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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

#31

Post by putcalltheta »

I was a regular at the options trading subreddit. Lots of questions about how to modify strategies kept coming up (I also have been thinking about it for a while) so I built https://putcalltheta.com.

Got some buzz when i first announced it but things went cold after that. I still get a few user signups occasionally. Need to do some work on it but my mind is wandering off to other projects.

Edit: lessons learned 1. I probably should have had a mobile version of the webapp at launch. 2. Marketing is hard

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

#32

Post by typon »

harel wrote: post #16
mysterydip wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

What about underpromise and overdeliver?

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

#33

Post by VLM »

nunSpQyeJR wrote: post #25

I 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…

> our app was just extra work

Just this week my kids basketball coach is trying get all the parents to "use the app" for scheduling and announcements and its just NOT working so back to email which works for everyone.

As both a player and in the past as a coach, my experience with "sports team apps" has been that nobody wants to be the end user's IT department and on any team with more than X players the odds of someone's phone being messed up approaches 100%. "Oh I have an android and you have an iphone so I can't help you" and its just infinite headaches.

If you could find a way to "do the sports team app" thing but over multiple incompatible messenger chatbots or over a web page it might get more traction.

If apps "just worked", which they certainly do not, it would be nice. An app-like experience over a web page might work.

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

#34

Post by x1ph0z »

Me and a few friends made a web app to calculate property investment returns. Lots of time sunk in but the app got no traction. Lesson learned we need to determine if there’s a market need before starting development, and a better effort on marketing wouldn’t hurt either.

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

#35

Post by wanderingstan »

Inspired by my dad scanning 20,000+ old photos, I created "Smallest Day". Photo organizing apps didn't (and still don't) handle old scanned photos well.

For example, Google Photos would not allow any photo to be dated before the 1970 unix epoch. Picasa required an email address for anyone tagged, which was problematic for nineteenth century photos!

Short demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAObvfnDso4 Presenting at the Personal Archiving Conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzBkuXvqEo4

In hindsight, I really needed a co-founder, especially someone more of a "hustler". I also should have committed more fully to reaching a GO/NO-GO decision instead of letting the project peter out over a year while I gradually took on more consulting work. Should have bought some ads to determine market appetite.

Still, I'm mostly happy that I didn't pursue it too far. 1000 Memories (a YC company) was also in the space and had an only mediocre exit. I'm relieved that no other company seemed to knock it out of the park. But a little sad that so many old photos (and the stories behind them) are not getting digitized and may not get preserved.

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

#36

Post by tester756 »

junon wrote: post #26
muzani wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 car…

>It just didn't pan out. Steam has a death grip on the market despite having terrible software.

But what software do they need?

Personally I just need to buy, download and play some game

it annoys me when I buy games on steam and want to play it and it tells me to create some ubisoft / epic games account, like what the hell.

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

#38

Post by edent »

Last year I tried building an animated laptop sticker business.

People loved the idea! People paid for stickers! Profit was reasonable!

But, on the downside...

The equipment is horrifically expensive. Minimum order quantities from 3rd parties means that every idea has to be a killer. They are a novelty, and quite pricey, so you can't rely on repeat custom. Zero barrier to new entrants.

I was glad that I did it - and I learned a lot. Perhaps when I'm a tech-billionaire, I'll work on getting the price down ;-)

More details at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/06/building-a-minimum-viable-l...

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

#39

Post by soneca »

https://www.quidsentio.com

A private social network (“private” in the sense that is a journaling web app that you share with close friends, not as “e2ee privacy”).

Zero interest on HN or Reddit or wherever. The few people who tried (including friends and family) never came back. The one paid user that I had tried to use the “import Facebook status” tool and it wasn’t working. I didn’t know how to fix (it worked in my machine) so I refunded them.

I used as personal journal for several months but eventually quit. The web app is still up because it’s basically using free tier for hosting, so I leave it there.

Lessons learned

Honestly, idk. Maybe that a new social network these needs a very clear unique spin. Generic “keep in touch with close friends and family” is not enough, any of the big ones can do that. WhatsApp and a closed profile on Instagram deliver that value already. The big ones that tried eventually failed (Path, famously, but also a recent one YC-backed, Coccoon).

”Pay a subscription so we don’t have to sell ads and your data” is not enough of a motivation for adoption.

For those that this would be enough, they also care about e2ee and decentralization (which I didn’t deliver because it was technically hard to do).

Social networks are expected to be on native mobile apps, not web apps, I think.

If anyone likes the UI of it and wants to use the frontend (React) for a web3 or any sort of e2ee backend, get in touch.

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

#40

Post by muzani »

Had several: last minute airline seat bidding app with an interested airline. Fishing competition app with paying users. Housing valuation app for a city council, with the actual city council interested and opening up their API to us. The city council also wanted a parking app and water billing app. A telco requested a reloading app that was basically CRUD but offered 6 digits for a few days of work. There was a diet app with thousands of monthly active users and hundreds of dollars in monthly sales.

The failure reasons were all the same: business partners who sat on money and did nothing.

These people were not incompetent. They've built companies before. They own a Mercedes, BMW, or Mazda RX-8. They've dedicated decades of their careers to building these connections. I personally burned my credibility setting up some of these meetings.

The problem was they didn't show up. Why didn't they show up?

"The poor and the middle class work for money. The rich have money work for them."

Nobody is naturally too lazy to take money that's lying in front of them. These people have been conditioned to think that work is for fools. They love doing strategic shit like picking domain names and researching target market. They'll never actually talk to the target market though. One entrepreneur even hired a "personal assistant" to do the talking, except the assistant was incompetent and just pissed everyone off.

Laziness is fine. Arrogance is fine. But anyone with a contempt for hard work will not get anywhere.

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