess with this measurement?
| Asking because I've never thought to consider the car a person
| drives as part of evaluating a potential partnership.
|
| I guess what I'm trying to land on is how you encountered and
| partnered with people who did as you described multiple times,
| and I'm leaning towards the idea that you're looking for the
| wrong indicators.
| hatware wrote:
| When I got to RX-8 I laughed heartily. Nice car != success
| but the RX-8 isn't even that nice. It's quirky and
| enthusiasts like it, that's it.
| muzani wrote:
| This probably means a lot less if you live in a developed
| country. Malaysia probably has some of the most expensive
| cars in the world. They're like student loans in the US.
| People here get very emotional about them because they're
| "necessary". You _can_ live without a car, but it limits your
| opportunities by a lot. A car often takes 9 years to pay off,
| the prices are artificially high thanks to bad government
| policies, and it 'll roughly cost 1/3 the price of a house
| for that period of time if you're frugal.
|
| An RX-8 back when I knew the guy would cost about 25% of a
| _good_ tech salary (senior big tech, or tech lead /CxO on a
| smaller one), on a 9 year loan. It's not a family car. And
| it's the cheaper of the three.
|
| I bought my first car at 32, with a manager job, and that was
| with quite a lot of arguments with my wife. It's a cheapish
| MPV.
|
| I have some emotional anchors to those cars. Partly because I
| ride with them going to a client's office. Partly because
| it's the last thing I see from them.
|
| As for partnering with them, there's a longer story and every
| story is different, but it's not car related. Most had proven
| themselves to some extent. In some cases they had already had
| the deal on the table, and just needed a prototype. And
| somehow I went from prototype guy to only person who cared.
| It's why I couldn't close some of those deals myself.
| jmchuster wrote:
| Yes, i think that cultural divide is what confused people.
| In the US, those are cars that yuppies buy after their
| first paycheck.
| eganist wrote:
| I learned a LOT from this reply. Thanks for your patience
| in writing it out; it seems to mirror what I witnessed
| elsewhere e.g Australia, and it's starkly different from
| our situation in the US.
|
| Given the context, I can't blame you for assigning
| significance to a car.
|
| What indicators are you looking for to avoid making the
| partnerships you described?
| muzani wrote:
| We actually would buy cars in Australia as students and
| ship it to Malaysia. Even with the weaker currency and
| shipping costs, it was a good deal. That's how bad it is
| in Malaysia. The long story was that Malaysia invested a
| lot in car manufacturing to become a high tech industrial
| country, which failed, so the gov taxed foreign cars and
| stunted public transport.
|
| I think the best model is personality + incentive. It's
| probably worth a couple chapters to discuss. But
| basically incentive is the time domain - can you
| continually incentivize them on such a slope to act in
| your interest?
|
| Personality is what kind of incentive they expect. Some
| people would lose their jobs for an affair. Some just
| want to appear successful. I know a guy whose life was
| changed by meditation, so he gave up his whole career and
| traveled the world helping people with stress. Everyone
| is a mix of things and place different weights on
| different things.
|
| So you want to model people and see that they align with
| whatever your specific venture is. Someone suited to one
| venture may not be suited for another. And there's a time
| component too, so someone great 5 years ago may be
| unsuitable now.
| reactspa wrote:
| I drive a 20 year old middle-class car. I drive it because
| it's been reliable and fuel-efficient, and I have no reason
| to replace it.
|
| GP would judge me as financially unsuccessful and not pay me
| any mind if I needed a problem solved.
|
| GP has been played by these "mercedes having" people and GP's
| own pre-conceived immature notions about status-signaling.
| sangnoir wrote:
| GP never suggested that the selection was based on the cars
| they drive - what gave you that impression?
|
| My own reading is that gp uses the cars are evidence of past
| financial success
| eganist wrote:
| > GP never suggested that the selection was based on the
| cars they drive - what gave you that impression?
|
| You captured it well in your next sentence:
|
| > My own reading is that gp uses the cars are evidence of
| past financial success
| muzani wrote:
| Either financial success or irresponsibility.
