Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn? • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by nicodjimenez » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 4:54 AM UTC

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #102

iandanforth wrote: post #84

I started a consumer robotics company with no more than a software and hobbyist robotics background. The grand plan was to sell furry robot pets and we got as far as the prototype stage and a demo at Maker Faire. After that we hit a huge wall. There is essentially no path from hobbyist, off the shelf components to a real product. After that company died I joined a real robotics startup with some seriously talented fo…

Just a note on this: Prototypes can be enough to get a company going. Engineers/Makers think that the product is the most important part of starting a company. It's not. Selling your vision to investors and customers is. Once you have a business plan that's funded, you can refine your product by hiring consultants that will help you with production. Once you have a product then you can get customers to refine the pro…

I totally agree with this, but you're missing selling the vision to employees in addition to investors and customers. Phase 1: sell the promise. Phase 2: fulfill the promise.

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

#122

Post by t0mbstone » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 4:58 AM UTC

woogiewonka wrote: post #119

t0mbstone wrote: post #90

Our startup failed because my business partner wanted to just be the "idea guy" who designed the screens, while having me code it and do all the heavy work. Initially, this was going to be a 50/50 split, but after working on it almost full time for about 6 months, I ran out of money. He had a pretty big savings account and came from a well-off family, so he agreed to front me basically just enough to cover my rent wh…

Couldn't you just use the code to do the rest yourself and launch it on your own - write him out of the picture if nothing was solidified legally?

Unfortunately, he had solidified parts of it legally, but not the parts that benefited me.

And honestly, even if that wasn’t the case and I could somehow argue that he didn’t own any of the intellectual property for any of the stuff he helped design (which I seriously doubt I could do), we are talking about code that is ten years old by now.

I could always re-design the basic idea and re-code it from scratch, but that is both time consuming and risky (since it would be difficult to completely separate all of the ideas that he might have owned from the ones I had).

I’m currently making good money as a full time salaried employee at a company that I enjoy working at. I’m afraid that the cut-throat, high stakes appeal of a startup is somewhat lost on me at this point.

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

#123

Post by catcontent » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 4:59 AM UTC

I partnered with a much larger company to profit from an existing sales structure and their technical infrastucture. To me it seems like -- due to their size -- they wanted to cut a larger piece of the cake for themselves, so negotiations about the details didn't really come to an end. They started to create and sell the product on their own with lots of stolen concept details. I am glad they failed. My lesson is to bootstrap and implement fast. Don't worry if sales are not exploding. However, check if sales are pointing upwards and finance is under control.

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

#124

Post by WheelsAtLarge » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 5:01 AM UTC

keithnz wrote: post #117

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a note on this: Prototypes can be enough to get a company going. Engineers/Makers think that the product is the most important part of starting a company. It's not. Selling your vision to investors and customers is. Once you have a business plan that's funded, you can refine your product by hiring consultants that will help you with production. Once you have a product then you can get customers to refine the pro…

what makes you think the US has the safest drinking water in the world? Can't see it in any of the top 10 (or 20) via google....

The population of the U.S. is over 300 mil. How many people die or get sick every year because of our drinking water? It's got to be very small if any, otherwise, we would hear about it constantly until it was fixed.

But let's say it is the worst in the world. Bottled water is not the best way to fix the problem. A water filter would be much better in terms of cost per gallon and quality.

Just by you asking the question, highlights how well sales and marketing have worked when it comes to bottled water.

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

#125

Post by WheelsAtLarge » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 5:02 AM UTC

nicodjimenez wrote: post #121

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a note on this: Prototypes can be enough to get a company going. Engineers/Makers think that the product is the most important part of starting a company. It's not. Selling your vision to investors and customers is. Once you have a business plan that's funded, you can refine your product by hiring consultants that will help you with production. Once you have a product then you can get customers to refine the pro…

I totally agree with this, but you're missing selling the vision to employees in addition to investors and customers. Phase 1: sell the promise. Phase 2: fulfill the promise.

Very true...

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

#126

Post by adventured » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 5:04 AM UTC

I've learned a few recurring lessons from several start-ups failures. My favorites -

Aggressively pursue the simplest version of your idea/product/service. As a very general rule, once you begin building, try to remove more features than you add from the draft concept, until you get to launch. Get rid of ballast, be ruthless with yourself about whether you really need a given feature or aspect of the product. If the dropped features make sense, you can add them back in later, assuming customers actually want them.

