My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups • Hacker News Board

Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups

#11

Post by epi0Bauqu » Mon, Oct 18, 2010, 4:11 PM UTC

thetrumanshow wrote: post #5

It would be very interesting to add information about when you were working with advisors/mentors and when you were purely working on your own. I haven't had nearly as many at-bats as you have, but enough to know that I personally can't get very far on my own without an experienced voice guiding me past a lot of dumb ideas.

At learnection I had a board of my uncle and another VC guy, who were helpful but I didn't use them at all to the degree I should have. Other than that, no real advisors/mentors.

For Zoofoo, Email client, Yahoo store thing, Namesdatabase & Kangadoo I worked with the same partner. The "Wall" (never launched) was with a different partner. And nth Club was with another partner. The rest is/was solo.

Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups

#12

Post by epi0Bauqu » Mon, Oct 18, 2010, 4:12 PM UTC

edw519 wrote: post #7

As a builder of digital things, the 3 things I have the most trouble communicating to non-builders are: - how hard it is - how much time it takes - how long it takes to become successful So instead of trying to explain it, I may just send them to this blog post, which shows all 3. Thank you, Gabriel! (Now if only you would remove that Mojo Badge business from blocking your great content.)

Thx--I may do that (remove it). I was alpha testing it for a friend.

Update: removed.

Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups

#13

Post by subbu » Mon, Oct 18, 2010, 4:13 PM UTC

Looks like you were startupping since 2000. Except NamesDatabase there haven't been any other exits. So how did you feed yourself until then? I am guessing your later projects were taken care by that exit.

Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups

#14

Post by megamark16 » Mon, Oct 18, 2010, 4:15 PM UTC

Wow, great list! My biggest take away was all of the times he says "perhaps I should have stuck with it". You never know where a project can go unless you stick with it.

Back to hacking at my project...

Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups

#15

Post by epi0Bauqu » Mon, Oct 18, 2010, 4:17 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #10

Would be even more interesting to know the details of why Gabriel failed to stick with some of the ideas. A Posterous-type service in 2001 sounds like it could have been a bigger success than the Names Database. Nth clubs sounds like it could work with a bit of incentive for club pros to recommend it...

I wish I had a good reason for ditching the public inbox. I don't. The proximate cause IIRC was I moved my server and had a disk failure. But that really isn't an excuse because I'm sure I had backups.

It actually got traffic too. I don't know what to say other than that it didn't feel like a startup at the time.

nth Club isn't a bad idea -- it just requires sales work that I don't want to do. I thought my partner (who is into golf) would be doing it, but that just has turned out not to be the case.

Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups

#16

Post by netaddict » Mon, Oct 18, 2010, 4:35 PM UTC

Why did Google blacklist all of your Tldscan sites? Was it just because your sites' content was updated automatically? Or was it because you did something wrong for SEO?

Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups

#17

Post by vaksel » Mon, Oct 18, 2010, 5:00 PM UTC

would be interesting to see what sort of traction you got with each service. i.e. did you quit when they only had 100 users, or was it more like 100,000

Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups

#18

Post by keeptrying » Mon, Oct 18, 2010, 5:03 PM UTC

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #8

keeptrying wrote: post #4

I wonder how many were done while holding down a regular job? From his linked in profile, it looks like he's being doing startups for a while. Pretty cool.

Been doing startups right out of college. Only had a "regular job" for one year, Aug 2001-Aug 2002. From 2001-2005 I also did consulting to pay the bills, but would try hard to keep it to 4hr a day max. From 2005-2006 I was also in a graduate program, which I treated as secondary to my startup (but still did it)--sort of equivalent to the consulting.

Awesome. I've been trying to figure out exactly how I'm going to feel when trying to work on startup. Your post seems more realistic and kind of shows me exactly what I should be expecting.

Thanks for this.

One quick question: I'm not a uber geek. Ie I like the business side of the equation too. Is this a good thing or a bad thing ?

Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups

#19

Post by run4yourlives » Mon, Oct 18, 2010, 5:08 PM UTC

Kangadoo:

Why did this fail, really? This should be a runaway success. There are millions of people out there that can barely figure out their cameras, let alone understand the concept behind facebook or picasa or flickr or whatever could be considered "competition".

Even with a founder departure, this is a valid idea... why didn't you continue to peruse it?

Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups

#20

Post by djb_hackernews » Mon, Oct 18, 2010, 5:14 PM UTC

This makes me feel better. I've built and released 4 webapps with another in dev and they all seem to be perfect failures, which I've been thinking is perhaps a sign...