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Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
71–80 of 285 posts
Re: Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
#72I 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 st…
Not sure if it's intentional , but your post reads somewhat like satire.
Re: Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
#73I 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.
Re: Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
#74Had 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…
> 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 to…
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.
Re: Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
#75I 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 st…
Not sure if it's intentional , but your post reads somewhat like satire.
Not satire, just being blunt. What do you think I'm satirizing? The magpie developer?
Re: Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
#76I 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.
Re: Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
#77Not 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.
Re: Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
#78I 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,…
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?
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).
Re: Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
#79About 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.
Re: Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
#80I 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 f…
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.