| fshr wrote:
| Have you considered that you're a common denominator in your
| half dozen examples? How could they all fail the same way with
| different people to blame?
| muzani wrote:
| There are plenty of other experiments.
|
| One failed because nobody wanted to fund it, right during a
| crypto boom. It might be a bad idea too. Who knows? But
| everyone moved on to better projects.
|
| One failed because we tried to clone Blue Apron but local
| logistics and payment infra wasn't mature enough.
|
| One failed because of scope creep.
|
| One failed because the CEO was bullshitting investors and
| they pulled out. It may not be related but probably is.
|
| Some failed because I was the lazy one who didn't feel good
| about committing.
|
| All of those did not fail from lack of hard work. But they're
| less interesting. Laziness is the one I'm really pissed
| about. It's also possible they'd fail later, but they did not
| get that far.
|
| There's successes too, but that's off topic.
| jimhi wrote:
| I've been burned a few times but realized how I need to vet and
| communicate better before and while working with someone. I had
| a chance to see a venture fail for reasons other than an
| incompetent cofounder which was educational. And I had great
| success in my most recent venture.
|
| You listed at least 4 ventures this was the cause of. I hope
| you have realized what you need to change as well.
| getup8 wrote:
| https://www.CocktailLove.com I built last year on my paternity
| leave and haven't had significant time to work on it since. I
| tried to monetize by selling Nick & Nora glasses on the site but
| didn't know how to market it (or just no one wanted them).
|
| It still gets a sign-up or so a week and 1.5k visitors a month
| from Google but it's far from where I wanted it to be.
|
| I think the biggest learning is that trying to work full time at
| a new job (moved from FAANG to a scale up), raise a young kid,
| maintain a relationship with your partner, workout occasionally,
| and work on a side project all at the same time is near
| impossible. At least for me :)
| igeligel_dev wrote:
| I had/have some projects: -
| https://caseconverter.pro/app - was more experimentation than
| anything else, paste a JSON and get converted keys -
| https://getworkrecognized.com - Could never reach market-fit with
| that. Wanted to really focus on the employee sides with brag
| documents but no employee will ever pay by themselves for such a
| tool - http://linkedium.com - was a LinkedIn Scheduling
| tool, was just annoyed at some point with that. Might spin it up
| again this year. So never launched
|
| Might put them up for sell somewhere. Maybe someone is interested
| to grow these or find product-market fit. But focusing on some
| other ideas I have right now.
|
| What I learnt: I am really bad at Marketing and Sales and have a
| lot to learn there. Will focus on other target customers and
| trying to niche down with the projects I am working on right now
| and want to work on soon. Maybe finding someone who is good at it
| and partnering up might be something to look into.
|
| Also, SEO and content is working to generate traffic. If you can
| convert the traffic it is a goldmine. The Google Search Console
| for getworkrecognized looks promising honestly.
| albert_e wrote:
| I managed a project that built a ambitious (for an internal
| project) collaboration portal integrating two enterprise
| applications and customizing one of them for UI and Business
| Process requirements.
|
| My job was project management and functional validation.
|
| But I dabbled in UI design and coding as a hobby. I flexed a bit.
|
| I impressed the stakeholders with a good UI mockup. Tech team
| said that level of UI customization is impossible. I delivered a
| working prototype of customized site on the same platform. They
| had to accept the requirements, grudgingly I imagine.
|
| I had a small team to do testing. I went aggressive and did a lot
| of testing myself. Tech team delivered a lot but did not have top
| notch tech people who were invested. They did stuff like security
| by obscurity and I called them out. I logged dozens and dozens of
| bugs. Resulted in extended timelines.
|
| I thought I was ensuring a robust product that everyone would be
| proud of at launch. Tech team probably hated me. Product was
| finally ready for UAT.
|
| Client team had a reorg and leadership change. This project was
| no longer a pet showcase project for new leadership. It was put
| on back burner and then shelved. Never launched.
