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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

#41

Post by igeligel_dev »

I had/have some projects:

  - https://caseconverter.pro/app - was more experimentation than anything else, paste a JSON and get converted keys
  - https://getworkrecognized.com - Could never reach market-fit with that. Wanted to really focus on the employee sides with brag documents but no employee will ever pay by themselves for such a tool
  - http://linkedium.com - was a LinkedIn Scheduling tool, was just annoyed at some point with that. Might spin it up again this year. So never launched
Might put them up for sell somewhere. Maybe someone is interested to grow these or find product-market fit. But focusing on some other ideas I have right now.

What I learnt: I am really bad at Marketing and Sales and have a lot to learn there. Will focus on other target customers and trying to niche down with the projects I am working on right now and want to work on soon. Maybe finding someone who is good at it and partnering up might be something to look into.

Also, SEO and content is working to generate traffic. If you can convert the traffic it is a goldmine. The Google Search Console for getworkrecognized looks promising honestly.

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

#42

Post by bendergarcia »

nscalf wrote: post #5

I don’t have a site to point to anymore, but me and some cofounders built out a physical therapy vertical saas (patient management + mobile patient portal). The issue: many PTs are VERY analog—sheets of papers with exercise, very few touch points, no data collection, etc. The solution: modern patient management system for doctors, a mobile app that will remind you to do your prescribed exercises, track your response,…

Do you think offering some kind of onboarding/deployment service would have helped? Helping them migrate all their data and workflows into this new tool?

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

#43

Post by Zigurd »

Before Android became a success, I led the development of an operating system with a JVM-based userland for VoIP devices: http://d2tech.com/1-products/mcue.htm

It was designed to use multiple IP communications protocols and to present a unified view of contacts' presence across all the ways they could communicate.

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

#45

Post by MihaiSandor »

soneca wrote: post #39

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…

Zero interest even in the comments section on this thread, lol.

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

#47

Post by kingcharles »

Created a site in the early aughts and tried to charge $1 a piece for people to make their own avatars. Nobody paid. Had to make it free about a month later. Now Flash is dead, so site no good. http://www.dudefactory.com/

Spent about a year building the absolute best text-message short-code system that let you run groups, competitions, surveys, take payments. Kept adding features and yak-shaving and forgot to actually sign up any customers. First month the product was finally "finished" we ran out of money for our connection to the SMS network and that was the end of it.

One more.. does this count as a failure?

Made a torrent site for TV shows. Took $13m in revenue. Law enforcement said "naughty, naughty". Closed site. No more revenue.

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

#48

Post by rozenmd »

I do a yearly post of my failures, this is the first year I had a success:

- https://maxrozen.com/2018-review-starting-an-internet-busine...

- https://maxrozen.com/2019-further-reflections-trying-to-star...

- https://maxrozen.com/indiehacking-3-year-review

- https://maxrozen.com/2021-strangers-paid-my-macbook

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

#49

Post by ezekg »

I’ve had a couple failed projects I can share:

- https://web.archive.org/web/20190528152755/https://www.theme... desktop app for local WordPress development, built on top of a CLI I made. Had a few hundred MRR within a couple weeks. It used Vagrant under the hood (right when Docker was blowing up), app was built on React (in Coffeescript - https://web.archive.org/web/20180809151636/https://alpacaget... web app to discover and book pre-planned weekend getaways w/ itinerary. Couldn’t get traction or sales. Probably needed to do content marketing, but my wife and I had just had our first child at the time, so we ultimately shut it down due to lack of time (she did most of the getaway hunting, I automated price discovery.) It was a 5k line index.js Node app. XD

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

#50

Post by Eric_WVGG »

I was a cofounder of a fashion and consumer startup, it was sort of like a focused Pinterest. We had a very enthusiastic user base before taking on SV money, but unfortunately never grew much beyond that.

I was the engineer (and briefly CTO), and the foremost thing on my mind was marketing and promotion. I was constantly told that word-of-mouth and natural virality was how things worked in the Web 2.0 era, so put it out of my mind and focused on the technical stuff.

I eventually got fired (justly so; I was good enough to get a personal project off the ground, but not FAANG material at the time), and watched as they squeezed out a redesign and an app and eventually sold out as an acquihire. (I’m told that means it’s “not a failed startup” but sure doesn’t feel like it.)

If I had it all to do again, as soon as it was apparent that I had reached the limits of what I could do as an engineer, I would have flipped to being the hype man for the product. Someone should have been hitting the pavement every day making connections at GQ, Supreme, HypeBeast, etc. My partners say we crumpled because we couldn’t build another round of funding; I say we couldn’t get the funding because of dumb naive belief in word-of-mouth.

—

coda: after that, I returned to another side project, a visual RSS reader for graphic designers and artists. Same problem, no plan to promote the damn thing.

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