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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

#201

Post by heavyset_go »

wheybags wrote: post #197

I spent a long, long time working on an open source reimplementation of Diablo 1 ( https://freeablo.org ), as a clean room reimplementation. In the end, a new project called devilution cropped up that was based on decompiling the original binary. Because of that, it was playable day 1, and started to build real community and momentum. Seeing their success killed my motivation, and the project has languished since. I…

> If I had to share a lesson: don't invest too heavily in someone else's IP.

To extend this lesson: don't invest too heavily in someone else's API, either.

Wasted a lot of time learning that lesson.

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

#202

Post by ChuckMcM »

andrewstuart wrote: post #138
ChuckMcM wrote: post #129

As I was known to drink a lot of Diet Dr. Pepper and had people who timed my code production in 'cans per hour' :-) I thought it would be fun to convert an old 47" Fresnel lens that came from an old big screen TV into an aluminum can melter. The project consisted of a frame on an alt/az base to hold the lens, arms from teh frame to position it's focal point on can that had been crushed vertically and then slid down a…

Please tell me your Dr Pepper consumption could not be measured "cans per hour".

Well to be fair it was Diet (so not the load on the spleen that a sugar load would be) but alas, I could easily consume several cans per hour. One engineer at NetApp joked they knew how long the meeting I was attending was going to be by the number of cans I brought with me.

Not a regimen I recommend but as vices go it was relatively benign. A couple of years ago I stopped all consumption, and then when started dieting added a '1 per mile walked' incentive program for myself. Very effective at insuring I got all the walking in I needed to in order to hit my goals.

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

#203

Post by wheybags »

heavyset_go wrote: post #201
wheybags wrote: post #197

I spent a long, long time working on an open source reimplementation of Diablo 1 ( https://freeablo.org ), as a clean room reimplementation. In the end, a new project called devilution cropped up that was based on decompiling the original binary. Because of that, it was playable day 1, and started to build real community and momentum. Seeing their success killed my motivation, and the project has languished since. I…

> If I had to share a lesson: don't invest too heavily in someone else's IP. To extend this lesson: don't invest too heavily in someone else's API, either. Wasted a lot of time learning that lesson.

Care to share more details?

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

#204

Post by davidmurdoch »

hutzlibu wrote: post #162
davidmurdoch wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, hindsight is 20/20. Really though, we probably would have failed either way, mostly because we didn't know the right people.

"Really though, we probably would have failed either way, mostly because we didn't know the right people." Maybe, but from the little I read, it seems like it might have been more the technical challenges (performance) too hard to overcome with the given ressources/target hardware.

Maybe you're right. There were lots of performance issues that were easily solved, like: we were writing to PostgGreSQL for every single game action, our poly counts were in the several hundreds to thousands but could have been well under 100 in many situations, and we were always globally consistent but could have been eventually consistent (through geographic sharding and a "speed of information" data propagation rule -- since all cells don't need any game state from distant cells due to players having to be in a physical geographic location to play). Though I'm sure there were even more huge issues not yet anticipated.

Ultimately, failure was always the mostly likely outcome here, even if we had millions to spend.

The most unfortunate part for me is that we didn't ever get to learn if people actually liked or disliked the game, since we didn't release it outside our own circles.

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

#205

Post by garren »

wheybags wrote: post #197

I spent a long, long time working on an open source reimplementation of Diablo 1 ( https://freeablo.org ), as a clean room reimplementation. In the end, a new project called devilution cropped up that was based on decompiling the original binary. Because of that, it was playable day 1, and started to build real community and momentum. Seeing their success killed my motivation, and the project has languished since. I…

Fwiw If you were to put together a book, site, or course describing the overall architecture, the design decisions you made, the rationale, possible improvements or alternatives, etc., I’d buy it. Something like pikuma.com, or handmadehero could be really interesting.

I’m not a game or graphics guy, but that kind of stuff has always fascinated me.

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

#206

Post by dutchbrit »

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 think it’s pretty insane & I’m amazed how you managed to get so far by yourself, especially since you wrote your own engine too. I love the feel of this game, did you ever consider starting a new Kickstarter or Indiegogo to continue/fund this project - I see that your last Kickstarter didn’t reach it’s goal, but maybe you could do with some extra marketing? Kind of a shame it stranded (understatement)..

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

#207

Post by Nathanael_M »

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…

My friends and I are making a communal blog to do this exact thing, but I suspect posts will be infrequent. It's hard to casually implement regular long form writing in your life.

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

#208

Post by heavyset_go »

wheybags wrote: post #203
heavyset_go wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I had to share a lesson: don't invest too heavily in someone else's IP. To extend this lesson: don't invest too heavily in someone else's API, either. Wasted a lot of time learning that lesson.

Care to share more details?

Built a platform that aggregated results from a variety of APIs, along with native results from the platform itself. The largest API provider we used decided to make their API private to everyone except for the partners they signed deals with. Those partners' platforms then were the only platforms that had the results the majority of users were looking for.

Although it was a completely different market, pretty much every social media platform does exactly this now with their APIs. First, they open their APIs up to everyone in order to gain marketshare. Once they've cornered the market, they make the APIs private or useless so that competitors can't leverage them.

However, the platform owners recognize the value that some companies using their APIs provide, so they hold those API consumers hostage and milk the best deal they can get out of them, and kick everyone else out. The only way to become a partner after that is to have enough funding to sign a nice deal with the platform owners, assuming those owners don't just copy potential partners' apps wholesale.

You can see this trend on Twitter or Instagram, where there are a handful of "blessed" companies that are allowed to automate and consume content on those platforms using the platform-supplied APIs. Companies that automate or consume content without being blessed are regularly blasted off of those platforms entirely, especially if they can be thought of as competitors.

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

#209

Post by asyncscrum »

Doches wrote: post #8

I'm sure you'll get a fair number of interesting stories here, but you'll find a _ton_ at IndieHackers ( https://indiehackers.com ) which is a sort of spin-off community from HN that's focuses more on bootstrappers and solo founders. For me, I launched a five projects in 2021 that were a mix of total flops and sorta-flops, and they all flopped for the same reason: * Saascast.io (https://saascast.io/) -- revenue forec…

In my quest to review every Todo app I had come across donelist and I loved your take. Actually, all your stuff looks pretty cool for failures! https://www.taskfiler.com/to-do-app-overview/donelist/r/recy...

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

#210

Post by tac0_ »

No link but when I was younger I partnered with a non-technical founder to build a personalised news app. He quit his job while I worked on it part-time. Despite having some users, we failed for many reasons in hindsight.

1. Not shipping fast enough. This one is standard startup advice. 2. No traction for the amount of time we worked on it. Probably caused by not shipping fast enough and not talking to users properly. 3. No conviction. I didn't really care enough about the problem to go all in. TBH, I just wanted something to work on to put on the resume. 4. No competitive advantage. There are a tonne of personalised news apps out there. We had no differentiating factor. 5. No realistic plan to monetise. 6. Finally too many co-founder disagreements as a result of everything so we called it quits.

I don't regret the experience because it taught me a lot about what not to do in my current project.

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