Ask HN: Are you embarrassed by your failed projects?

Everyone goes on and on about there is no penalty for failure... However, over the years I have launched a few side projects, and I have eventually shut them all down. They were met with disinterest or in some cases only casual interest... the worst part is the people that actually liked your product. they are the ones that always bring it up. has anyone else had similar experiences? also, how do you deal with promoting your next project in light of all the past failures?

Embarrassed by my failed projects? Not really. I just pretend that they never happened.

Not if someone directly asks, of course; but in my autobiography the failed projects rather drift into the mists of time. The same goes for most creative people: You hear about Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, but you never hear about the books he started but never made any progress on.

It depends on why they failed.

I was involved in a project that failed because of a moral mistake I made. You could blame it on the culture (my whole team, my boss, my bosses boss, and the director of the organization were all "fired" because of this incident) but I was the one person who could have stopped it. And I didn't.

To be fair, I probably would have lost my job had I done the right thing. On the other hand, I would have kept my integrity and, retrospectively, I know I could have gotten a new job very easily at that time.

I was very embarrassed by that, and it screwed up my life for a while... Hell, I gained 40 pounds as a result.

The big picture is that you have to ask yourself, "What is the cause of this failure?" Sometimes you gamble, sometimes you get a "2-7" with nonmatching suits and you go all in before the flop. People have won the WSOP playing like this... People also lose big playing like this.

Myself, developing web sites on my own account, I've noticed that most web developers (in the sense of a real estate developer) create something that 'maxes out' their potential) and they never make anything that cool again. Personally, I'm trying to be more systematic and gradually make things that are bigger and bigger.

I consider myself reasonably fortunate, in that most of my side projects were made to scratch my own itch, and they all served me well.

In that sense, none of them failed, since their primary purpose was to statisfy one of my own needs, and so they did.

However, most of them never gained momentum, I stopped maintaining most of them after about a year, and hardly anyone missed them.

There's one or two where I still get a few questions, whether it's still in development, or "what happened to it?", even after years of stopping work on them - one can either view that as a failure, since the projects were shut down; or as success, since some still remember them fondly.

Being an optimist most of the time, I treat them as success.

No. Some of my 'worst' ideas have succeeded to my amazement. OTOH, some of my best ideas failed despite how 'awesome' they were.

When I look back, everything succeeded or failed based on timing and execution.