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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

#81

Post by throwawayboise »

tator22 wrote: post #53
VLM wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 some…

Could you give me some examples of what you would think would be needed? Have a sister whos kids are going to be getting into sports and feel like this would be a fun side project

It won't be. I've run youth sports league websites on a variety of platforms. The platforms all suck in one way or another (most actually suck in many ways), but that's not the real problem. The real problem is that some portion of the user base/parents are hopelessly incompetent with technology and will consume your time with their problems or questions. Another segment will feign problems to try to get you to do their work for them, and at some point you will do it because it takes less time than spending time on a back-and-forth of questions and getting nowhere.

Just use email and/or text messaging.

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

#82

Post by rustybolt »

dharmaturtle wrote: post #75
rustybolt wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if it's intentional , but your post reads somewhat like satire.

Not satire, just being blunt. What do you think I'm satirizing? The magpie developer?

Yes, nothing wrong with learning new technologies but this seems like using your side project as an excuse to learn new technologies.

Also nothing wrong with that, but personally I like to think more about architecture than about the particular implementation.

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

#83

Post by Winterflow3r »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #50

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…

Would it be ok to email you to find out more?

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

#84

Post by edent »

kingcharles wrote: post #58
edent wrote: post #38

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…

Those were a great little product. I can see you easily saturating the market, though, and selling to basically everyone on the planet who wants one and having no possible customers left. I had some custom shirts made once (same as the one Marty wears in Back to the Future) by the original manufacturer. I'm glad I only had 500 made because selling the last dozen was a real chore. I absolutely and totally exhausted th…

Cheers mate. It was fun for a lockdown project but, yeah, nothing long term.

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

#86

Post by albert_e »

I managed a project that built a ambitious (for an internal project) collaboration portal integrating two enterprise applications and customizing one of them for UI and Business Process requirements.

My job was project management and functional validation.

But I dabbled in UI design and coding as a hobby. I flexed a bit.

I impressed the stakeholders with a good UI mockup. Tech team said that level of UI customization is impossible. I delivered a working prototype of customized site on the same platform. They had to accept the requirements, grudgingly I imagine.

I had a small team to do testing. I went aggressive and did a lot of testing myself. Tech team delivered a lot but did not have top notch tech people who were invested. They did stuff like security by obscurity and I called them out. I logged dozens and dozens of bugs. Resulted in extended timelines.

I thought I was ensuring a robust product that everyone would be proud of at launch. Tech team probably hated me. Product was finally ready for UAT.

Client team had a reorg and leadership change. This project was no longer a pet showcase project for new leadership. It was put on back burner and then shelved. Never launched.

Didn't make any friends.

Lesson: Avoid big-bangs. Launch MVP and iterate. Make friends. You don't have to be a Rockstar - aim for normal success.

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

#87

Post by dharmaturtle »

rustybolt wrote: post #82
dharmaturtle wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not satire, just being blunt. What do you think I'm satirizing? The magpie developer?

Yes, nothing wrong with learning new technologies but this seems like using your side project as an excuse to learn new technologies. Also nothing wrong with that, but personally I like to think more about architecture than about the particular implementation.

Fair point. In my defense, people say you should pick the tech-stack you're most familiar with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29626371 Perhaps I'm misusing the word architecture - I guess I really mean tech-stack.

I'm most familiar with F#, so I went with that and Blazor initially (to avoid learning JS). PostGres feels fairly uncontroversial. Perhaps I magpied from there to event sourcing - I still find it surprising that an indexdb-eventsourcing-wrapper doesn't exist. I considered ReScript given my F# background (the two share a similar philosophy/syntax).

Now though, I'm trying to "pick the best tool for the job" instead of "use what you know". AFAIK if you want offline syncing, the best tool for the job is CouchDb/PouchDb. If you want to avoid the VDom, Svelte or SolidJS are the most popular options.

Please let me know if I'm mistaken - perhaps I'm too lost in my own head.

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

#88

Post by sangnoir »

eganist wrote: post #54
muzani wrote: post #40

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…

> They own a Mercedes, BMW, or Mazda RX-8. I'm not trying to be glib, but what quality of a person or partner were you looking to assess with this measurement? Asking because I've never thought to consider the car a person drives as part of evaluating a potential partnership. I guess what I'm trying to land on is how you encountered and partnered with people who did as you described multiple times, and I'm leaning to…

GP never suggested that the selection was based on the cars they drive - what gave you that impression?

My own reading is that gp uses the cars are evidence of past financial success

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

#89

Post by anyfactor »

Robintwits

Based on the Robinhood API, I attempted to merge Stocktwits API to create hype stock trend analysis platform. I wanted to combine both the buy side and hype side of these stocks into a very basic analytics platform. After Robinhood shut down their unofficial API my project was dead. Also Stocktwits are quite restrictive with their API use now, I believe.

Lesson learned: Platform risk is an obvious threat to your project. You can never go wrong by choosing freedom. Build something from the ground up and if you are relying too much on other people's product make sure you recoup investments fast as possible.

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

#90

Post by eganist »

sangnoir wrote: post #88
eganist wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They own a Mercedes, BMW, or Mazda RX-8. I'm not trying to be glib, but what quality of a person or partner were you looking to assess with this measurement? Asking because I've never thought to consider the car a person drives as part of evaluating a potential partnership. I guess what I'm trying to land on is how you encountered and partnered with people who did as you described multiple times, and I'm leaning to…

GP never suggested that the selection was based on the cars they drive - what gave you that impression? My own reading is that gp uses the cars are evidence of past financial success

> GP never suggested that the selection was based on the cars they drive - what gave you that impression?

You captured it well in your next sentence:

> My own reading is that gp uses the cars are evidence of past financial success

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