Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 285 posts

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

#11

Post by quaffapint »

How about the multitude of ideas I start - get all excited by this great new idea, start working on landing page picking just the right colors and font, look into the coding and hosting, all the while researching and checking out the competition only to say to myself there's no way this will work, look at all those features the other players have, I can't market, don't have a following...Fail. Next idea - rinse & repeat.

Then only to see a month or whatever later a similar idea posted to HN with them saying how they have customers and inflow. Could I have done the same? Maybe. Was it just because they could market well? Maybe. Will I ever really know? No. Cause I never tried. Will I ever learn my lesson? I can only hope.

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

#12

Post by subinsebastien »

Me and one my acquaintance built a online grocery delivery service from scratch. We launched it in a small tier-3 city in India. It was ahead of time compared to all the services which later became successful. We had things like automated phone number verification as a first in apps launched in India. What we have learned is that:- do not do things that are ahead of it’s time. Launch a mobile app, when pretty much everyone has a smart phone for themselves.

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

#15

Post by muzani »

junon wrote: post #13

I was building a competitor to Steam. Our tech was genuinely better. Didn't matter. You can't compete with Steam.

I tried to do this, didn't get past validation stage. A lot of developers were hostile to the idea. This was around 2010 though. I didn't expect Steam to survive with that kind of hostility but it did. It's not even a shitty incumbent like WhatsApp, it's genuinely changed how we purchase and own games.

You'd probably have to do the Epic approach to even have a fighting chance: give out AAA games every month. Or the itch approach: lower the bar completely.

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

#16

Post by harel »

mysterydip wrote: post #9
davidmurdoch wrote: post #6

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 a…

"perfect is the enemy of good enough" I learned a few years ago. Thanks for sharing, this is really interesting as I'm working a multiplayer project right now. What was your marketing budget like? How did you get those 4000 people? Do you have a postmortem or dev log from the time?

I've seen enough failures exactly because "Perfect was the enemy of Good enough". It's a good mantra.

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

#18

Post by tablet »

Doches wrote: post #8

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 forec…

I always believe in focus. I spent 14 years on my first product, then 5 years on a second (still working on it). Why not take one and iterate?

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

#20

Post by NicoJuicy »

http://ledenboek.be/

It actually works pretty good ( member management for sport clubs), but I'm going to turn it off.

Only 1 club is using it consistently, while i didn't have to do anything for it since 2014 ( except moving it off Azure to reduce costs).

Failed to gain any traction, had an email list of prospects but it didn't have any results.

Sad thing is, sport clubs don't have much to spare. So I gave up on this project.

Post reply on HN