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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?

#351

Post by everybodyknows »

josh_frome wrote: post #339
everybodyknows wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People inside our tight social circles are held accountable by social pressure. This is why, for instance, Mormons seldom defraud other Mormons -- it would make Sunday mornings unpleasant for a long time to come. That your uncle would choose very deliberately to alienate his entire family is the astonishing thing. Would be curious to know what his social life is like, now ...

Actually, "According to the FBI, affinity fraud crimes are especially prevalent in Utah." https://fox13now.com/2017/12/20/fbi-warns-lds-church-members...

Interesting, but the article doesn't give us much sense of how close the victim and perp were in the church hierarchy, My reading is that they probably did not have the same Mormon bishop, who would have felt some pressure to take action.

So, yes, the farther away in the social network, the weaker the social pressure. If the link is mere nominal membership in the same faith, that may be worse than no link at all. Most of Madoff's victims were Jews -- because they were inclined to give him the benefit of any doubts.

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

#352

Post by aarongray »

robbick wrote: post #318
aarongray wrote: post #317

I built an app for kids that created a family currency where kids would pick the chores they wanted to do each day, earn points based upon the difficulty of the chores, and then those points could be redeemed for real-life rewards that they also chose - hosting friends for a sleep-over, a fishing trip with Dad, learn a new card game with Mom, screen time, etc. The problem came with the marketing. When I did my due di…

Does this product still exist?

Yeah, it still exists, I just paused development on it.

https://www.chorosaur.com/.

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

#353

Post by aarongray »

Embylodium wrote: post #321
aarongray wrote: post #317

I built an app for kids that created a family currency where kids would pick the chores they wanted to do each day, earn points based upon the difficulty of the chores, and then those points could be redeemed for real-life rewards that they also chose - hosting friends for a sleep-over, a fishing trip with Dad, learn a new card game with Mom, screen time, etc. The problem came with the marketing. When I did my due di…

That sounds like a fairly decent app! I would probably try it out.

Cool. I'm not working on it actively, but if you try it out and have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them!

https://www.chorosaur.com/.

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

#354

Post by aarongray »

tim333 wrote: post #340
aarongray wrote: post #317

I built an app for kids that created a family currency where kids would pick the chores they wanted to do each day, earn points based upon the difficulty of the chores, and then those points could be redeemed for real-life rewards that they also chose - hosting friends for a sleep-over, a fishing trip with Dad, learn a new card game with Mom, screen time, etc. The problem came with the marketing. When I did my due di…

Sounds interesting enough that you might get users by blogging about it / pr etc rather than paid advertising?

Yeah, maybe so, I just haven't had the time to invest in that. My wife took a high stress / high pay job to support us temporarily while I built the app, and she was nearing burnout and it just was taking me too long to scale my customer base after the paid ads failure, so I had to put it down and go back to a 9-5 to protect our marriage. ;-)

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

#355

Post by everybodyknows »

xutopia wrote: post #346
everybodyknows wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People inside our tight social circles are held accountable by social pressure. This is why, for instance, Mormons seldom defraud other Mormons -- it would make Sunday mornings unpleasant for a long time to come. That your uncle would choose very deliberately to alienate his entire family is the astonishing thing. Would be curious to know what his social life is like, now ...

The opposite is what I noticed though. Family members will screw you over and then if you ask for repair they'll use the excuse that as family you should just all get along.

What I noticed early in life is that when a successful businesswoman in my family lent some cousins money, and they then offered fabulous stories instead of repayment, they were no longer seen at events she hosted ...

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

#356

Post by coupdejarnac »

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…

How can you only have 8% equity if you did all the software? Did you take a seed round and give up a bunch of equity or something?

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

#357

Post by gfarah »

maayank wrote: post #288
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?

In our case we approached construction companies. After a lot of one on one talks, we convince a couple with upcoming projects to sell the new houses they were planning on building with our devices pre-installed and use that fact as a selling point when pitching to prospective home owners. Prospective owners then, could decide to opt-out from having our product pre-installed and save that cost, but the majority wanted it and that’s how we got those 550.

From my experience hardware is hard all around and finding partners, even no traditional ones like we did on that occasion can help a lot.

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

#358

Post by cetico »

xutopia wrote: post #350

The app was essentially what Slack does today. It was built to compete with Campfire and Hipchat (the new kid on the block) and the mission of the product was to be the most extensible group chat application. Within a month we had paying customers. We didn't know how to grow the user base as neither my co-founder nor myself knew how to do marketing. After a few months of just adding features we tried finding investor…

Marketing is hard. What did you try at the time? What would you try these days, with the benefit of hindsight?

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

#359

Post by jimnotgym »

otterley wrote: post #301
theelous3 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A handshake agreement is enforceable.

Attorney here! (Not dispensing legal advice, though.) Not in the US in many cases. Take the Uniform Commercial Code, for example, which requires a written contract for the sale of goods over $500, or agreements creating a security interest. See https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/when-is-written-cont... for a decent overview.

IANAL

But I believe in the UK it is only transfers of land that require a written contract. However you might want to think about how you would prove a handshake to a court

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

#360

Post by maerF0x0 »

MisterOctober wrote: post #9
god_bless_texas wrote: post #4

I chased and successfully won a huge customer for my small and fledgling startup. I chased and successfully won a sole service contract for a key part of their business process. I allowed a credit situation with them to grow over the course of 3 months while I allowed them to have 60 day terms. And then, they went out of business and left me holding the bag with $150,000 in unpaid AR after I spent $90,000 generating…

^ this is real talk. Big companies love to be behind on AP for a variety of reasons, among them: - Their own 'highly matrixed' organizational structure makes it near impossible to find 'the correct person' to talk to about accounting issues, let alone get a straight answer out of them - so chasing these issues down becomes a huge drag on your time and energy and you may very well just give up after a while - Past-due…

>Past-due invoices are typically penalized with tiny interest percentages [in the That 2% is usually monthly, so the APR is more like CC debt, not bank loans.
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