|
| Didn't make any friends.
|
| Lesson: Avoid big-bangs. Launch MVP and iterate. Make friends.
| You don't have to be a Rockstar - aim for normal success.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Here is a summary of 13 failed commercial software products. It
| is from 2010, but a lot of the reasons for failure are just as
| relevant today:
| https://successfulsoftware.net/2010/05/27/learning-lessons-f...
| Zigurd wrote:
| Before Android became a success, I led the development of an
| operating system with a JVM-based userland for VoIP devices:
| http://d2tech.com/1-products/mcue.htm
|
| It was designed to use multiple IP communications protocols and
| to present a unified view of contacts' presence across all the
| ways they could communicate.
| Zigurd wrote:
| I meant to post the archive.org link:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20090217184935/http://d2tech.com...
| ransom1538 wrote:
| A doctor directory. Google black listed it after 30 days. No
| reason provided.
|
| https://www.opendoctor.io/
| Rinum wrote:
| Google sucks. I've also had projects blacklisted, adsense
| banned, etc.
| ehnto wrote:
| That is a lesson learned indeed. I avoid any business models
| that rely on Google's algorithmic blessing now, too many
| horror stories and it doesn't really pass a risk sniff test
| anyway.
| frasermince wrote:
| I worked on a language learning app for about a year. I wanted to
| read the first Harry Potter in french and easily create
| flashcards. I iterated early on based mostly on what I wanted to
| see in the app instead of talking to people. I definitely should
| have talked to people much more and much earlier. Also I didn't
| have any other founders with product or design experience. In
| retrospect I would have really benefited from other cofounders.
|
| In addition to this such an app is very content driven and the
| lack of being able to use anything other than public domain
| content really limited me. It's still up in a semi working state
| https://unchart.io. Personally it achieved my language learning
| goal as I was able to read most of the first Harry Potter in
| french so I will probably continue to add more features as a
| personal project.
| schnebbau wrote:
| Early on it isn't wrong to let your own vision guide the
| direction. Then introduce feedback loops once you have some
| traction.
|
| The iPhone wouldn't be where it is today if Steve let the focus
| groups create v1.
| gergejerzy wrote:
| I've had a predictive maintenance startup. We managed to bring
| value for local gas distribution company, for mining machines
| provider and 100+ wind turbines owners. But in the end we needed
| to let it go - mostly due to lack of focus, long sales funnel and
| high costs of data scientists / software dev against to what
| value PdM brings. We dreamed that it will be repetitive Saas, but
| we always manages to implement a custom, hard to maintain thing.
| anyfactor wrote:
| Robintwits
|
| Based on the Robinhood API, I attempted to merge Stocktwits API
| to create hype stock trend analysis platform. I wanted to combine
| both the buy side and hype side of these stocks into a very basic
| analytics platform. After Robinhood shut down their unofficial
| API my project was dead. Also Stocktwits are quite restrictive
| with their API use now, I believe.
|
| Lesson learned: Platform risk is an obvious threat to your
| project. You can never go wrong by choosing freedom. Build
| something from the ground up and if you are relying too much on
| other people's product make sure you recoup investments fast as
| possible.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Oh man, that sucks. That sounds like a reasonable, maybe even
| pretty good idea compared to most on here. But you got really
| unlucky I think.
| anyfactor wrote:
| haha thanks, friend. Appreciate it. I didn't get hit as hard
| as Robintrack though. They essentially bought Robinhood's
| unofficial API to public interest which essentially led
| Robinhood to close that down.
| anthuswilliams wrote:
| I spent a few years trying to bootstrap an app for independent
| pharmacies. The basic idea was a kanban board for patients whose
| prescriptions were coming due for refills. Pharmacists would use
| it to coordinate calls out to patients to proactively refill
| their prescriptions a few days before they were due to run out.
