For those who missed , Andy Brice interviewed some startup/projects founders who failed :
http://successfulsoftware.net/2010/05/27/learning-lessons-fr...
My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups
41–50 of 82 posts
Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups
#42Why 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 o…
In my case some clicks worth over $2 (if I remember correctly) triggered manual review. They sent me canned email about tos etc.
The funny part is that the domain in question was already expired when email arrived because I've decided to stop this venture.
Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups
#43Among my non-startup friends, there seems to be this pre-conception that people are working in some day-job and one day, have some crazy idea that nobody else has thought of and go and start a company and become successful.
Good to see several people writing recently (from experience) about how this couldn't be farther from the truth. While it may happen from time to time, it's clear that most founders of successful (technology) startups have built a long-term lifestyle around working really hard, for a really long time, on a bunch of their own ideas and projects. Especially true given what we know about how much of a role luck and timing plays in the success of startups.
Thanks for the post, Gabriel.
Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups
#44I wonder if the lesson from this is perhaps narrow but deep rather than wide but shallow?
Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
I wonder how many otherwise viable little businesses fall victim to this heavy handed approach. Is this one of the reasons DDG got started?
Well, it did push me onto other things, though I wasn't (at least consciously) looking to get back at Google.
Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups
#46Why 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 o…
I talked to someone from Google at I/O who should know and he claimed they don't play "Whack a mole" with websites. They will tweak their ranking algorithm to punish the behavior they see in a web site they don't want to be ranked.
Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
I talked to someone from Google at I/O who should know and he claimed they don't play "Whack a mole" with websites. They will tweak their ranking algorithm to punish the behavior they see in a web site they don't want to be ranked.
Lies, damned lies.
Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
I talked to someone from Google at I/O who should know and he claimed they don't play "Whack a mole" with websites. They will tweak their ranking algorithm to punish the behavior they see in a web site they don't want to be ranked.
Interesting, but in this case it wasn't that it was ranked lower, but that one day I had 25 domains indexed fine and the next day they were no where to be found, i.e. not in the index at all. And I had plenty of other domains (not in that adsense account) that were still ranked fine.
Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups
#49Kangadoo: 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.
This is another important lesson for entrepreneurs and hackers to learn. Sometimes, you have to cut loose even good ideas, in the service of the best of your ideas or the one you feel most passionately about.
You'll have dozens, or hundreds, of ideas during your entrepreneurial development...but, any one of them will probably require absolute focus and dedication to make it really work.
Re: My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
I talked to someone from Google at I/O who should know and he claimed they don't play "Whack a mole" with websites. They will tweak their ranking algorithm to punish the behavior they see in a web site they don't want to be ranked.
Matt Cutts often tells us this - but he talks specifically from a search web spam perspective, I suspect the Adsense team have different rules and probably can (and do) "play Whack a mole" when appropriate.