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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?

#401

After 4 years of excellent growth my partner and I had enough income to support one person full-time. Both of us were programmers, the company was a side gig for us. When his dad was laid off from his job, we hired him to handle the day-to-day of the company, which was mostly turn-key at that point. He did a bad job, drove the company into the ground, and we couldn't fire him without major personal issues, so we let…

If it was mostly turn key, how’d he do such a bad job? I’m mostly at that point with my business and am aiming to “fool-proof” operations so looking for things I may be overlooking.

I guess you can apply fool-retardant, but can’t really fool-proof processes - that’s much the business value of an org once the basics are in place. “You had ONE job” is a meme for a reason :-)

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

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are an entrepreneur, you will have to overcome that psychological barrier. Go to some local events and talk to everybody who is willing to listen to you. Some of them might be your potential customers.

I recently moved to SF Bay Area. I live in Fremont (cannot afford to live in SF). I don't know any good places to hang out with peer entrepreneurs. I guess I should try harder.

I have lived in Fremont for 12 years. I can tell you it is not the best place for entrepreneur networking. Most of the networking events are in south bay or in San Francisco. A meetup group I recently came across that focuses on entrepreneurs in Fremont area is Brown Bear Meetups (https://www.meetup.com/Brown-Bear-Meetups/). It is a relatively new group and all their events are free. Since you are in Fremont, it is worth checking out.

If you are serious about networking and do not mind driving to the south bay, you will get a lot more options. Personally I would recommend the following ones.

1. Startup Matchup and Networking Event at Founders Floor (https://www.meetup.com/Silicon-Valley-Startup-Founders/). It is a monthly event and is always on Tuesday evenings at Founders Floor. Try to be there at 6pm so that you can park on streets for free (or stay in your car until 6pm if you arrive early). You should expect to see about 50 to 100 people. They charge $15 and provide dinner. When the event starts, the host will ask everyone to do a self-intro (about 1 minute). This is the part I both like and dislike. I like it because it kind of gives you a chance to know everyone. I dislike it because it can easily take up to 2 hours so that there is not much time left for networking.

2. Monthly Mixer: Find Your Cofounder (https://us.techcode.com/events/2017/2/8/meet-your-co-founder). This is also a monthly event and is always during lunch time on Wednesdays. The good part is you don't need to worry about traffic and it is also free to attend. The bad part is that no food is provided. So be sure to eat something before you go. You should expect to see 30-40 people. The format is similar to the Founders Floor event. Usually it will be around 1:30pm after the intro session is over. You can stay there networking afterwards (that is why you need to eat something before you go!). Parking at TechCode is free.

3. Lifograph SV Networking : find cofounders, investors, developers, growth hackers, freelancers, customers (https://www.lifograph.com/events). This event was once combined with the Founders Floor event. But recently it is moved to Mindrome in Santa Clara. It is very similar to the Founders Floor event and you need to pay to attend. The host, Dea Wilson, is a very charming lady and always makes the event fun to attend. Parking is free.

4. Entrepreneur Mixer and Happy Hour at Sports Page bar near Google (https://www.meetup.com/sventrepreneurs/events/249922641/). This event is also monthly and happens on Tuesdays (5-8am). It could be challenging if you live in Fremont as you need to get there during the rush hour. You don't need to pay to attend the event. But you may feel obliged to buy some drinks in the bar. There will be no host and you are on your own once you step into the backyard of the bar. You just walk around and find people to talk to. Because the bar is open to the public while the event is on, you need to be sure that the person you are approaching is there to network (many Google engineers come out for drink during that hour and may not want to be disturbed by you). The parking lot in front of the bar is rather small. You may want to arrive early.

5. Silicon Valley TGIF Business and Social Networking (https://www.meetup.com/Silicon-Valley-Startup-Idea-to-IPO/ev...). This event is also monthly and happens on Fridays (8pm - 11pm). This event is one of my favorites partly because Bay Area traffic usually clears out after 7:30pm (important for those who live in Fremont). The event is free to attend and there is no fixed agenda or format. You just get into the lobby of Hyatt Regency Santa Clara and look for people with name tags on their chests. Talk to whoever you want to talk to. And there is no hard stop. You can hang out there as long as you like although most people would have left by 11pm. You can park your car for free in the parking lot right in front of the hotel.

6. Founder Hiking Monthly @ Stanford Dish (https://www.meetup.com/sventrepreneurs/events/248758563/). This event used to be at Wunderlich Park. This year they moved it to Stanford Dish. If you are an outdoor person, this event is a good fit for you. Due to the nature of hiking, most likely you will stay with the same person(s) throughout the morning. Although that leads to some in-depth discussion, it does limit the number of people you can interact with.

Other than those mentioned above, there are also a few other networking groups in south bay. I just did a quick search on meetup.com and here is the list (disclaimer: I don't know much about events of those groups; the list is just for your reference).

https://www.meetup.com/106miles/

https://www.meetup.com/Bay-Area-Entrepreneurial-Network/

https://www.meetup.com/Network-After-Work-San-Jose-Business-... https://www.meetup.com/Startup-Saturday-SV/events/253766764/

...