| This gave them time to fix insurance snafus, get renewals from
| doctors, etc, and they could lower their inventory costs by only
| stocking drugs when they knew patients would come to purchase
| them. Moreover, most insurance companies are following Medicaid
| in implementing a program where they rate pharmacies based on the
| degree to which their patients are adherent to their prescribed
| medications and use this rating to adjust how much they paid the
| pharmacy for the drugs they issued. So the product also helped to
| pharmacies improve this rating by ensuring patients picked up
| their medications on time (which is the only means whereby these
| agencies know if patients are adherent).
|
| I could go on and on about the problems:
|
| 1) I (and the two other programmers I was working with) had a
| job. The pace at which we rolled out features and bugfixes was
| glacial, even when customers were clamoring for them. And this
| statement is just about improving the app; it doesn't even
| consider the other tasks involved in running a business, on which
| I was even less excited to spend effort.
|
| 2) Pharmacy management software is a fragmented market, and
| almost every player is impossible to integrate with. Since our
| product didn't do the insurance, billing, inventory management,
| etc. it meant we had to integrate with them. We started out by
| telling people to run them side by side and manually make changes
| to both our app and that of their vendor. Not a great pitch.
| Looking back, I wish I'd invested in this from the get-go,
| instead of trying to do it after building the app.
|
| 3) The product required pharmacies to change their entire
| workflow to even realize the benefits. Which is fine, but we sold
| it as a software thing that worked magically, and didn't invest
| at all in helping customers use it successfully.
|
| 4) Our cofounders (pharmacists) were not interested in running a
| SaaS company. They viewed the app as their strategic advantage in
| their own pharmacy, and dragged their feet on the customer
| outreach we hoped they would take ownership of. I felt like they
| were actively working against me. This was the biggest issue, and
| what caused me to finally decide to close it down. Someone else
| in this thread made a statement of "I went from the prototype guy
| to the only one who cared." and that statement really resonates
| with me. In retrospect, I had the opportunity to structure the
| deal as more of a product/customer one than a cofounder one, and
| I wish I had been smarter about that.
|
| I still think it was a great idea, and we built a slick app. I
| just failed on the sales and customer outreach side of the
| business. The app still exists in a zombie state, and a few
| customers still use and pay for it. I haven't done anything on it
| other than renew SSL certs since 2019.
| kerogerokero wrote:
| Mine is rather unconventional.
|
| Started a side project (https://javfilms.com) that aggregates
| popular Japanese adult videos (NSFW site by the way).
|
| It didn't fail, but it never picked up to a substantial point.
| ehnto wrote:
| Might want to put NSFW before the link, I'd already clicked on
| it before reading the warning. No harm to me though, I'm at
| home.
| silexia wrote:
| Testedrecruits.com - I built a recruiting software in-house that
| has helped me hire hundreds of people. I tried to turn it into a
| software as a service and never got anywhere and never got
| anywhere.
|
| RomyLMS.com - same thing here, I built training software that I
| use to run University level courses for my employees. Employees.
| I converted it to software as a service, and no one used it.
|
| My lesson from both is that if you are not going to be putting
| full-time marketing and sales effort into a software as a
| service, you'll have a very hard time beating established
| competitors.
|
| I think that the software as a service area now has started to
| become saturated as people view it as easy money. I think the
| true easy money right now is actually in the construction trades
| and manufacturing. Building skills in each of those areas will
| reap long-term rewards for those who do so.
| nscalf wrote:
| I don't have a site to point to anymore, but me and some
| cofounders built out a physical therapy vertical saas (patient
| management + mobile patient portal).
|
| The issue: many PTs are VERY analog--sheets of papers with
| exercise, very few touch points, no data collection, etc.
|
| The solution: modern patient management system for doctors, a
| mobile app that will remind you to do your prescribed exercises,
| track your response, have reminder videos so you're doing
| everything right, and feed difficulty levels, etc to the doctor
| in real time to monitor recovery.
|
| The problem: selling to doctors is hard. Replacing their entire
| day to day interface for their whole staff is a giant barrier to
| pass. Many patient management systems bundle in handling
| insurance, so his ended up being a "solve everything, then we'll
| talk" type of system.
