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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?

#171

Post by scabarott »

stretchwithme wrote: post #113

Well, it didn't completely fail yet. It's still going 13 years after I left, actually. But part of the struggles were brought on by my mistake with a military customer that probably cost us the contract. This was back at the beginning of the Iraq war. Our main contact told me the US should attack France, as they weren't supporting the invasion. I made the mistake of saying I was glad he was executing policy, not maki…

This sounds like a story straight out of the Onion, or Dr. Strangelove. That must've been one kooky customer.

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

#172

Post by skunkworker »

ckastner wrote: post #153
haolez wrote: post #136

We wanted to create a routing app for bikes, which would take in consideration cliffs, dangerous streets and the likes. With our internal team, we’ve managed to create a killer backend that would do all the hard routing stuff without issues. It was better than Google Maps in most cases! Now, we just needed the app. We used all our money to pay a third party contractor to make the app, and they failed miserably. We ne…

> We used all our money to pay a third party contractor to make the app, and they failed miserably Where did you hire/find the third party contractor? Friends of mine, in two separate startups, got burnt badly by those outfits that offer the "native apps for iOS and Android" package for $10K or so. I talked to some of those "developers" once, when I helped my friend troubleshoot an issue. It was horrible . They were…

And then they want you to sign a document or email saying that they did all they would say and just rip people off when they think, "oh an iOS app with backend for $5000".

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

#173

Post by NNScientist »

gfarah wrote: post #163

On my first startup right after university, we were doing an IoT device (hardware + software), our MVP was good enough to make a couple of sales amounting to 550 consumers. At that point the board decided the best way to grow was to bring in “adult supervision” aka a seasoned CEO to run the company. Even though I did all the software, I had only around an 8% stake in the company at the time. The person in question de…

> Big-corp CEOs don’t make for good startup CEOs 99% of the time.

Doesn't sound like she would make a good big-corp CEO either. Moving up a big corp is a very political battle and not a good indicator of actual competence.

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

#174

Post by lostsock »

the_clarence wrote: post #158
tomasien wrote: post #18

I've had two startups "fail" for unusually clear reasons: Startup #1: too hard to believe it could be big. Widely loved consumer website we tried to fund with angel/VC money, and it was too implausible it could ever be a $1b+ company. We needed a non-VC strategy to fund that business but didn't realize that - ran out of gas. Startup #2: found PMF, business-model fit, high-growth, and had an amazing team. Blown up by…

Pmf?

Product Market Fit

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

#175

Post by skunkworker »

tonyoconnell wrote: post #127

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…

Interesting, at the time you were dissuaded from going into that market could the actual TAM support your business idea or would it have been more viable later?

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

#176

Post by ttty »

tonyoconnell wrote: post #127

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…

So what happened to the app, you sold it to somebody or just let it die?

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

#177

Post by mikel11 »

Lack of clear leadership.

Two founders - friends. Thought we could work every decision out democratically. Didn't turn out that way - used to fight about almost everything until each of us tried to force our way. And we had enough - that kind of stuff will drain the energy out of you.

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

#178

Post by zeuslawyer »

haolez wrote: post #136

We wanted to create a routing app for bikes, which would take in consideration cliffs, dangerous streets and the likes. With our internal team, we’ve managed to create a killer backend that would do all the hard routing stuff without issues. It was better than Google Maps in most cases! Now, we just needed the app. We used all our money to pay a third party contractor to make the app, and they failed miserably. We ne…

I would love to see the backend open sourced as well, as I think this is something that could be quite unique to each country. I'm in Melbourne, Australia and biking safety is a big deal here - i ride everywhere. The uniqueness of each area would lend itself well to localisation via open source. I'm at zubin.pratap at gmail - do let me know!

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

#179

Post by domparise »

the_clarence wrote: post #158
tomasien wrote: post #18

I've had two startups "fail" for unusually clear reasons: Startup #1: too hard to believe it could be big. Widely loved consumer website we tried to fund with angel/VC money, and it was too implausible it could ever be a $1b+ company. We needed a non-VC strategy to fund that business but didn't realize that - ran out of gas. Startup #2: found PMF, business-model fit, high-growth, and had an amazing team. Blown up by…

Pmf?

Product market fit

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

#180

Post by liamcardenas »

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.

To be fair, he said he “could” have been SalesForce, not that he “would”, necessarily, have been SalesForce.
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