Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hardbound Update

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 59 posts

Re: A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hardbound Update

#21

Post by blizkreeg »

To the founder: you're equating the failure of your business/idea with the failure to raise money. They're not the same. Perhaps try to delve deeper into this thinking. That thinking is toxic.

You do still have the option of keeping your "vision" afloat and your business going (also, please, call it a business, not a 'startup'). Get a job, use the $2500/mo to keep producing content with the resources you can afford and work at 4xing that $2500/mo that you're currently making. You'll eventually be back in business, if you are flexible with how you think about this.

$1B or nothing is fool's errand.

Re: A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hardbound Update

#23

Post by hinkley »

ernsheong wrote: post #15

Reconsider. https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3972-reconsider

I know a guy who has run a small social gaming company for eight years and about four years in he moved to bigger, nicer offices.

I tell him I'm impressed with his success and he kinda downplays it. I've worked plenty of places that failed after four or five years. If you can keep the wheels on that long you must be doing an abnormal number of things right, and you should be objectively proud of that.

Re: A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hardbound Update

#24

Post by nbashaw »

taneq wrote: post #2

Why didn't the fundraise work? Maybe because your business model doesn't appear to be working at your current scale, you're not scaling fast enough to make it work any time soon, and you didn't seem to have any clear plan to change this. I don't mean to be harsh, it sounds like you gave it a shot and it went pretty right. But you got caught up in the unicorn-chaser Silicon Valley mindset: 1) Do something that only wo…

OP here. I'm curious, what makes you think that you know anything about what our plans were?

You're absolutely right that we weren't profitable at our current scale, and that our goal was to raise funding from VCs, and since we couldn't do it we had to make really tough changes. But this was a risk that we all accepted! Would I do it exactly the same way again next time? No, of course not. I learned a lot from this experience. But do I regret going for something big that I believe in, even if it wasn't a plan that was easily bootstrapped? Absolutely not.

You are smart, and you make a lot of good points. I could learn a lot from your way of thinking! But--you're also being a bit of a condescending know-it-all. This is a perfect example of why everybody makes fun of Hacker News comments.

You can see that, right?

Re: A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hardbound Update

#25

Post by nbashaw »

jaclaz wrote: post #20

Maybe it is just me, but I cannot refrain from noticing how the "layman examples" and "imagining" he makes seem a bit off in a funny way. >There’s an image in my head that helps me make sense of this: > >I’m driving towards the horizon in the desert. Wait a minute, a man can dream, but the image in your mind is driving in a Ferrari towards the horizon in the desert. And right after: >Instead, the car ran out of gas,…

The ferrari thing was definitely a little distracting, for sure, but literally it was the only good free photo I could find of a car driving towards the horizon in the desert.

Re: A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hardbound Update

#26

Post by nbashaw »

alphajulietmike wrote: post #4

Sounds like you should be the platform and let content creators in. Pay them commission on sales and you can QC anything coming in until you can afford to pay someone else.

It's definitely something we considered! We actually were really focused on that for a long time, but didn't get a lot of traction with it, because creating content in our format requires illustration and animation, which is not easy to do. A lot of people said they wanted to do it, but very few followed through. We did some partnerships with media companies but we didn't solve a critical problem for them (the original inspiration was the end reader experience) so there was not very much urgency or willingness to pay. So we pivoted to a "full stack" model where we create the content and build the platform. It was working decently well (it's not easy to get 1,200 people to pay for access to content), but just not well enough.

Re: A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hardbound Update

#27

Post by nbashaw »

scandox wrote: post #13

> I see a huge range of possibilities: > 1. Try to get acqui-hired and pretend I didn’t fail to fundraise, as is the tradition in our industry (“our incredible journey!”, etc). Hint: I’m not going to do this. In the words of Oliver Cromwell: 'put your trust in God; but mind to keep your powder dry'.

What does that quote mean in this context? I am trying to decode the meaning but am failing haha

Re: A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hardbound Update

#28

Post by nbashaw »

goodJobWalrus wrote: post #22
csense wrote: post #18

How do they make money? Do users pay for the service? It is not obvious from the website.

yes, it's I believe $5/month to unlock all of the stories, otherwise you get just the newest one.

It's $3.99 but yeah, we have a subscription model

Re: A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hardbound Update

#30

Post by nbashaw »

blizkreeg wrote: post #21

To the founder: you're equating the failure of your business/idea with the failure to raise money. They're not the same. Perhaps try to delve deeper into this thinking. That thinking is toxic. You do still have the option of keeping your "vision" afloat and your business going (also, please, call it a business, not a 'startup'). Get a job, use the $2500/mo to keep producing content with the resources you can afford a…

Am I?

"Now, everyone has moved on but me, and I’m trying to figure out how to move forward. For the time being, we’re not going to be able to release any new stories (it sucks, I know), but the app and website will stay up. I am not ready to quit just yet. There probably will be some big changes, but I am not finished."

Also:

"The second option [continuing with our same model & creating all the content myself] is tempting, because I have no significant new data that changes my mind about Hardbound’s potential. Investors are wrong all the time. But if I just jumped into that, I would need to spend all my time working on new stories and I wouldn’t have very much time to learn from what just happened. So I have reservations about immediately jumping into this route."

When I reference "failure" in the post, I am referring to my failure to keep our bank account full.

Post reply on HN