|
| What I've learned: you need to make sure you're MVP is ACTUALLY
| viable. We talked to a lot of PTs, and they were interested but
| not forthcoming with exactly what they would need to switch--
| still not sure how to pry out that info. Vertical saas is a
| double edged sword: the customers are bigger and stickier, but
| the sales process is slower and harder. Doubly so if you are
| trying to dethrone other deeply ingrained saas businesses from
| day one. A better approach likely would have been an extension to
| improve existing ones, then our own system.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| Did you know much about the PT field beforehand?
|
| It seems to me that really successful entrepreneurship requires
| enough time in that field to really understand the rough edges
| of the domain, but not so much time in the field that you
| actually start to accept the existing solutions as "good
| enough" in a sort of stockholm syndrome.
|
| You need to be an expert with a beginner's mind, which is
| extremely difficult.
| mtlynch wrote:
| I know another indie founder I believe is working in this
| space. Their app is called Rehabit:
|
| https://rehabit.co.za/
|
| They've been building it in public for the past year, but I
| haven't seen updates for a few weeks:
|
| http://whatgotdone.com/michaelcampbell/2021-11-05
| jbmsf wrote:
| My spouse is a PT and hates her software. I get the sense that
| she also has an above average appreciation for the needs of the
| admin staff. They quote literally make the difference between a
| good day and a bad one by the choices they make around
| scheduling.
|
| The problem is that she works for a large chain and the people
| with purchasing power are not clinicians.
| bendergarcia wrote:
| Do you think offering some kind of onboarding/deployment
| service would have helped? Helping them migrate all their data
| and workflows into this new tool?
| nscalf wrote:
| It likely would have helped on the margin, but honestly it
| seemed like we were selling a much better experience to
| patients, and only marginally better experience to doctors.
| We really needed to nail the doctor experience, but there is
| some nuance there. Generally, PTs have front office people
| who spend their day in these tools, while doctors have fairly
| limited exposure. The shortcomings of the existing tools
| aren't as obvious to them.
|
| One thing was completely clear---this was not as close to
| product market fit as we expected it to be, so we decided to
| back away from the project instead of raising money and
| doubling down on trying to force a solution to a problem that
| wasn't very important to our direct customers. In other
| fields, tools that affect our customers customers are very
| successful IF that drives more sales, or can affect the
| bottom line in some way. Physical Therapy is less of a sales
| business and more of a referrals business (from other docs),
| so we didn't have much impact. If anything, we may have
| prevented business by increasing exercise adherence and
| improving outcomes, therefore cutting "recurring business"
| (decreasing the amount of visits/injury, or the overall
| amount of recurring injuries).
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| " In other fields, tools that affect our customers
| customers are very successful IF that drives more sales, or
| can affect the bottom line in some way."
|
| Very insightful - whatever solution you have must actually
| drive enough $ for someone to _really_ want to give it a
| try. Which is a huge ask if someone's business isn't really
| tech oriented and they don't really believe the
| optimization is worth breaking through existing ways of
| doing things.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| Spent about $200000 on developing a real-time massive multiplayer
| online strategy game just to run out of money then fail our
| Kickstarter:
| https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/breadboard/terra-mango-...
|
| We already had 4000+ people sign up to play once it hit beta, and
| even had local news cover us:
| https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/terra-mango-could-be-the-n...
|
| We vastly underestimated our ability to market the game and to
| influence people, even our own friends.
|
| We should have shipped a somewhat slow and buggy beta version to
| those 4000 people who signed up to beta test.
|
| Don't let perfectionism get in the way of shipping.
|
| Or maybe we just had a bad idea
| mysterydip wrote:
| "perfect is the enemy of good enough" I learned a few years
| ago. Thanks for sharing, this is really interesting as I'm
| working a multiplayer project right now. What was your
| marketing budget like? How did you get those 4000 people? Do
| you have a postmortem or dev log from the time?
