151–160 of 181 posts
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It was near Redding, CA. Unfortunately the monastery needed a website built for them so I spent quite a bit of time working online. I couldn't escape it. But building and maintaining a website for a few hundred users was much more relaxing then building and maintaining one for tens of millions.
Was it http://www.monasteryofstjohn.org/ ? I grew up there (the town not the monastery).
Started in 2007, no tech skills.. - Idea I published was novel & since has been copied by oodles, including celebrities, large corps & one copy now has millions of users. In 2009, after not being able to get my idea out in timely manner I started doing front-end dev jobs. I've been failing at those too for the past five years. I'm not a fast coder. In 2013, now with technical chops & a solid tech team we created tech…
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http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/8/4276466/jeremy-riney-everyt...
I was a user, still have it embedded on my wedding site (though dead): http://dovandrebe.com/ . Hadn't followed what came of it/you. Thanks for sharing your journey!
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Having read through your post I think your stagnation was due to the wrong pitch, and, secondly and as odd as it sounds, due to that dorky faces illustration at the top of your landing page. I can't think of a single case where a forum maintainer would say "gosh, I need a better community building tool " rather than "I think I need a better forum". Then, say, he lands on your page and the first thing he sees is a bun…
> You got the "hello" completely wrong. Agreed. We knew it too. But that wasn't the reason for our failure. Our sales pipeline was already quite full and so our focus wasn't on changing the pitch even though it was sub-optimal. Instead we were trying to optimise the slow sales and onboarding processes as those were what held us back at that point. It's the usual thing: We had limited resources, and so we prioritised…
"It feels very much like we would be creating an enormous amount of extreme risk (the foolish kind)"
I'm puzzled what the risk was, unless you would still be losing money even with no wage costs?
In the early 2000s with a few friends together I founded and ran a web development startup in Germany. Because I had been consulting for advertising agencies since high school, building a service company for agencies seemed like the natural thing to do. Afterall, it was the kind of customers I understood well, and my cofounders were enthusiastic about the concept, too. Despite doing every single conceivable thing wro…
> after the startup there is a bleakness to a "normal" lifestyle I could never quite shake off "Running a company would make you perfect for any conceivable job were it not for the fact you'll never want one again." Not sure where I read that, but it sounds true. I am being gently pushed into job life by circumstance after 5 or 6 years of independent life (startup ~2 years, school ~1 year, freelancing ~2 years) and g…
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> You got the "hello" completely wrong. Agreed. We knew it too. But that wasn't the reason for our failure. Our sales pipeline was already quite full and so our focus wasn't on changing the pitch even though it was sub-optimal. Instead we were trying to optimise the slow sales and onboarding processes as those were what held us back at that point. It's the usual thing: We had limited resources, and so we prioritised…
I read your Medium post and was puzzled where you wrote in regard to keeping things running while you went and got jobs that: "It feels very much like we would be creating an enormous amount of extreme risk (the foolish kind)" I'm puzzled what the risk was, unless you would still be losing money even with no wage costs?
The risk therefore was to the investors, whose support we needed to continue even though we hadn't secured more experienced angel or VC support (not a good signal).
Failed, job, startup -success...gave up company because of co- founder,started again.. startup- success...amazing journey first 3 years...next 4 years hell with business partner. I have failed in the year 2011 after 7 long years at my bootstrapped company. My business partner didn't want me around, I was pretty emotional after so many years, I felt it's time to accept fate n move forward. Broke up with my gf, I quit…
How did you end up with $1m of personal debt? That seems like an epic disaster, worth telling the tale to allow others to avoid making that sort of mistake. For my part, in 2 failed businesses I never went more than £10k or so into personal debt.
I never borrowed but from my family , but since my business partner borrowed hell lot from friends, cousins, to keep it going , we were essentially paying 24%-36% interest on the debt, almost all the profit was going to just pay interest.
And since we were Not making operational profit , we did turn over of 5million usd , paid interest of 2 million and operationally we were in a debt trap. It was classic case of denial of risk and peril. just thought that I will come up with blockbuster product and wipe it all,it never happened in 7 years the problems multiplied. Debtors were hounding on the door for their principal, even though we paid them huge interest,it's like bank run, once they sense things are wrong , everybody wants their money back on that day. Got into new personal guarantee agreements ,made huge sacrifices and finally here I am.
Failed, job, startup -success...gave up company because of co- founder,started again.. startup- success...amazing journey first 3 years...next 4 years hell with business partner. I have failed in the year 2011 after 7 long years at my bootstrapped company. My business partner didn't want me around, I was pretty emotional after so many years, I felt it's time to accept fate n move forward. Broke up with my gf, I quit…
Congrats on coming out of failure. I would love to learn more about what worked and what didn't work. What sort of pitfalls you had, lessons learned, etc
1.Never ever give personal gaurantee for more than your net worth! So that failure stops with you, otherwise your entire family gets affected.
2.Focus on one thing , become incredibly good at it.
3.Focus on customers and trust yourself on giving value , customer insight is better than customer need.
4.Be alert about interest on debt ,business debt ( high interest) essentially will kill every possible way of being rich, instead it will drag you down the road of no return.its 100 times better to get VC fundin or investor money than business debt.VC will stop you before it's too late. LESSON ....take business debt only from banks if it's low interest, then investor money. Ideal is do business with customer money if you are in software. Get pre- sales before you make, it's tough but it works.
5.Indecision killed most of the profit for us,we were two people protecting each other back and it doesn't help, when you are in such impossible situation and indecisive,we should have closed the business 2 years earlier. It would have saved us a lot money and time.
6. Always have 3 extra advisers on board if you are just two co-founders....to get a perspective otherwise emotions run high and it will be huge drain on the company.
Failed, job, startup -success...gave up company because of co- founder,started again.. startup- success...amazing journey first 3 years...next 4 years hell with business partner. I have failed in the year 2011 after 7 long years at my bootstrapped company. My business partner didn't want me around, I was pretty emotional after so many years, I felt it's time to accept fate n move forward. Broke up with my gf, I quit…
Why did you break up with your girlfriend initially and what motivated both of you to come back together?
Not able to give time to her , I felt I might destroy myself or her permanently if I hanged around the relationship, it was becoming extremely stressful to handle her and my debt. So I requested her to let me go and allow me to focus on clearing the debt.
Also I guess the break helped her see me in different light when she was away from me. I just melted to my gf waiting for me 3 long years. I said yes got married in 3 months.
I am incredibly thankful for my parents to keep supporting me with all their might and it's beautiful....that I was born to such family where they go to any extent when rubber meets the road.