30kloc and $0 revenue. Lessons from my failed startup (& code release)

1. For the money to get someone to review your paper, you can get someone to write it for you. http://www.bestwritingservice.com/ has essays for ten dollars a page. If you're willing to pay someone 20 bucks to review your essay, you're willing to pay 50 to write it.

2. Most universities have writing centers where people will review your papers for free. These places are oddly underused. The people who would go don't need them, and the people who don't know don't realize they do.

>Please take the code (30k lines, PHP/Flex), design & docs and make a go of the business.

Could the OP please give a more formal license statement, even if it's just on this page?

Also, as others have said/hinted the execution looks (after a brief glance) to be pretty hot. The design is certainly crisp and clean and the screencaps look well laid out. Pivoting seems a good option.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2619641 (and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2620156 particularly) discusses it.

well phrased description from that article:

"A hellbanned user is invisible to all other users, but crucially, not himself. From their perspective, they are participating normally in the community but nobody ever responds to them. They can no longer disrupt the community because they are effectively a ghost. It's a clever way of enforcing the "don't feed the troll" rule in the community. When nothing they post ever gets a response, a hellbanned user is likely to get bored or frustrated and leave."

If you visit this user's page at http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Humourisok you can see that their first 3 comments had negative karma, after which the hellban was applied. I think it is automatically triggered if you reach a certain negative cumulative karma.

I forget who said it, but the best advice I've heard from a V.C. is that one of the biggest mistakes they see is founders going overboard trying to avoid making the mistakes their last startup made.

That said, I had an experience at a startup that did what the author now considers "the right way." We went out and sold before we had a product built. We figured out the pitch that the customers wanted to hear and had all of our best leads ready to go. But then it took more like a 12 to 18 months to build the thing, not the 3 to 6 we were promising. Unless you've built something exactly like the current product before, there are always technical problems you don't anticipate, and they always get solved the same way: add more engineering time.

Your earliest/best sales leads are a precious resource. Do not look like a dumbass in front of them. The second batch is not as easy to find as the first or they would have been in the first batch.

What was your motivation for your startup? Did you just want to make a buck, or did you really care about helping students do better in their exams? Do you think the decisions you made would have been different if you had different motivations?