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| To get the list of people: We went to a lot of indie
| meetups/presentations, posted all over Reddit at every
| opportunity (got on the front page of many gaming subreddits
| a bunch of times), constantly spammed our friends (there were
| 5 of us working on it), got involved with faculty and
| students at Full Sail University, anything we could. We were
| all very passionate about it and it pretty much consumed
| every waking hour of our lives; I even refinanced my home to
| pay for development.
|
| It was an incredibly fun endeavor... until it wasn't. Haha.
|
| We never did a post mortem because it didn't actually end...
| It just fizzled out (it did end some friendships though). I
| (lead dev and co-founder) left the project and my ownership
| share (after the Kickstarter failed) to the other partners; .
| They then tried to find someone to either buy or invest in
| the development of the project for a few years. I only got
| notice that they finally stopped paying the server bill a
| week or so ago.
|
| Good luck on your game endeavors!
| marcos100 wrote:
| The problem is knowing what is "good enough". It comes with
| experience and, if you're doing something new to you, I think
| it's hard to assess.
|
| You may probably tell what went in hindsight, but even then,
| it's just one if in the lifetime of the project.
|
| "Oh, we could've released when x was done". Maybe, but maybe
| not too.
| harel wrote:
| I've seen enough failures exactly because "Perfect was the
| enemy of Good enough". It's a good mantra.
| typon wrote:
| What about underpromise and overdeliver?
| harel wrote:
| What about it? Nobody ever complained if they were over
| delivered did they?
| hutzlibu wrote:
| But in a world where hype is the standard, you will
| likely just get ignored, if you do not hype, but
| undersell your product.
| kingcharles wrote:
| > Don't let perfectionism get in the way of shipping.
|
| I see this a lot. I wonder if a lot of creatives have obsessive
| personalities that cause us to want to fiddle endlessly with
| something before we release it?
| AQuantized wrote:
| Can I ask where the capital came from? Did you all pool
| together to fund it? It's a lot of dedication for something
| that sadly didn't ship.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| Most was provided by a single investor, about $40k each was
| provided by myself and one other. Software developers are
| expensive
| jwfriese wrote:
| You say that your team should have had the willingness to ship
| a flawed product sooner, and that maybe that would have changed
| your fortunes.
|
| If you're ok with sharing, I'd be interested in learning more
| about why you believe that. Did you hear that from former beta
| customers later on down the line? Is it an intuition you have
| from your reflections on the period?
|
| Also, what brand of "perfectionism" are were talking about
| here? Chasing down minor performance boosts? Gold-plating
| existing features?
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| The way I worded it was weird... we never shipped to beta,
| despite having 4000+ people sign up to be beta testers. We
| only shipped a "closed beta" (you had to ask one of the devs
| personally to let you in) to people in our own city. It was a
| location-based game (like Pokemon go), so there has to be a
| bunch of people in the area if your actually wanted to do
| anything fun.
|
| Regarding perfectionism: the game was very rough around the
| edges in regards to in-game assets. Performance was also a
| concern, both on the device and the back-end. The device
| could slow to 1-2 FPS if there were enough assets (100s of
| troops firing at once - which was easy to do with a few
| friends playing together at once) animating at once. The
| server would slow to 4s+ response times if there was enough
| activity in a single geographic area.
|
| I was okay with shipping with these issues, but the other
| partners weren't.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "I was okay with shipping with these issues, but the other
| partners weren't."
|
| Maybe on a different timeline, you would have regretted
| shipping too early - because first impression matters, too
| and many people who walk away, after the first try will not
| come back for second try.
|
| The trick is, to find the right time.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| Sure, hindsight is 20/20. Really though, we probably
| would have failed either way, mostly because we didn't
| know the right people.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "Really though, we probably would have failed either way,
| mostly because we didn't know the right people."
|
| Maybe, but from the little I read, it seems like it might
| have been more the technical challenges (performance) too
| hard to overcome with the given ressources/target
| hardware.
| suyash wrote:
| thanks for sharing this, very important lesson indeed!
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