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What was the project and why did it fail (best to your knowledge)? Or what's a side-project of yours that's actively losing money?
It was the opening of a flower shop. My business didn't make a profit.
On the business side, the supply chain seems like a nightmare. Any specific lessons learned?
It failed because quite simply, when we tried to get other sales managers to use it for free (hoping it'd be popular), we found they wouldn't make the time to spend 2 mins planning a 1:1, probably as they're managed on 'selling deals, right now' in many cases, which is a bit sad!
Learning: I should have read the Mom Test.
With hindsight, I wish I'd built it for engineers based on Pull Requests (PR #181 had a ton of back and forth / NLP shows it got heated). It would have been fun if nothing else!
Stripe closed my account before I was able to launch as it was "unable to accept payments for crowdfunding"..... Their marketing doesn't match their policies.
We launched a 1:1 tool for sales managers that used predictive analytics to suggest which deals needed to be discussed (ie Deal X looks like it's stuck). The reason being, when I was a sales manager, I found people would naturally talk about positive stuff rather than easily giving the whole picture. It failed because quite simply, when we tried to get other sales managers to use it for free (hoping it'd be popular),…
An email alert for horse owners/barn managers when the forecast will be colder than a configured threshold temperature. It's saved us a lot of mental energy this winter (having to check not just the forecast but also making sure to check the temp at 3 AM with windchill factored in, etc...). Got zero interest from various equestrian forums. shrug.
I taught myself Spring Boot through so that's a win!
If you start a side project with the goal to make money then you are making an error of definition. A side project should have the goal of teaching you something or being useful in some other way. If it doesn't then it has failed. If it makes money that's gravy but it should definitely not be the first factor in deciding whether or not it has failed.
A crowdfunding site for product feature requests. Stripe closed my account before I was able to launch as it was "unable to accept payments for crowdfunding"..... Their marketing doesn't match their policies.
You could add a tag to feature request issues that it'd read from, maybe as a github app or something. I run an OS repo and it'd be really cool to be able to get through them all faster with a bit of money to pay a freelancer, for example. I imagine the users-paying side would be very hard to find though.
I'd also love to be able to attach a bounty to PRs with this money, although quality control would make me worry it'd be hard.
I imagine Patreon is never an enormous sum for people because the money is goodwill - it isn't tied to receiving anything back. You could make it like this.
I'm surprised there wasn't some other way of doing this - clearly other crowd funding sites exists, what do they use?