So far I only covered the south bay and did not mention a word about San Francisco yet. There are many good networking events in SF and you can easily find them by searching meetup.com. I used to go to SF a lot. But I quit going after a robbery accident on BART as I came back from an event in SF (luckily I was not targeted). Most SF networking events happen at night. It could present challenges if you live in Fremont.

Hope this helps. Good luck!

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

#403
Discovering patterns from chaotic datasets, albeit via Graph Theory techniques (instead of ML) for populating a knowledge graph. e.g., find commonalities among documents, such as a single occurrence of a common phrase in each that connects otherwise obscure papers.

This technique is well suited for datasets with insufficient features for machine learning...

Initial tech focus was on finding commonalities within a set of documents, such as by crawling all links on first 10 pages of Google search via their CSE API. Next search optionally increases the pool.

Initial business focus was for marketers, who not only know their pain but are willing to pay to make that pain go away.

Nothing unique about the market... but with Lean Interviews and with 100% hit rate for interest among the 40 highly qualified leads, it seemed like a simple matter of assembling various bits that we had each previously built.

Lessons learned:

Even if a long-time friend commits to joining, has the financial means to contribute several months, owes you the personal favour to do so, etc., etc.-- Don't bank on that.

Like a perfect storm, I had multiple friends who previously committed to assisting, then each suddenly experienced extenuating circumstances preventing them from joining. One would have been our NLP lead-- ouch!

More mundane lessons learned captured in articles:

https://play.org/articles/new-entrepreneur-checklist

https://play.org/articles/introduction-to-natural-language-p... (i.e., unlearning misconceptions about "synonyms" to fully deployed with spaCy.io)

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

#404
post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the contractor did indeed come through and mine for about three years. Contractor opted not to renew his contract. At this point I have to disclose my home country, it is Zimbabwe. We have had trouble convincing anyone to invest in the country. Dictatorship. Money that we made was shared according to the shareholding structure. I made peanuts. Nothing happening now, I guess we tired from fighting.

tsano, Zim ma1 people just screw each other! i'm from Zim too

Totally agreed. It is hard to explain to someone not from Zim just how things work in Zim. I tend to feel we are unique, not in the best possible way.

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

#405
post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds interesting to me (the releasing as open source bit, in particular). What's the backend tech stack?

A combination of PostgreSQL + PostGIS + pgRouting, Java + GraphHopper and my personal favorite: PostgREST!

Hey haolez, glad to hear you like PostgREST :)(I'm the current maintainer).

If you manage to open source your project please stop by our docs repo, would be great to have a real world PostGIS project in our ecosystem list.

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

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this theory that ppl throw out crazy ides like the earth being flat or that there are giant apes living in the pacific northwest in order to find irrational consumers. If anything sticks, you've got one! Makes sense, right? If someone, say, actually believes the earth is flat, despite having access to the Internet, etc they must an imbecile. These are exactly the types of ppl that can easily be separated from…

Then you can sell supplements that turn people red, it's a win win

Supplements that turn people blue are good too:https://www.wired.com/story/does-colloidal-silver-work/

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

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently moved to SF Bay Area. I live in Fremont (cannot afford to live in SF). I don't know any good places to hang out with peer entrepreneurs. I guess I should try harder.

I have lived in Fremont for 12 years. I can tell you it is not the best place for entrepreneur networking. Most of the networking events are in south bay or in San Francisco. A meetup group I recently came across that focuses on entrepreneurs in Fremont area is Brown Bear Meetups ( https://www.meetup.com/Brown-Bear-Meetups/ ). It is a relatively new group and all their events are free. Since you are in Fremont, it is…

Wow! This is awesome. Thank you so much!

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

#408
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a consultant I state that I will charge a 10% late fee for every week a payment is late. I’ve never had a late payment. I’d say offering a discount does the exact opposite.

How big is your average client and how heavily utilized are you? Your experience is very different from mine, but I may be working with larger companies (or you might be working with an idiosyncratic subset --- I don't think I am, though).

I work with companies 1-50mil in revenue typically. I don’t know what the law is when it comes to late fees, the language is mostly there as deterrent. That being said I am VERY picky about who I work with so I’ve never had a late payment or nonpayment, I suspect that’s more due to the screening process than the language in contract. If I ever had to actually charge a 10, 20 or 30% late fee, I would not pursue it and choke it up to a business loss and forget about it, move on. Cost of doing business.

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

#409

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…

Great product idea. Sounds like something I would use. Have you heard of the lean startup?

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

#410
We tried to set up a small startup of 3 people with the goal of offering a service for social bot detection, reporting and (eventually) removal. The assumption was that they are an annoyance and might be a danger to the public opinion and to brand reputation. We started on Twitter for our MVP. We failed to generate interest in it and it turned out that social bots are actually mostly marketing tools by ad agencies to promote their customer's product. Their goal is to make a topic trending, so that real people start noticing it. There is a strong business case for social bots. We should have created some Social bot toolkits, that would have probably worked much better...
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