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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

#181

Post by suyash »

garbagecoder wrote: post #177

All of my failed projects have the same problem. For some reason, my interest just switched off. What was an intensely interesting learning experience that I would work on in every spare minute just stopped being interesting. Quite often, this happens before I have a working thing made. In fact, my successful projects all have these same discontinuities they just come after it’s working.

It's a very common problem unfortunately, I have many side projects that are unfinished but next year ...focus and shipping is my mantra :)

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

#182

Post by suyash »

lisper wrote: post #169

I've launched six failed startups. FlowNet (early 90s), a high-speed (500 Mb/s) local area network designed to compete with FDDI, Fast Ethernet, and mainly ATM which was supposed to be the Next Big Thing. Offered QoS guarantees back when that was a big deal. Died because gigabit ethernet happened instead. IndieBuyer (2003-2006) - a marketplace for independent movies on DVD. The angle was that we would provide recomme…

awesome on keep going and trying again and again, best wishes for future!

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

#184

Post by suyash »

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…

good reminder, sometimes we introduce too much tech that not necessarily plays well with the environment

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

#185

Post by et1337 »

rafale wrote: post #164
et1337 wrote: post #57

I worked solo for three years on a 3D cyberpunk shooter all in a custom C++ engine. It was a hybrid single/multiplayer idea, where you would progress through the campaign and encounter other players at the same time. The twist was, in keeping with the cyberpunk theme, once you got to the end it would be revealed that all the players were actually bots the whole time. At first I was going to commit 100% to the decepti…

That's an amazing trailer!

Thanks. :) This comment is my payout for all that hard work!

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

#186

Post by suyash »

I missed some key goals this year that were along the lines of personal productivity and projects -

1. weight loss : I seem to have bounced up and down, lost some, then gained, then lost and then gained. Looking back it was a combination of loosing motivation to go to gym and eating clean. The key lessons seems to be "eating clean food - that tastes good and is healthier" that might mean I need to cook more at home. Second factor is consistent exercise, even if I don't go to gym, need to get enough cardio/strength training.

2. creating and shipping side projects around magic/design/code. - Being distracted with too many shiny projects and setting very high standard (aka perfection) before I ship anything led me to endlessly procrastinate. Next year the mantra is 'laser focus on few and ship'.

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

#187

Post by mattbk1 »

dividuum wrote: post #22

https://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 f…

This looks amazing!

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

#188

Post by fttx_ »

et1337 wrote: post #57

I worked solo for three years on a 3D cyberpunk shooter all in a custom C++ engine. It was a hybrid single/multiplayer idea, where you would progress through the campaign and encounter other players at the same time. The twist was, in keeping with the cyberpunk theme, once you got to the end it would be revealed that all the players were actually bots the whole time. At first I was going to commit 100% to the decepti…

I love the visual style you achieved - really awesome work. I hope one day you or someone else can pick up the code and make something from it.

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

#189

Post by kmarc »

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,…

Sorry to hear that it became a failure.

My PT uses a software exactly like this, and that made it possible that my progress was tracked during my months long vacation too, all online.

The app: https://medbase.physiapp.com/ (in German)

PS. it worked, my back problems are gone.

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

#190

Post by westoncb »

I spent years building:

1. an 'abstract visual debugger'

2. a new kind of program editor

—and I made the same critical mistake in both cases: I didn't treat the programs as sufficiently exploratory. I reached a point in each where I thought the idea was good enough that with my limited resources I should jump directly to building the real/production version.

Both were far too big/complex for me to build production versions of alone, though I could've iterated on design issues through prototyping and probably attracted investors to build for real.

Looking back I think part of what underlay this poor decision was partly a form of perfectionism, and partly that I didn't know good tech for prototyping at the time.

[1] http://symbolflux.com/projects/avd [2] http://symbolflux.com/projects/tiledtext

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