Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?

My two latest failed projects were a SaaS to help landlords manage their properties, including rent payment management, and an analytics tool that consolidated data from real estate property in a excel so people looking to buy or rent could analyse the options in a more effective way than going property by property in the listing site. Both projects failed because I could not attract users in a consistent way. I could not find any paying user during the 2 months that each project stayed online. Nevertheless, it was a good learning experience and it was one of the motivations to derive the project that I am working now (https://turbovar.com/), which is a full-stack Java Web APP template.

A little bit ago I stopped a twitter bot I created for game development news. It was a php script that aggregated gamedev news from ~10 different sources every hour. It took the raw headline, converted them in tweets, then filled up the remaining character count with a link and #hashtags. I had a safe list of hashtags that it was supposed to match against in the headline first, convert those if possible. Then fill in hashtags at the end, setup a drip feed and post a random tweet every ~30 min. I randomized the time and set a window between 7am-9pm.

Gained 1k following in about 2 or 3 months. But after investigating twitter traffic, I noticed most followers are bots and tweets I put up trying to sell some game assets gained lots of likes and retweets, but never a sale.

It was a fun project on its own and confirmed that I'm not missing out by avoiding twitter. The web scraping portion was actually the most fun to it.

I’m the said founder so Thanks for your kind words :)

one of my last projects was a website for real estate(including warehouses, garages, parking spaces, offices...) rental and sale that was made for global(!) market with main goal being to get rid of real estate agents and connecting buyers and sellers directly, for free. i would sell ad space as source of income. i had no problem paying for the infra out of my pocket from the start so that was not an issue. it had a UI with a big map with a filter with similar feeling to airbnb. one of the main features was the filter itself - it worked on scoring system that took the criteria and ranked all ads within selected area accordingly, so if all criteria matched it gave it 100% score so there was no sorting by price, area, distance or anything typical like that. it had many more features but that is not important.

anyhow, i closed it down because today, in order to succeed, your idea or execution does not matter. you need to put all your money into promotion. it is not like in the early 2000s when you had a chance to build something new(software, service, ...). today, everything has been done and all markets have its established players. so even if you do it better, it does not matter anymore. it is only about budget for PR. and i was not willing to spend a ton of money on ads so I shut it down.

another project I made around that time as well was an online website builder service. drag&drop essentially. but even after it has been finished and connected to braintree payments and functional invoicing i came to realize that the PR is again a massive issue and that it would take a lot of time to build new widgets and try to compete with the best in the market. so i closed it down.

my third project that i will mention here is one that i am working on close to 10 years now. this is a big one. i stopped and got back to it multiple times. it evolved in concept, architecture and all other areas. currently the project's goal is to provide a single place for online B2B and B2C. if i would be able to get it up and running it would seriously threaten big players like amazon, aliexpress, shopifiy and so on. the thing is that i came to realize that for this iteration(as i have mentioned, it evolved from something simpler throughout the years into something much, much, bigger) to work, I am just unable to do it myself. It is way too big of a project for a single person. In the past in its simplified version(it started as a shopping cart software back in the day) I was betting on the fact that I can overcome money with time, which I had plenty of(still do). But you see, 10 years later, I am still not done. I took various paths in architecture and it just kept on evolving and finding itself. I reacted to the current state of the markets and tech and so it go me to where I am right now - massive concept where time no longer suffices. So I am currently trying to figure out how to simplify the architecture so it could be made by a single person within a year. So far I am stuck. I would have gave up a long time ago but this is just something I don't see being beating with a better idea to do in my spare time. It also served as a learning tool that allowed me to get to be a pro at what I do and earn and live like I do. So I have lost no time by working on this at all. One could say that this is my Moby Dick :)

that's some innovative and technologically monumental work, you must be good at what you do.