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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?

#281

Post by jpmoyn »

eps wrote: post #258
fybe wrote: post #221

I was part of a start-up that still exists but it seems to be stagnating. i left due to the founders having almost nothing in common except for making money. The site is like squarespace but for local shops and businesses. The founders met on an airplane and thought they can make a business. So you had the business CEO with no technical background living in X country and the ruthless CTO with his team in Y country. I…

I think the OP aimed his question at founders of failed startups. There are fewer of them than of us poor shmucks that got burned by a failed startup as a collateral damage. So their accounts of failures are far more interesting.

I have to say this story was still pretty interesting.

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

#282

Post by SkyPuncher »

phonebucket wrote: post #209
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…

"Lesson learned: Big-corp CEOs don’t make for good startup CEOs 99% of the time." While this may be true, I don't believe it is fair to reach this conclusion on the basis of a single experience.

Anecdotal, but I tend to agree with it.

Large companies are optimized for a different set of outcomes - usually including extreme concern about quality and public image. That doesn't fly in a startup.

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

#283

Post by JoeAltmaier »

Market penetration. We had an always-on collaboration tool for distributed groups. All anybody knows is conference tools, and even the customers that signed up for our product would have a session average time of 1 hour. The product was intended to be always-on, not started and stopped for meetings.

Anyway we figured it took 2 days of requiring the team to keep the product running, before folks 'got it' and began to use the features fluidly. After that they'd take off. But that's way, way too long a trial and almost nobody would stick it out. Our few successes came from enterprise customers that could control what was running on the team's devices.

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

#284

Post by karlkatzke »

ak39 wrote: post #194
karlkatzke wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They took development in house. It’s not like PHP (despite some obfuscators being available) can’t be edited by anyone who barely knows the language.

Did you have subscription plan or was it only pay for development?

That’s one of the places I messed up. The original agreement was that they’d fund development of the features they needed, but I retained rights to the software and they got a license as long as they were funding development, but they could license a copy in perpetuity for a flat fee. We never updated the amount of that flat fee as the feature set grew.

I had thought I needed to develop a multitenant feature set in order to sell to more people with a subscription, but I was probably incorrect on that (in hindsight).

The bigger issue was that I didn’t know how to plan for anything like that. I was essentially in reactive mode and got way behind.

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

#285

Post by punnerud »

mkagenius wrote: post #228
mmsimanga wrote: post #219

I come from a coal mining region. For over a 100 years there has only been one mine in the area, a big mine. There is plenty of coal in the surrounding areas. This is Africa. An uncle of mine had the idea that we start a mine. He invited about 20 of us, all related. We started putting aside money to register a company, pay a geologist to prospect for the coal and get mining permit to mine the coal. We all contributed…

> owing 5% I ownwed 0.00086% of the mine Didn't you sign after reading? I dont know how it works there but generally one has to get all signatures for approval.

In Europe/Norway the agreement have to be beneficial to all parties to be legal. In addition goes any doubt in favor of the one who did not write the agreement. Isn’t there any similar rules in your country?

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

#286

Post by [deleted] »

mmsimanga wrote: post #219

I come from a coal mining region. For over a 100 years there has only been one mine in the area, a big mine. There is plenty of coal in the surrounding areas. This is Africa. An uncle of mine had the idea that we start a mine. He invited about 20 of us, all related. We started putting aside money to register a company, pay a geologist to prospect for the coal and get mining permit to mine the coal. We all contributed…

[deleted]

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

#287

Post by maayank »

ethbro wrote: post #268
mmsimanga wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's my way of saying we were really mad! Mad enough to come to blows which nearly happened at our meetings or to sabotage the whole mining operation. Have a look at this story[1] about a community in diamond rich land in South Africa who are still bitterly divided to this day. [1] https://mg.co.za/article/2014-01-30-bitter-fight-for-diamond...

It turns out, there's a name for this (which I learned in a HN comment): resource curse. One theory being that, essentially, legal controls and enforcement are expanded with economic activity. But a sudden surge in resources (e.g. discovery or exploitation) exceeds the existing system's ability to control corruption, and it's very hard to steer a cash-rich system back to good governance after this happens. https://th…

The story of Argentina: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2014/02/17/a-century-of-d...

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

#288

Post by maayank »

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…

Getting to 550 consumers sounds impressive. How did you achieve that? Any resources that in retrospect helped you most?

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

#289

Post by wgx »

We built an app that let people pay for goods and services (in the real world) with their smartphone, we grew fast, raised, built a product our users loved. Then... contactless payment (and later Apple Pay) came along and killed us. Lots of other stuff happened along the way, but with the benefit of a few years' hindsight - this is basically what happened.

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

#290

Post by ajones93200 »

andreivasiliev wrote: post #280

My startup failed because I was too secretive. I though I had a great idea and always worried that somebody would copy it. I spent 4 years working on my idea only to find out that nobody was interested in what I was doing. Now my mentality completely changed. I will be flattered if someone even bothers to copy my idea. At least that means I am doing something right.

Same here. I failed for the same reason. I wish I had talked to others about what I was doing earlier. These days when I go to networking events and hear people say "I am in stealth mode", the only thing goes to my mind is "Good Luck, Man".
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