Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 285 posts

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

#211

Post by notreallyserio »

kingcharles wrote: post #51
davidmurdoch wrote: post #6

Spent about $200000 on developing a real-time massive multiplayer online strategy game just to run out of money then fail our Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/breadboard/terra-mango-... We already had 4000+ people sign up to play once it hit beta, and even had local news cover us: https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/terra-mango-could-be-the-n... We vastly underestimated our ability to market the game a…

> Don't let perfectionism get in the way of shipping. I see this a lot. I wonder if a lot of creatives have obsessive personalities that cause us to want to fiddle endlessly with something before we release it?

I think that's a big part of it. I think there's also the difference between treating something as art and something as product.

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

#212

Post by qwertyuiop_ »

mberning wrote: post #91

http://tiredb.com A power user tire search with affiliate links. I did make some money off it but got super discouraged when I realized people were using the site to find tires, then searching for coupons or discounts, and my commission was being harvested by shitty SEO sites.

Just curious how did these shitty SEO site harvested your affiliate links ?

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

#213

Post by NicoJuicy »

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…

Am i mistaking that, instead of the Kickstarter campaign the steam early access could have been a better road to "actual revenue"?

It's pretty insane what you did and already had finished!

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

#214

Post by pier25 »

skrtskrt wrote: post #158
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,…

Did you know much about the PT field beforehand? It seems to me that really successful entrepreneurship requires enough time in that field to really understand the rough edges of the domain, but not so much time in the field that you actually start to accept the existing solutions as “good enough” in a sort of stockholm syndrome. You need to be an expert with a beginner’s mind, which is extremely difficult.

Domain knowledge is by far the most important in starting any business.

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

#215

Post by et1337 »

dutchbrit wrote: post #206
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)..

Thanks for the kind words!

Yep, I ran a failed Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/et1337/deceiver-philoso...

Kickstarter is a lot tougher these days, it’s not as novel as it once was and a lot of people have been burned. You basically have to bring your own fan base of people ready to pay.

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

#216

Post by cinntaile »

reactspa wrote: post #173
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…

I drive a 20 year old middle-class car. I drive it because it's been reliable and fuel-efficient, and I have no reason to replace it. GP would judge me as financially unsuccessful and not pay me any mind if I needed a problem solved. GP has been played by these "mercedes having" people and GP's own pre-conceived immature notions about status-signaling.

The GP added more context in another comment. There are some cultural differences at play here.

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

#217

Post by et1337 »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #213
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…

Am i mistaking that, instead of the Kickstarter campaign the steam early access could have been a better road to "actual revenue"? It's pretty insane what you did and already had finished!

Yep I think you’re right. Hindsight 20/20!

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

#218

Post by xmaayy »

kingcharles wrote: post #47

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 actuall…

#1 sounds like very early NFTs

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

#219

Post by scyclow »

I tried to sell pictures of discarded ketchup packets as NFTs [1]. They didn't sell very well. I guess the market for ketchup packets isn't as hot as I thought it was.

I learned that flashy websites can't quite sell everything.

[1] https://steviep.xyz/natural-flavors/

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

#220

Post by NicoJuicy »

dharmaturtle wrote: post #87
rustybolt wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sur…

Why indexed db and offline syncing?

Ps. https://martendb.io/ and https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=232... ( Microsoft sync framework)

Post reply on HN