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I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900

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Re: I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900

#21

Post by anjc »

grenoire wrote: post #3

Although a bit harsh in writing, JustStartNoob's comment [0] is honestly a good analysis. The guy had an idea and tried to force it through as hastily as possible with the sole goal of 'making it.' Unsurprisingly, it didn't work out. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/comments/dkyq92/how_i_was...

> "I spent stupid money throwing shit at a non-stick wall, realized the wall was non-stick, so started spending money throwing shit at a different non-stick wall instead".

This is the worst possible interpretation of OP's venture, and must be written by a 12 year old if $1900 is "stupid money"

Edit: I'm not saying that $1900 is not a significant amount of money to many people in the world. But it is NOT a lot of money in the context of developing/marketing a tech product in the first world.

Re: I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900

#22

Post by throwaway93760 »

I respect anyone who is able to accept the sunk cost and walk away after doing the correct analysis.

My startup is still preseed and I have a few angel investors. When I pitched I had done some research but didn't truly understand the market. Basically the industry I'm is massively fragmented, and each segment has very different access requirements.

There's still money to be made, but not the sort of money that attracts VC and no express rainbow to a pot of gold. I would have done things very differently had I known what I know now, but a revenue generating business that could break even in a couple years is a pretty hard sunk cost to swallow.

Re: I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900

#24

Post by NicoJuicy »

sheinsheish wrote: post #15

Don’t give up after the first try. I understand it costed you money and time. Money is what you need to survive. Do you have second thoughts? Dilemma? Like going back to it and trying again, this time slow and during your free time (=when not working) ??

I agree, he said 10 weeks and 3 tries.

That's hardly 1 normal attempt.

Re: I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900

#25

Post by jobigoud »

eastendguy wrote: post #6

He had an idea and tested it. 3 month and $1900 sounds about right. I don't think you can test product ideas with significantly less time and money investment.

The trick is to make a list of all the ways it could fail and test these first. Have two personas, one that assumes it will fail and one that is enthusiast. Set the tasks priorities so the enthusiast one starts coding tasks that disproves the failure hypotheses of the skeptical one. If you can't get past one, don't switch to the "easier" stuff. Put the project in "hibernation" mode and switch to another one until you get another insight, usually from reading a totally unrelated thing, that will unblock you.

Re: I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900

#27

Post by genidoi »

mattigames wrote: post #14
danilocesar wrote: post #7

This reminds me that fateful question that we, software engineers, use to hear from our moms/dads/family: "Why don't you start a facebook?"

This amuses me to no end, I have never got that question, the closest thing was "you do websites right? do you know how to hack someone's Facebook?"

Or even "can you fix my printer?"

Re: I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900

#30

Post by raverbashing »

Well, 10 weeks is nothing. On top of that, you're trying to start with niche/limited communities. A student community focused on studying?

People want to communicate about what's fun, not about what's a hassle.

I don't remember how Reddit started but I remember one of the first r/s that got big was Aww.

There was a very nice example a couple of weeks ago on how before the network effects kick in you need to give people a reason to go to your site and use your service. Nothing like that happened here.

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