It's like giving up smoking - None of my projects failed, the gaps between commits just get longer and longer.
Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
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Re: Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
#22https://geolua.com (On mobile it gives you a "consumer" view. Check it out on a desktop for a complete impression of what was possible)
I built a programmable and multiplayer capable way of doing geocaching. I keep it online because I still think it's neat, but back then I didn't think of any reasonable way to monetize or market it. It got some interest from the geocaching community, but IIRC links to it got banned from some geocaching forums because they wouldn't allow third party tools. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So I guess: 1) Think about what you build before you do. 2) Make sure the possibility to make money exists at all. 3) Don't rely on third parties. 4) Use what you've learned in your next project
Re: Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
#23I have many, but also some that had some level of success - https://rinum.com
My lessons:
1) Keep your day job, most projects fail
2) Fail fast, 20% effort gets you 80% of the project and that's when you ship it to see if it works, doesn't have to be perfect
3) Don't hang on to failures, move on
Re: Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
#24Spent 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?
To get the list of people: We went to a lot of indie meetups/presentations, posted all over Reddit at every opportunity (got on the front page of many gaming subreddits a bunch of times), constantly spammed our friends (there were 5 of us working on it), got involved with faculty and students at Full Sail University, anything we could. We were all very passionate about it and it pretty much consumed every waking hour of our lives; I even refinanced my home to pay for development.
It was an incredibly fun endeavor... until it wasn't. Haha.
We never did a post mortem because it didn't actually end... It just fizzled out (it did end some friendships though). I (lead dev and co-founder) left the project and my ownership share (after the Kickstarter failed) to the other partners; . They then tried to find someone to either buy or invest in the development of the project for a few years. I only got notice that they finally stopped paying the server bill a week or so ago.
Good luck on your game endeavors!
Re: Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
#25I built an app to help people create balanced teams during pickup games for any sport. The app had every player register themselves, then each player ranked everyone, including themselves, from best to worst, then the app would spit out n number of (probably) balanced teams.
It turns out that complaining about team balance after the match is a feature, not a bug, of the experience for most people and our app was just extra work.
Re: Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
#26I 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 i…
Yep. It's the classical critical mass problem: no users to attract publishers, no publishers to attract users. You need money to jump-start it, and we didn't want to seek investment.
Our plan was instead to create a solid client that integrated all of the other platforms into one, without even needing to have them installed. But out of the hundred or so people we asked, I could count on one hand how many actually cared.
If it had been successful wed introduce our own store as just another backend, low dev cut so we'd compete, and then subsidize sales with some investment later on.
It just didn't pan out. Steam has a death grip on the market despite having terrible software.
Re: Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
#27I was building a competitor to Steam. Our tech was genuinely better. Didn't matter. You can't compete with Steam.
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Re: Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
#28Related past discussions:
* "Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22397720 (222 comments)
* "Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25580637 (582 comments)
* "Ask HN: Failed project you spent 15 hours/week for 5 years on?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27838479 (74 comments)
Re: Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
#29I built OneKeynote.com - the idea is to create podcast streams of an individual you like to hear, across all the various podcasts they go on.
My original motivation was hearing Chamath speak on Kara Swisher's podcast and I loved him. I wanted to hear more of him but realized the only way to do so was to search his name. This was fraught for one big reason, many, many podcasts include his name in the description, even if he isn't a guest (ex try searching Elon Musk!). So I built a quick site and used ListenNotes.com to create custom feeds. I started with tech personalities since that is my area of interest and everyday I would conduct a search on ListenNotes and add to the custom feeds.
ListenNotes does allow you to track who subscribes but it's inaccurate. I did see people start to subscribe to various feeds. However it was very hard to receive feedback. The other problem is it was really time intensive. I would spend about 30 minutes each morning going through all these personalities trying to find new episodes. Eventually I cut the time down as there are some people that don't go on podcasts very much (ex. Andrew Mason) and some people that are on podcasts a lot (Harley Finkelstein) so I adjusted how often I would search. 20-30 minutes might not seem like a lot, but I have a full time job, a family, other projects. My end goal was to insert ads into these feeds but never got the traction to get there. I eventually stopped updating the feeds and I should update the site to reflect that (although the site doesn't appear to be working right now anyways).
I still think this is a good idea but there is probably a better way for it to be done.
Re: Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
#30I launched ByteVitae (https://bytevitae.com/) a couple of years ago, got a decent launch here and in Product Hunt, a bunch of users the first days ~3500 and a steady influx of users over the following months. I didn't know how to convert most of those users to clients, didn't talk to them, lost all interest after the initial launch and moved on after an amazing -26€ in benefits :P
I learned so many things and was such a fruitful ride that for me it is far from a failure. But on the business side, definetly a complete failure!
Even wrote a little post mortem at the time: https://vilva.io/blog/1-year-of-building-reflections.
Lesson learned: Talk to your users. Don't neglect the business/marketing side, specially if you are a techie who loves to code. Talk to your users. It is a marathon run, forget about the overnight millionare launchs, the launch is the "easy" part, growing steady from there is the real challenge. Talk to your users!!