Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned

I had my own company in design and development. Too much administration regarding everything and taxes. And thought I could do it ALL by myself... (Administration, Development, design, getting new customers, giving support etc)

Next time I would do this, I'll probably will pay someone to do administration and taxes!

>Next time I would do this, I'll probably will pay someone to do administration and taxes!

Or marry them (works for me). ;0)

Spent about $200000 on developing a real-time massive multiplayer online strategy game just to run out of money then fail our Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/breadboard/terra-mango-...

We already had 4000+ people sign up to play once it hit beta, and even had local news cover us: https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/terra-mango-could-be-the-n...

We vastly underestimated our ability to market the game and to influence people, even our own friends.

We should have shipped a somewhat slow and buggy beta version to those 4000 people who signed up to beta test.

Don't let perfectionism get in the way of shipping.

Or maybe we just had a bad idea

I'm sure you'll get a fair number of interesting stories here, but you'll find a _ton_ at IndieHackers (https://indiehackers.com) which is a sort of spin-off community from HN that's focuses more on bootstrappers and solo founders.

For me, I launched a five projects in 2021 that were a mix of total flops and sorta-flops, and they all flopped for the same reason:

   * Saascast.io (https://saascast.io/) -- revenue forecasting for Stripe-based SAAS businesses
   * Offramp (https://offramphq.com/) -- Get automatic feedback from unsubscribing customers
   * Donel.ist (https://donel.ist) -- like a TODO list, but more motivating
   * Sandpiper (https://sandpiperhq.com) -- inventory tracking for people who hate inventory tracking
   * Rent Robin (https://sandpiperhq.com) -- automatic rent collection for small businesses

Saascast and Offramp are more or less total flops; I keep them running because I use 'em in all my other projects and I find them useful. They're flops almost entirely because I don't know how to market them, and I'm not convinced that they have enough value-add or PMF to be worth pouring money down the search ads sinkhole.

Donel.ist is, arguably, a total success because it got me out of a moderate depression (being fired and immediately going into lockdown sucks) and back into the habit of building things. It actually has a fair number (50ish) daily users, but it's not monetized at all so in that sense it was a failure at launch!

Sandpiper and Rent Robin are spin-out projects from another, not-failed project -- and while they're not setting the world on fire, they see slow-but-steady growth and the folks who use them seem to love them.

The running theme between all of these is that the projects I build where I already had an audience -- even if that was just myself! -- are successful, and the ones that I built because I had a clever idea but no committed users are failures.

I finished a NASA SBIR before Thanksgiving with my buddy. Mixed results on the technical end and, after lots of discussions with potential gov/industry customers, we realized the market is probably not big enough if we could productize it.

I learned a lot about myself. Was previously in a stagnant job, in my opinion due to management. After managing my own project I am even more certain this was the case.

Besides my partner, there was no one else to get things done. I wrote the proposal and most of the budget, selected and integrated many hardware components, learned to use a CNC and pour foam and solder 17-pin connectors. Constructed and operated an off-grid sensor site for a few months with great uptime. Lashed together an ETL system with Python and Postgres. Wrote and delivered briefings to potential gov and industry partners who knew A LOT more about the topic than I did. In the middle of the thing we were selected as finalists in a pitch contest, though didn’t win.

Gave me back a lot of confidence lost in that other job. I know I can jump into a relatively new area and do decent enough work as judged by experts in that area. I doubt we’ll get a Phase II (and sort of don’t want it as I’d pay myself dookie for two years with questionable payoff), but will crank through some leet code or something for a few weeks and have a eye-catching project on my resume!