31–40 of 476 posts
The system worked well, but I struggled to find users, and it died a sad, lonely, death.
I have a project which may never generate revenue, despite the fact I spent 2 months after hours working on it. I did a dumb thing and dove directly into the project without first finding a fit or customer base for it. More or less, it's a scheduling application that allows a user to set when they're open and allow anyone to book that time for however much the original scheduler valued that slot of their schedule. It…
Consensus seems to be an awful name :)
When the standard was released 2.5 years ago I figured that exacting security code against an unevenly documented API was worth paying for, but nobody understood what 2FA was, why SMS is garbage for 2FA, that you could now get devices for a couple bucks that would work on dozens of sites while respecting your privacy, etc.
I spent about a month coding and tried to sell it for a couple months, but I simply didn't have the resources to try to do all the education needed. I put it on the shelf.
But this spring I've gotten a couple inquiries about updating it to Rails 5.0 and 5.1, so I guess the knowledge is getting out there. I did another survey and there are still no drop-in libraries for the languages I'm comfortable in (Ruby, Python, JavaScript, PHP) - either they require a lot of fiddly customization or they're half-finished hobby attempts.
I'm considering updating the gem, automating the license purchasing, taking steps to enforce the dual-license, and seeing how it does.
I have a project which may never generate revenue, despite the fact I spent 2 months after hours working on it. I did a dumb thing and dove directly into the project without first finding a fit or customer base for it. More or less, it's a scheduling application that allows a user to set when they're open and allow anyone to book that time for however much the original scheduler valued that slot of their schedule. It…
I'm good at "releasing". I'm not good at deciding what to build (demand) and I'm not good at the marketing side.
My latest project helps you get more followers and increase user engagement on Instagram. It's a Google Chrome extension called Magis. It's currently bringing in $30 per month with $25 per month in fee's for the payment solution. Yay $5 profit; if you don't count my time.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/magis/kahkfpeemmmj...
My previous project helped you validate your idea before you create the actual product. Apparently it was a bad idea because all it really seems to do is piss people off. Anyway, meet FauxBuy.
Those are just the last two. I build a lot of stuff that's not profitable.
The idea was to allow people to find other gamers to challenge to matches for which there would be a monetary reward. I'm not a lawyer, but I've understood such an arrangement to exist in a legal grey area (at least here in Canada.) Regardless, I had looming concerns about legal issues. The major issue for the eventual discontinuation of my work on the project was bad scope management, which resulted in me developing far too much product at once. One such example was my choice to include real-time matchmaking in the "MVP". A great learning experience to be sure.
So anyway, now there's a git repo with a fairly clean NodeJS + (oops) Backbone.js project sitting on BitBucket with hundreds of hours of work put into it that'll never be released!
Perhaps the most valuable lesson I've learned from my various projects is how to manage scope, and focus on minimizing work up front. Delay work until the last responsible moment.
I think there's a lot of money to be made in such a venture, if you can manage your feature set properly. The biggest trouble is verifying match results though - which now that I think about it - may have been one of my primary concerns. (I had an entire system set up for verifying match results via automatically uploaded screenshots, which would then be verified using instructions by workers on Mechanical Turk.)
If I were to do it again, I'd focus solely on the main experience of challenging someone and pick specific games that are easy to verify the results for.
It's been a couple months, and my $20ish investment (you have to place an order for a sticker before you can sell it) has turned up $43 of profit. So technically it was profitable, but I don't think I've even reached minimum wage for the time I spent on it.
That said, I can try to distill out a few key points:
(in no particular order )
1. Doing this as a "side project" while the founders still work day jobs. I think doing that is fine, but it limits how fast you can move and how aggressive you can be.
2. And (1) goes hand in hand with this one, which is "not being focused enough". I should have emphasized a "what is the single most important thing we can do now to generate revenue" approach from the beginning. Instead, we worked on this "grand vision" which is pretty cool, but took forever to get close to having a shippable product.
3. Early on I was thinking mostly about on-premises deployments, with the idea of rolling the code into a SaaS version as "next step". In hindsight, that was probably exactly backwards. Going SaaS, and going "down market" in terms of customer size would have made it easier, I believe, to get initial traction. IoW, as Mark Suster put it[1] "hunt deer, not elephants".
4. Not taking my health seriously enough. As some of you may recall, I had a heart attack[2] near the end of 2014. And while I lived and was able to get back in the saddle, that whole ordeal happened at a really bad time from a company perspective and cost us basically the entire following year, as I recovered both physically and mentally. In hindsight, I was pushing myself way too hard, and not doing the things I should have been doing w/r/t diet, exercise, etc.
On the flip side, we have done some things right. Probably the most notable is keeping the burn rate extraordinarily low. We spend a small enough amount of money that I can fund our current activity level out of my pocket nearly indefinitely. Which is a big part of why we're not out of business despite having no revenue. And now things are starting to look up, as we have one really solid prospect in the pipeline and are deep into the transition to a SaaS delivery model for the "old" products, and have a really cool new SaaS offering stirring as well.
The interesting point for us will be if we can sign even 3 or 4 relatively small deals and get some real traction established. Then we can decide if we want to go pursue outside money or not, or if we want to just keep doing the organic growth thing.
[1]: https://bothsidesofthetable.com/most-startups-should-be-deer...
This change effectively made my somewhat useful app almost completely useless, at least in my eyes, because now there's little incentive to self study.
I could have tried harder to market it but I'm glad I left it alone.
Lessons learned: - Politics suck. Any business related to firearms is going to be vulnerable to government regulations. - Money matters. Once you start charging for something, you automatically feel the need to deliver a product of higher caliber. You also get immediate validation on whether or not your idea is worth it and how much it could be worth.