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Ask HN: Failed project you spent 15 hours/week for 5 years on?
51–60 of 79 posts
Re: Ask HN: Failed project you spent 15 hours/week for 5 years on?
#52Mine is https://pushback.io/ . It wasn't for 5 years more like 3 and wasn't consistently 15+ hours/week but definitely got up there when the passion was burning bright. I've failed to implement a winning conversion plan (need to iterate my pricing, just never got around to it) and do marketing. I've since moved on to another side project, but my passion certainly calls me back to Pushback from time to time.
You are in my backlog of services to implement in my current project :)
Let me know if you need any help :)
Re: Ask HN: Failed project you spent 15 hours/week for 5 years on?
#53dashpc.com
Dashboard Linux Automotive.
Basically, it was the first in-car touchscreen mp3, gps, fm radio, bluetooth(eventually), linux based caputer concept project. In 1999, it was a full computer retrofitted into the dashboard. By 2003, me and my team were doing conferences (Phreaknic), etc.
It was slashdotted a few times and a few mags did writeups about it.
Major auto manufacturers were regular visitors to the site (according to the logs). It was in a 2000 VW Jetta and it looked factory.
It still lives on in archives, but I failed to turn it into a business or maintainable project.
Open source collaboration was still “new” back then and it wasn’t easy to crowdsource capital or form business networks.
I was often told to contact my local Small Business Administration for leads (went nowhere).
I learned a lot, mostly what not to do, so value was created in some way.
Re: Ask HN: Failed project you spent 15 hours/week for 5 years on?
#54I've spent the last decade doing this. Building up my savings, draining them on an idea. I put in 40+ per week for a couple years on my last startup in the real estate space. Poached some top level VP's from the biggest firm in our country, but we ran through our capital too quickly due to too many pivots and licensing costs, I could only do no salary for so long, tough when your rent is $2.5k/mo. Now I am back at my…
Keep in mind that tech is a tool for people to use to solve a problem. High tech that does not solve a problem is useless. My advice would be to focus on people first. What problem are people having that needs a solution? How can I solve the problem with the least of effort from the user's point of view? Customers are looking for products that make their lives easier/happier not the slightest bit harder.
I would go as far as getting a job in the space you want to focus on and look for problems there.
Apple always comes to mind. I can't think of any mind bending technology that they have invented but they've focused on the user's needs and have created a monster of a company by delivering products the customer wants to use.
Re: Ask HN: Failed project you spent 15 hours/week for 5 years on?
#55Hey, I've done this several times. In the 90's I spent over 10,000 hours on a 2d real time board game similar to Starcraft for the Amiga. In 96 I gave up on the possibility of an Amiga comeback and spent a couple of thousand to build a windows development system to post the game to. Well it turned out to be impossible as the M$ system is so defective. Once used to perfection it is difficult to program a turd. Linux w…
I spent two years building an animation system for the Commodore 64, lots of assembly language, a sprite editor, and then someone came out with a product very similar to what I was building so I gave up. Some time later I realized that was a mistake, I would have just been competing instead of being first. For my next project I wrote a ray tracer for the Amiga (C-Light). Same thing happened, another company came out with something better before I'd even finished (the competition could display more colors simultaneously using an assembly trick I didn't understand) but I kept going, got to version 1.0, and got a distributor in the UK. The distributor ripped me off and vanished, collection agencies couldn't find him. I wasn't happy spending so much time on stuff that wasn't programming and it was costing me money so I gave it away for free. I spent at least five years on that.
Two things that have stopped me from starting new projects are patents and the fast evolution and demise of platforms. It is really difficult to know if any part of your idea is patented. You could put a lot of work into something only to have a troll take it all away. Platforms don't last any more (try running apps from your first iPhone on a current iPhone) and the continuous churn makes planning to work on something for years a very risky proposition. Everything changes, OS's, programming languages, API's, UI's, cloud vs local, networking, etc. If you're doing it all yourself it is not possible to keep up for very long. So I'd suggest carefully considering the longevity of what you plan to do. If it's going to take you 5 years to reach success you had better be sure your product is going to still be possible and relevant in 5 years. Otherwise I'd attempt shorter term projects. Supply chain attacks for example may be about to wipe out certain classes of software/service products if no one trusts them any more (though it's nice to have a scapegoat, maybe you could sell scapegoating as a service? :-)
Re: Ask HN: Failed project you spent 15 hours/week for 5 years on?
#56My most successful project, by far, is a font. As a software engineer, I find that slightly amusing. None of my software projects got anywhere near its traction. Except, maybe, an Emacs plugin made as a joke that adds IBM Selectric typewriter sounds to your text editor.
What is the font and its story?
Re: Ask HN: Failed project you spent 15 hours/week for 5 years on?
#57I've spent the last decade doing this. Building up my savings, draining them on an idea. I put in 40+ per week for a couple years on my last startup in the real estate space. Poached some top level VP's from the biggest firm in our country, but we ran through our capital too quickly due to too many pivots and licensing costs, I could only do no salary for so long, tough when your rent is $2.5k/mo. Now I am back at my…
> I was of the "first to market / build a unicorn" mindset I'm not dissing that mindset at all, but it is essentially gambling. Over the decades, I've warmed to "the pioneers get all the arrows" mindset: that from a business perspective, it's better to be the second or third in a new area, because you can learn from the pioneer's mistakes. It's rare that the entity that invented a thing is the entity that makes the m…
It might be gambling I suppose, but it's actively encouraged by the VC companies who put a little seed money here and there. They want you to work yourself to death just in case you happen to get further investment. You may have no choice other than being first in a market - you don't always get a choice to be second or third when you see an opportunity.
Re: Ask HN: Failed project you spent 15 hours/week for 5 years on?
#58It is how I work usually for the past 30+ years: I spread my time between 3-4 projects always and most are my own. I work on them for 3-6 years per project until something hooks some success or does nothing at all. Most fail, I had a few successful ones that made enough to live a nice life with a family and a few turned into serious companies. I suspect I will keep doing this until the end of my life: it is a lot of…
Do you have a metric for when you give up on something? I'm 4 years into something that is a grind of epic proportions and wondering whether I should just shelve it and move on.
Re: Ask HN: Failed project you spent 15 hours/week for 5 years on?
#59dsf
Re: Ask HN: Failed project you spent 15 hours/week for 5 years on?
#60[deleted]