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Failed for the past 12 years as an tech entrepreneur

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Re: Failed for the past 12 years as an tech entrepreneur

#111

Post by gb2d »

_hcuq wrote: post #92
orasis wrote: post #59

I’m sincerely not trying to be mean, but it’s possible you were previously simply bad at entrepreneurship. There is this dominant narrative that entrepreneurship is primarily about raw willpower and persistence despite the odds. As a 20+ year entrepreneur I do not believe this to be the case. I believe the primary skill is observation. Yes, we need to try different ideas, but what really makes a product work is liste…

Yes, I have had a bit of entrepreneurial success. I started off contracting, but looked at the needs of my contracting customers and also their customers. After a while there were too many decent ideas to execute. I could choose the ones that appealed, get a purchase order that paid for development and then sell the developed product to other customers.

How did you go about getting purchase orders for products? My contracting work has always been on a time and materials basis. Have always felt it felt rude / awkward to offer the building of a product on different terms to the rest of the work I was doing, but it is something I'd like to try.

Re: Failed for the past 12 years as an tech entrepreneur

#112

Post by start123 »

Glench wrote: post #28

Nice perseverance! I'm not really a business expert, but when I hear about your failed projects it sounds like the marketing and distribution channels weren't really fully fleshed out. It's quite hard to get people to pay for things when you don't know exactly who they are, what they value, or where they hang out. This is a really common problem for developers creating product businesses apparently — you build someth…

The biggest problem with my approach was not understanding my product well. What was it trying to solve? I had no answer. Besides that, identifying distribution channels and lack of marketing were primary reasons of failure. I wish I could have spent more time learning Sales and marketing giving me a better shot at success.

Re: Failed for the past 12 years as an tech entrepreneur

#113

Post by start123 »

scandox wrote: post #32

Manage your reputation very very carefully. I do tech for an email security service and we start blocking these very quickly once we see any anything we don't like.

I understand your concerns I personally hate short generic links. They are a big security risk especially phishing ones.

The way I counter this is by not allowing people people to create generic links in the first place unless you are a paid customer. Plus, you need to add your custom domain to do something meaningful on the platform.

That pretty much weeds out 100% of scammers.

Re: Failed for the past 12 years as an tech entrepreneur

#115

Post by mst »

inglor_cz wrote: post #109
honkycat wrote: post #86

I've never understood the drive to own my own business. My parents were both entrepreneurs and it always felt so tenuous and stressful compared to other jobs. What percentage of small businesses actually end up making you more money than a traditional job? If my parents had worked at Walmart with their business degrees, they would probably be making way more $$ at a much more stable company than if they had run busin…

Some of us just hate having bosses. Being subject to someone's whims is such a repulsive feeling for me that I will go to great lengths to avoid it. I actually even hate having dominant customers. My ideal model of business is a ton of smaller customers, with none of them having more than 10 per cent share of the total revenue. Also, finding more ways to grow your business is rewarding - both psychologically and fina…

The big difference between consulting and in-company roles for me is that if I have to deal with a stakeholder being foolish I'm aware they're gitting billed directly for the time I'm spending dealing with it.

This isn't connected to how much -I- make each month either, it's a primarily psychological difference.

Agree absolutely that ending up with a dominant customer can make you effectively in-company in terms of your incentives, though, and isn't the experience I want out of my work.

Re: Failed for the past 12 years as an tech entrepreneur

#116

Post by zerbin »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #41

I'm not an entrepreneur, so by all means you know far more than me. But it does puzzle me that a lot of your ventures seem very...generic. Like you made a tech blog in 2008. Great, but why is your blog special? That's like making a Twitter account now. There are some people who receive massive success from Twitter, but they're very rare. Then you created a note taking app. I don't know if note taking apps were that h…

It's undoubtedly got to be hard for the "entrepreneur" without novel ideas or an ability to notice market shortcomings and imagine patches to them. Like you, I read this post with a bit of incredulity - sure, you might want to "be your own boss" and "launch a successful product" but in order to actually do that... you kinda have to do something novel. I don't want to crap on OP's dreams, but I don't see the link manager thing turning into a billion dollar unicorn.

I feel like this is the same thing that happens with musicians and artists - it's trend hopping and hoping to get a second of the spotlight for what's in vogue. One year it's brostep, then it's NFT, then its your vanlife miniseries on Youtube, then it's your hyperpop EP, then it's your "metaverse" art project, etc. I know a lot of people like this and few of them seem to find lasting success because they either aren't sticking in a certain domain long enough to really excel, or have no real passion other than chasing "success" which results in ventures that are half-baked and obvious clones of things that already exist.

Re: Failed for the past 12 years as an tech entrepreneur

#117

Post by tata71 »

orasis wrote: post #59

I’m sincerely not trying to be mean, but it’s possible you were previously simply bad at entrepreneurship. There is this dominant narrative that entrepreneurship is primarily about raw willpower and persistence despite the odds. As a 20+ year entrepreneur I do not believe this to be the case. I believe the primary skill is observation. Yes, we need to try different ideas, but what really makes a product work is liste…

Piggybacking: just seems OP more interested in success than identifying problems that stir their passion.

Re: Failed for the past 12 years as an tech entrepreneur

#119

Post by iLoveOncall »

start123 wrote: post #42
hardwaregeek wrote: post #41

I'm not an entrepreneur, so by all means you know far more than me. But it does puzzle me that a lot of your ventures seem very...generic. Like you made a tech blog in 2008. Great, but why is your blog special? That's like making a Twitter account now. There are some people who receive massive success from Twitter, but they're very rare. Then you created a note taking app. I don't know if note taking apps were that h…

I was naive back then and had very little understanding of how things work. I jumped into things because I felt they were cool and not really worrying about solving a problem. And I wish I could share some pics of my failed ones, I did try my best to differentiate.

So how is your current project different?

It feels like you're jumping on trends when they have existed for years already without bringing anything new to the table. That'll never get you anywhere.

Re: Failed for the past 12 years as an tech entrepreneur

#120

Post by serjester »

honkycat wrote: post #86

I've never understood the drive to own my own business. My parents were both entrepreneurs and it always felt so tenuous and stressful compared to other jobs. What percentage of small businesses actually end up making you more money than a traditional job? If my parents had worked at Walmart with their business degrees, they would probably be making way more $$ at a much more stable company than if they had run busin…

I think for some people working for someone else is akin to selling off a piece of your soul daily. It's not about the money - it's about having autonomy, excitement and risk in your career. Money is just the scorecard.

As an entrepreneur you get to hand pick who you work with, what you work on and how you get it done - something basically impossible working for someone else. If you think about it, in no other time in history has it been normal to work in distributed, mega corporations.

This path definitely isn't for everyone and there's a lot of real downsides. Personally I grew up telling my Soviet parents that I want to be an entrepreneur - and them telling I need to choose a "real" job. Well after trying the "real job" thing, I vowed to stay as far as I could from corporate life and couldn't be happier. I guess it's just a matter of taste.

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