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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

#111

Post by ehnto »

muzani wrote: post #15
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 i…

It's the streaming service problem. Entrepreneurial me wants competition and a free market, but end-user me wants everything on one service because bugger having 10 different game launcher/library apps installed.

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

#112

Post by dharmaturtle »

quadrature wrote: post #100
dharmaturtle wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No users - no launch. I have many conversations with potential users though... I'm 100% positive this is something that people want. E.g. right now the way they solve the problem of collaborating on flashcards is by using _google sheets_ to collect errata on shared decks. https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki/comments/f0bj27/o... This workflow involves manually checking the sheets link, downloading it, convertin…

Can you launch without offline sync ?.

Great question. I've thought hard about this. I originally built it to be online-first, thinking "you can add offline support later". This is the version that's demoed in the video on the Github - and is over a year old at this point. I abandoned this for multiple reasons:

1. Adding offline support is very nontrivial. It (may) influence your choice of DB and your data schema. This is a type of master-master replication, since the user is the master of their data, and this is quite painful in RDBMS-land. I'm avoiding having to migrate my schema to support offline sync.

2. There already exist solutions that are online-first. E.g. Quizlet, mochi.cards, remnote. I find all their tools for collaboration lacking, despite being online-first... which is surprising. They don't even support something as basic as commenting on a card. This blows my mind. Imagine Github without issues/discussions/pull requests.

3. Users have repeatedly told me that they prefer offline-first. This is probably due to them coming from Anki - a popular open source offline-first program. Anki is my real "competition" - not billion-dollar Quizlet.

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

#113

Post by syngrog66 »

dls2016 wrote: post #10

I finished a NASA SBIR before Thanksgiving with my buddy. Mixed results on the technical end and, after lots of discussions with potential gov/industry customers, we realized the market is probably not big enough if we could productize it. I learned a lot about myself. Was previously in a stagnant job, in my opinion due to management. After managing my own project I am even more certain this was the case. Besides my…

very cool! I once wrote a proposal (for a proposal) for a NASA/FAA SBIR phase I grant. we didnt end up submitting/competing based on mine. but it was a great experience.

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

#114

Post by tentacleuno »

asicsp wrote: post #28

Related 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)

Thank you!

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

#115

Post by bsenftner »

I wrote and globally patented Automated Actor Replacement in Filmed Media, a fully automated visual effects based actor replacement and automated digital double creation pipeline. I started working on the idea in 2002, had it globally patented by 2008, with a startup team of Academy Award Oscar winners for VFX, the VFX Supervisor and VFX Producer from the talking animal film "Babe", with a custom built server cluster capable of 125K new, unique 3D digital doubles of real people per hour, and a rendering pipeline capable of 12x real time for video clips less than 1 minute in length.

However, I launched during the 2008 financial meltdown. The only serious investors I could gather would eventually realize the tech could be used to create Deep Fake Porn, which I refused to pursue. VCs thought the tech was science fiction and suspected fraud. (Remember, this was '08 - the term deepfake has 7 years before going mainstream.) Every film studio and music label I contacted, all already familiar with VFX technology, wanted to use the tech for promoting media products, but none wanted to invest to create a production scale studio (because they were familiar with the lack of VFX studio success stories). I got letters of intent from every studio & label to use the production system once a public scaled system was in place, but anyone willing to finance the studio insisted in also producing porn. Once again, I refused.

By 2015 I was personally bankrupt; I tried to pivot to making game characters of real people, so gamers could realistically be themselves or look like celebrities if they wanted. Previously, I'd been on the OS team of the first PlayStation. I know a lot of people in senior places in the game biz. Every game studio and publisher I met, except one, simply wanted the tech for free and refused negotiation. Managed a few clients, continually adding features, but never breaking even. My income was primarily from doing other startups financials, business plans, and software contracts. Towards the end of 2015 I sold the patents to escape bankruptcy, and took a job writing facial recognition software. I'd been principal engineer for that company through three generations of their enterprise FR system until last spring when I quit to return to school and deep dive on machine learning.

The twitter feed is all that is left for the public: https://twitter.com/3DAvatarStore/media I still have all the tech, and I'm working with a new startup to bring all this back to life.

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

#116

Post by dktoao »

I made a spreadsheet add-on similar to the pint library for python (dimensional analysis) based on my own open source JS library (https://github.com/GhostWrench/pqm). Website is still up: https://ghostwrench.net/convertplus.html.

To me it seemed like the perfect way to get a solo app up and running because Google was going to run all the sever stuff and I could just cash in. The app never really got off the ground and by the time I realized that Big G really doesn’t want to make it easy for any schmuck to run a profit generating app using their servers and their technology and it wasn’t worth the maintenance effort to keep up with the constant requests to update the app. I think it is no longer available on the GSuite store as of a few months ago. I think my biggest mistakes were as follows:

1) I needed a business/marketing oriented co-founder. I underestimated how difficult that job is and overestimated my ability to do it.

2) I wanted to charge too much for the app. I didn’t want to undersell myself and get caught in a trap of not making enough to keep up with maintenance. I went too far the other way. I think maybe a $50-$60 on time charge would have been appropriate, instead of requiring a subscription. This is an easy fix, but I would had to re-do my marketing effort and see #1

3) Built before I tested the market. I convinced myself that just asking a few of my engineering friend would use it was enough. Again, this is probably a symptom of #1

4) I was mentally unprepared to deal with failure and I lost motivation to keep working on the project when things didn’t go as I expected.

5) I underestimated how much people actually use spreasheet add-ons. There really isn’t a thriving market and most of the really popular apps are a utility attached to another popular standalone project.

6) Probably should have targeted Excel rather than Sheets, because the market is simply bigger.

I think if the stars align, I would like to give this project another go. I don’t think it has totally failed rather than just gone dormant, but I need a better strategy for round 2!

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

#117

Post by ehnto »

Rinum wrote: post #94
ransom1538 wrote: post #44

A doctor directory. Google black listed it after 30 days. No reason provided. https://www.opendoctor.io/

Google sucks. I've also had projects blacklisted, adsense banned, etc.

That is a lesson learned indeed. I avoid any business models that rely on Google's algorithmic blessing now, too many horror stories and it doesn't really pass a risk sniff test anyway.

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

#118

Post by bsenftner »

bsenftner wrote: post #115

I wrote and globally patented Automated Actor Replacement in Filmed Media, a fully automated visual effects based actor replacement and automated digital double creation pipeline. I started working on the idea in 2002, had it globally patented by 2008, with a startup team of Academy Award Oscar winners for VFX, the VFX Supervisor and VFX Producer from the talking animal film "Babe", with a custom built server cluster…

Here's the video for the failed Kickstarter campaign, only raising 25% of the goal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f2Eah3bofk

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

#119

Post by ehnto »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #20

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 thi…

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

I had the same conclusion working on a motorsport app. Most people in grassroots motorsport put all their money into getting onto the track, and there really aren't any needs they would want solved for ~$15/month on a phone that they can't solve with a spreadsheet.

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

#120

Post by fshr »

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…

Have you considered that you’re a common denominator in your half dozen examples? How could they all fail the same way with different people to blame?
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