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Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#411

Post by timoth3y »

myth_buster wrote: post #392
timoth3y wrote: post #114

I wrote a detailed and (to me) heartbreaking account of this two years ago. The article went viral and kind of freaked me out, but I think the advice is as good as ever. https://medium.com/startup-lesson-learned/why-i-turned-down-...

Thank you for sharing your story/learnings. I didn't come across your blog initially. These specially resonated with me: I need a higher level of certainty than investors do because my time is more valuable to me than their money is to them. Investors place bets in a portfolio of companies, but I only have one life. Listen to what your users say, but believe what they do. From now on, immediate benefit: sell to the u…

Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed the article. That was one of the big revelations for me as well. One of the things that made me realize that pulling the plug was not only acceptable but the right thing to do.

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#412

Post by KennyCason »

murukesh_s wrote: post #367
aarongray wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, maybe so, I just haven't had the time to invest in that. My wife took a high stress / high pay job to support us temporarily while I built the app, and she was nearing burnout and it just was taking me too long to scale my customer base after the paid ads failure, so I had to put it down and go back to a 9-5 to protect our marriage. ;-)

ha ha, looks like the single biggest reason for failure (or success) of startups are marriage :-)..

My anecdotal evidence says, yes, it can be very stressful on the marriage. :)

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#413

Post by cattlefarmer »

I started a Wordpress consultancy with a couple of friends. The idea was to eventually transition into a proper design agency that can also code.

One friend was part-time and did only design because he didn't know how to code. The other friend never did any work at all so I ended up having to do almost everything, which wasn't really that much anyway since we only had a handful of customers.

Eventually one of those customers led to a full time gig so I shut the whole thing down.

There were many lessons but the main lesson was that you cannot rely on a person's word.

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#414

Post by ragebol »

tixocloud wrote: post #237
ragebol wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a small robotics company in the Netherlands, technical university spinoff. We did tests in care homes for elderly and disabled people and we actually had clients that wanted to use our robots and were very positive about them. But we were just too early. The robot didn't even need to be very autonomous, shared autonomy was part of the plan (fake it till you make it and honest about it :-) ). I controlled…

Reading your story from an outsiders’ perspective, did you guys have a commercial person figure who was going to pay for the robots? From my experience, healthcare usually comes down to figuring out who is willing to pay for it (insurer, user, govt, etc.) and less so about the tech. You are right that the tech doesn’t need to be fancy but funding model is usually the bit needed to be fixed. A buddy of mine is success…

We did have a business case worked out, even had a Dutch care insurance company as investor. Those insurers would pay for the largest bit.

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#415

Post by ragebol »

oceanman888 wrote: post #188
ragebol wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a small robotics company in the Netherlands, technical university spinoff. We did tests in care homes for elderly and disabled people and we actually had clients that wanted to use our robots and were very positive about them. But we were just too early. The robot didn't even need to be very autonomous, shared autonomy was part of the plan (fake it till you make it and honest about it :-) ). I controlled…

A lot hardware startup that started from zero made a first product that can barely called a MVP (Gopro first product was a camera shell, DJI first product was flight controller) do you think such ultra minimalist product(yet very meaningful to understand customer) could have been done looking back now?

The problem with a lot of robots in care is that if you pick 1 task, the MVP to solve that problem doesn't even have to be a robot. To automate 2 tasks, you will need 2 MVPs and this doesn't really scale. A single robot can do a lot of different things, all with the same hardware that gets used a lot, where as 1-funtion MVPs only get very infrequent use.

But it does require to build a robot that can do a lot of things, which is not a minimal thing to do.

Things get expensive and complex when robot arms get involved, which do give you lots of capabilities in return. Arms and mobility make the difference between a smart speaker like Alexa and a robot.

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#416

Post by ragebol »

boxspam wrote: post #295
ragebol wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a small robotics company in the Netherlands, technical university spinoff. We did tests in care homes for elderly and disabled people and we actually had clients that wanted to use our robots and were very positive about them. But we were just too early. The robot didn't even need to be very autonomous, shared autonomy was part of the plan (fake it till you make it and honest about it :-) ). I controlled…

Robovalley right? Is there still animo for this? I would love to invest in elderly care technology, especially AI for Alzheimers. Would this still be possible, or is it a big company (Philips?) thing now?

We were a spinoff of TU Eindhoven. Robovalley went up into Holland Robotics recently, AFAIK, but Netherlands is small of course. Our company just stopped. I actually interviewed at https://www.robotcaresystems.com/ that now have an autonomous rollator on the market and I recently found out about https://mojin-robotics.de/ which seems to continue where we left off. So, yes, there is still animo for robotics in care.

I don't know any companies that focus on Alzheimers, but there is a bunch of medical robot tech companies around here, eg. http://microsure.nl/ that do micro-surgery and http://www.preceyes.nl/ that make eye-surgery robots. A

There's Health Valley (https://www.healthvalley.nl/welcome-to-health-valley), that may know some companies that do focus on Alzheimers more.

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#417

Post by OkiiEli »

I used to work at a multi-national and got fired. I always wanted to try freelancing but didn't have the courage to leave a well paying full-time job and take the risk. This gave me that opportunity and I went ahead to started a productized content-as-a-service http://contentiskey.co which offers unlimited content for $250/mo Right now am busy searching for customers, you can join me

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#418

Post by sbfeibish »

My startup didn't fail. But my initial projects failed. Project 1. I started a commercial version of Wikipedia back in 1990. Just the computer hardware and software section. I hated starting there. But that's what I knew. And that's the reason I started the project in the first place. It was harder to get info about computers back then. You had magazines (and user groups I guess). I wasn't sure of my computer programming skills. So I used an off the shelf database management system. Long story short. The DBMS didn't scale. It had a GUI front end. And as the project went along. Any change became exponentially longer. Small insignificant changes started taking an hour, then two, and finally 2 whole days to make a small change. (I was so mad I wrote my own DBMS. And since it didn't have all the bells and whistles, it was lightning quick. And changes were mere compiles that took 4-11 minutes.) I should have stress tested the commercial DBMS I bought, at the start. I just assumed I was paying a lot of money for it. It would work. There's much more that I don't have time for. I should have sought funding, I shouldn't have worked on my end of the project alone (I thought it would be in business's self-interest to provide content and update the info. At the start about 15% did. Which in retrospect was decent.), ... I should have started the startup earlier in life. My aging parents became my primary concern.

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#419

Post by haolez »

steve-chavez wrote: post #405
haolez wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A combination of PostgreSQL + PostGIS + pgRouting, Java + GraphHopper and my personal favorite: PostgREST!

Hey haolez, glad to hear you like PostgREST :)(I'm the current maintainer). If you manage to open source your project please stop by our docs repo, would be great to have a real world PostGIS project in our ecosystem list.

Will do! Congratulations, btw. PostgREST is incredibly stable :)

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#420

Post by pytyper2 »

mmsimanga wrote: post #219

I come from a coal mining region. For over a 100 years there has only been one mine in the area, a big mine. There is plenty of coal in the surrounding areas. This is Africa. An uncle of mine had the idea that we start a mine. He invited about 20 of us, all related. We started putting aside money to register a company, pay a geologist to prospect for the coal and get mining permit to mine the coal. We all contributed…

Do the rest of the shareholders have first option to buy his shares if the uncle were to wander into the jungle and fall into a pit, just a pit, a big pit?
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