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What it feels like to fail

aflanagan.com

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Re: What it feels like to fail

#41

Post by augustflanagan »

bazookaaa wrote: post #38

I've been feeling the same way about my startup, which has almost 17,000 users but only a small amount of them are paying customers (launched a paid plan a few months ago). I keep wanting to ask myself how much longer I should give it to see if it reaches profitability, or should I just shut it down? Anyway, right now I'm creating a survey for the paying users to be able to tell what they like/don't like about the pa…

Thanks. I really appreciate the feedback and advice (from everyone on HN). The whole "wondering how much longer I should give it" phase lasted from about February until early April.

One of the first things that made me realize it might be time to cut my losses and focus my attention on other projects was when we launched this website in mid Feb - http://toeflnow.com

We sell a TOEFL Tips and Strategies guide eBook, and while it certainly isn't earning enough to pay all the bills it is making substantially more money than Lenguajero. In fact, in its first week it made more money than Lenguajero did the entire month of Feb.

That was a real turning point. It was like "Hmmm...hundreds of hours spent on Lenguajero vs. ~40hrs spent on an ebook. Maybe I should be doing something else right now..."

Good luck! I really hope it works out for you. What's the website if you don't mind me asking?

Re: What it feels like to fail

#42

Post by pwntifex »

I'm coming off a very painful startup failure myself, but I am honestly very thankful for the experience. There is an old cliche that says you learn more from your failures than your successes. It's become a cliche for a reason, it's usually true.

I reflect often on the entire experience and constantly go over all the mistakes we made in hindsight. It's painful, really painful, but you learn from the pain. The pain makes it real so you won't ever make the same mistakes again.

I'm onto my next startup now and all that hard learning is paying off. I'm working even hard but with much less stress since I know I'm doing the right things this time around.

Re: What it feels like to fail

#43

Post by bazookaaa »

augustflanagan wrote: post #41
bazookaaa wrote: post #38

I've been feeling the same way about my startup, which has almost 17,000 users but only a small amount of them are paying customers (launched a paid plan a few months ago). I keep wanting to ask myself how much longer I should give it to see if it reaches profitability, or should I just shut it down? Anyway, right now I'm creating a survey for the paying users to be able to tell what they like/don't like about the pa…

Thanks. I really appreciate the feedback and advice (from everyone on HN). The whole "wondering how much longer I should give it" phase lasted from about February until early April. One of the first things that made me realize it might be time to cut my losses and focus my attention on other projects was when we launched this website in mid Feb - http://toeflnow.com We sell a TOEFL Tips and Strategies guide eBook, an…

Thank you! That's amazing about your TOEFL vs. Lenguajero revenue. My site is http://soshiku.com and my submission to HN is http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315281 (submitted ~19 months ago, yikes).

Re: What it feels like to fail

#45

Post by qeorge »

Keep going, even if this isn't the site. Like you said, you've come miles in just one year, and you've achieved more than you're giving yourselves credit for.

Turn off Mixergy and get to work. :)

Re: What it feels like to fail

#46

Post by puredemo »

augustflanagan wrote: post #31
nostromo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"All told we are probably out ~$2,000 and one years worth of work." Clearly all businesses should be ROI positive after $2000... let's give up!

I don't think the $2,000 mark is really of any significance in deciding whether to move forward or not. If we had a business model that I truely believed in I would be happy to invest a significant amount of money into it. As it stands at this point I don't.

Generally, you would start offering new services that people are willing to pay for.

How about e-learning modules for businesses that are $50 / exam?

Re: What it feels like to fail

#47

Post by fuzzythinker »

abstractbill wrote: post #28
augustflanagan wrote: post #21

Just for the fun of it does anyone want to throw out some new names for the site? Lenguajero is pretty bad in English. I think we fell into the trap of speaking Spanish everyday and thinking that it just sounded cool (and a bit witty). Ideas???

secondspeak.com is currently unregistered, and makes sense to me as a name for a site for people learning a second language.

wow, that's a very good name! Especially if you thought of it in minutes. Oh, and I just checked it, it's taken now, hope OP's the one who got it and not someone else taking the advantage..

Re: What it feels like to fail

#48

Post by roel_v »

augustflanagan wrote: post #15
orblivion wrote: post #4

So... did you ever try a revenue model? Make some sort of premium account? I'm not speaking from any amount of experience, but you have 7000 users, you're about to throw in the towel on the business end of things anyway, I would think it's worth trying to come up with something.

We tried a couple of different ideas, neither of which gained traction. The most promising was offering a paid tool to Spanish and English professors, who could sign up their classes and then monitor how their students were using the site. We actually had about 50 universities sign up for a free trial, although only about 10 actually used the site actively last term. I think the biggest problem with this idea was tha…

A 20% conversion rate? Man I'd give up my left pinky finger for that. Maybe even the right one if every conversion (university) brought in enough users.

Re: What it feels like to fail

#49

Post by Vivtek »

orblivion wrote: post #13
Vivtek wrote: post #7

This is not what it feels like to fail. You've got an active, committed community of 7000 users - that is not even close to failure. When I built Despammed.com in 1999, I peaked at around that. Donations were plenty to keep the site running and even paid for the mortgage once or twice when things were tight. You've got a much more committed community there, and while you're not going to be the next YouTube (because l…

Since you mentioned donations, I figured I'd ask you this. I've got a site I'm working on that I want to commit to full time, potentially without any other source of income. When you say it was "enough to keep the site running", do you mean enough to maintain servers, or enough to maintain your refridgerator and roof as well? Also, is it ok to have a donation based site if you eventually hope to profit significantly…

By "keep the site running" I mean it paid to keep the server hosted at a local ISP. (Good Lord, what a blast from the past; it was the last server I ever actually physically saw, a used SPARCstation running Solaris, and I carried it to the ISP myself.) Occasionally, I had enough in the kitty to pay some personal bills. That was just on PayPal donations from one link in the corner of the home page.

But I wasn't even close to being committed to Despammed full time (although it sometimes felt like it during my trial-by-fire sysadminning lessons when things went wrong) - so I don't think there's much to generalize from. You have the advantage of full attention - but I was the only free spam filter in the world for a short time, and a few people were pretty virulently thankful about it.

As to the morality of donations when you hope to profit later - absolutely. You're not forcing people to donate, and if they like your site well enough to give you money, they will not only cheer you on if you become profitable, they'll even feel personal pride that they helped you on your way. The Knew-Him-When effect. I think only a few people would feel you'd sold out. And you can ignore them; they'll be looking for a way to feel superior no matter what, so you might as well let them feel superior all the way to your bank. Everybody's happy.

Now if you actually sell yourself as a community effort, then appropriate it to yourself when it's time to make money, that will piss people off, and rightly so. It's really all your attitude, though, that sets the tone. If you're honest about your plans, that's all people want.

Re: What it feels like to fail

#50

Post by Vivtek »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #40
augustflanagan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm getting that a lot on here. I think it is a hard name for people who only speak English, or speak English and other languages that aren't latin based. (Our Spanish speaking members really like the name.)

So use multiple domain names.

This is your best bet. I really like "Lenguajero", but I lived in Puerto Rico for a couple of years.
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