An overnight success, 15 years in the making. The lesson here is that you only really need to be successful once, so keep trying.
My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups
21–30 of 82 posts
Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups
#22Kangadoo: 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?
Yeah, I do think the idea is good, but I didn't want to do the sales work my parter was doing and I'm not nearly as passionate about it as DDG.
Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ?
Not a Bad Thing, per se. I will tell you this: I recently launched a company with my cofounder who has had prior success. She had to do both the technical and business aspects. The startup we are building ATM wouldn't be a success if it hadn't been for her business experience - but I will also echo my side: she didn't do any of the programming; it is clear my skill and knowledge are deeper. So, in short, this startup really wouldn't be much without either. However, it's easier to be technical and acquire the business knowledge than the other way around, IMHO.
So, the better question is: what kind of startup are you building? If it's a technology startup, you will either need to commit to learning your technology space or finding a technical co-founder. Committing to learning the technology will teach you a lot about your interests, you will either love it or not - if you don't love it, you won't succeed technically (you might business wise, there are plenty of companies with shitty technology that make money).
Just some thoughts from a non-business oriented intellectual and programmer.
Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups
#24Are there links for the two episodes of "Twenty Questions"?
Nope--not online any more.
Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups
#25Why 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?
Here's my (completely unsubstantiated) theory. It happend literally the day after crossing $500 & 50K views in adsense. I'm guessing one of those was a trigger for manual review by some contractor, perhaps overseas. They looked at my sites for 3 sec, found them to be cookie-cutter and decided to blacklist the account. I get the impression they shoot first, ask questions later. I didn't feel like dealing with it all or starting over so I just moved on to other things.
Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups
#26Wow, 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...
Absolutely. That is one of my biggest lessons learned.
Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups
#27Looks 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.
Real job for one year. Then consulting. Then exit. Also, my wife has a job.
Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups
#28would 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
Really varied across the board, but nothing with anything close to 100K users. For the ones that didn't launch, obviously none :). I can't remember exact numbers for the old stuff, but pretty much everything got a decent amount of SEO traffic that I could play with (run tests on). Decent amount is several hundred to a few thousand uniques a day. More recent stuff more on the order of 100s of users.
Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups
#29Very very inspiring post.
I've built and released only two web sites and just a couple of C++/C projects in storage area (of course nothing successful), so I have way to go...
It be would interesting to know what did you learn of each these projects? Which project do you consider the most important from learning perspective?
Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups
#30I'd like to see how much was made or lost on each of these, enough to do angel investing after all of that. I know the $500/day was mentioned, but just curious. Was the bulk of the money made that is now invested from these startups, or some other income?