Narrowly focus on knocking over that first bowling pin. Do not target too large or wide of a market to begin with. I made variations of this mistake with my first two start-ups. Focus narrow, narrow/small enough to capture a market or substantial market share, then try to knock down more pins. Chris Dixon has an eloquent explanation of this concept (which I borrowed the bowling pin analogy from). [1] Peter Thiel also has various good elaborations of the concept in his book and talks he has given.

Have a customer - ideally multiple - before you build the product. It's the easiest and fastest way to validate that there is some kind of market there before investing your time. Even better if you can get them to put money on the line ahead of launch. It's repeated over and over again, and it's worthy of the reptition, make sure you're really solving a problem that people have.

[1] http://cdixon.org/2010/08/21/the-bowling-pin-strategy/

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

#127

Post by tonyoconnell » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 5:09 AM UTC

10 years ago I built an almost amazing business that schools, universities, teachers and students could use to build elearning and web apps. Think Square Space + Moodle + Udemy.

Heres a demo if you're interested https://vimeo.com/2221065 The demo doesn't show much of the learning management features but they were also complete.

But the app had memory leaks and I didn't have the cash to pay expensive engineers to fix them. For months and months I tried to fix the problems myself until finally I was given the choice of giving up my business or my wife.

I don't regret choosing my family because we had another daughter before the marriage ended and she wouldn't be alive if I chose to continue with my business instead.

I learned ...

1. I should never have given up. If you don't give up you can't fail. 2. I shouldn't have believed my mentor who said there wasn't a market for my product. A company entered the same market and now they are worth over $1bn. Listen to other people but have faith in yourself. 3. Be careful to choose the right technology. I chose Plone/Zope/Python the same stack that was used by CIA. I thought I was very smart about that but I didn't realise that specialists in this tech would be so difficult and expensive to hire. 4. Don't blame anybody. In the end it was my choice to give up. 5. Everything is as it is meant to be.

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

#128

Post by bsenftner » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 5:18 AM UTC

Too early with a ML product back in '08, people were not ready to believe such a thing was possible: basically a working VFX pipeline for what are now called "deep fakes", but I targeted inserting consumers into brand advertising TV commercials and music videos. First people simply could not grasp the concept, then they did not believe it was possible, and then because I wrote it alone and had no team VCs and partners and other potential collaborators felt working with "my company" was too risky. People want to see a team, not just one guy and an automated media pipeline. You need a team and an organization to be taken seriously, no matter how great one's technology happens to be. I did have two freelancers helping with the web site, but the entire media digital double creation and VFX pipeline was written by just me, and that is perceived as too risky. Here we are 10 years later, and still no one has done automated consumer inserting into still and video advertising. I still have my working pipeline...

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

#129

Post by karlkatzke » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 5:27 AM UTC

Nydhal wrote: post #115

karlkatzke wrote: post #105

The basic gist is that I was arrogant and negligent. I started a company to leverage an order taking and customer management system I’d built for a friend’s b2b outside sales company. Before, they were managing everything with excel spreadsheets on a shared drive and it was a mess. After, everything was in a php application that could set up a recurring credit card transaction within a few clicks. It used AJAX (in 20…

> I could have been SalesForce if I hadn't been arrogant. Did you overcome that and learn from the mistakes? No offence, but to be honest you saying "I could have been SalesForce" makes it seem like you're still working on the arrogance part.

My point in saying that was not to express arrogance, but was to point out that ideas are worth nothing and execution is everything. I executed poorly. If I had executed well and a bunch of other variables had aligned, I might have grown that company successfully.

I’m still a bit arrogant and aggressive in my approach to solving problems, but it’s tempered somewhat by experience.

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

#130

Post by artwr » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 5:29 AM UTC

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #124

keithnz wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what makes you think the US has the safest drinking water in the world? Can't see it in any of the top 10 (or 20) via google....

The population of the U.S. is over 300 mil. How many people die or get sick every year because of our drinking water? It's got to be very small if any, otherwise, we would hear about it constantly until it was fixed. But let's say it is the worst in the world. Bottled water is not the best way to fix the problem. A water filter would be much better in terms of cost per gallon and quality. Just by you asking the quest…

I am not sure how the people at Hinckley, or more recently at Flint would take that assertion. Just because tracking causality of morbidity to drinking water can be a difficult task does not mean it has no contribution to health issues.