"As a new player in the space we couldn’t offer huge traffic or guaranteed results. So we had to give it away for free." How were you making money?
Volume. :)
My failed bootstrapped startup: a retrospective.
31–40 of 52 posts
Re: My failed bootstrapped startup: a retrospective.
#32He writes:
"I dropped MongoDB in favor of using a relational database"
I wonder what made him abandon a perfectly good datastore in favor of a SQL thing, because everybody knows that http://www.mongodb-is-web-scale.com/ ;-)
Re: My failed bootstrapped startup: a retrospective.
#33"As a new player in the space we couldn’t offer huge traffic or guaranteed results. So we had to give it away for free." How were you making money?
I wasn't, unfortunately. This was self-funded. The idea was to give it away for a period of time ("3 months free! Buy today, pay later!!!!1! OMG!!") in order to crack the chicken-and-egg problem of content vs visitors.
Re: My failed bootstrapped startup: a retrospective.
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Only point I wanted to make was that quitting job is not a pre-requisite to having a successful startup, which you were implying. I used to hear that often and naively believed that to my own peril. I discourage others to do the same however amount of saving you may have unless you are at a stage where you never need to work for money." If you don't have any money in the bank, then you shouldn't quit your job. Howev…
I'm at a similar point. I have about one years worth of savings in the bank and could probably stretch it to two years if I sell some stocks. I'm also young so if I blow through that money I will recover. A friend of mine had a great idea that we are going to work on and I just thought it's now or never. If I try to work and do this on the side, I don't really see myself putting in as much as I could and it would be…
I had to rewrite lots of my code because it became fractured when I was working. It was mostly because some parts required me to sit down for many hours to write it out and test it and I had to try to squeeze this into 2-3 hour blocks after work.
In addition to this, a full work day sucks most of the creative energy out of me. At the point when I would just be getting to my side project, all I wanted to do was take a break, which I pushed through, but my projects suffered.
Re: My failed bootstrapped startup: a retrospective.
#35My story is just like your story except that each time something didn't work, I took a few days or weeks off and then tried another site. And another. And another. It took dozens of ideas until I found a business that worked for me.
Take the lessons you learned and start again. Sooner rather than later. You'll probably fail again too, but eventually you'll stumble upon something that clicks. The key is refusing to give up.
Perseverance is much more important than any idea, programming language, or system of doing things. People who get it all right on the first or second try aren't skilled entrepreneurs. They're just lucky.
Re: My failed bootstrapped startup: a retrospective.
#36Please Note: This might seem critical but I'm just pointing out three problems i.e. lack of effort, lack of measuring effort and other statistics, lack of empathy with customers. My argument would be that without at least 2 of these 3 the OP will keep running into problems and keep blaming extrinsic meaningless things. * Credit to the person (aaron?) for writing this. However, the lack of measured numbers is terrifyi…
How is time spent on something in any way correlated with how much he learned? The whole idea of failing fast is that you don't need to invest pointless time after you have learned something is not going to work.
Failing fast doesn't mean much if you don't have a definition of failure to work off of so you can iterate. How exactly does one define these kinds of failures?
Re: My failed bootstrapped startup: a retrospective.
#37Your product needs two sides of customers: merchants want to reach more consumers and consumers want to get good deals. Breaking this chicken and egg issue creatively is probably the single most important thing you needed to do.
Re: My failed bootstrapped startup: a retrospective.
#38If all you building a Grouppon clone - then technology is the easy part.
Re: My failed bootstrapped startup: a retrospective.
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Only point I wanted to make was that quitting job is not a pre-requisite to having a successful startup, which you were implying. I used to hear that often and naively believed that to my own peril. I discourage others to do the same however amount of saving you may have unless you are at a stage where you never need to work for money." If you don't have any money in the bank, then you shouldn't quit your job. Howev…
I'm at a similar point. I have about one years worth of savings in the bank and could probably stretch it to two years if I sell some stocks. I'm also young so if I blow through that money I will recover. A friend of mine had a great idea that we are going to work on and I just thought it's now or never. If I try to work and do this on the side, I don't really see myself putting in as much as I could and it would be…
Before you quit your job and plan to spend a year on your startup, validate your asumptions. Will there be anyone who cares about your product once it's finished? Don't write one line of code until you really know the answer to that question.
Re: My failed bootstrapped startup: a retrospective.
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm at a similar point. I have about one years worth of savings in the bank and could probably stretch it to two years if I sell some stocks. I'm also young so if I blow through that money I will recover. A friend of mine had a great idea that we are going to work on and I just thought it's now or never. If I try to work and do this on the side, I don't really see myself putting in as much as I could and it would be…
Before you quit your job and plan to spend a year on your startup, validate your asumptions. Will there be anyone who cares about your product once it's finished? Don't write one line of code until you really know the answer to that question.
Yes, we've talked to some people and believe they would be interested when it's ready. Obviously it's not a sure thing but I'm fairly confident this idea is something that is needed. It's a B2B app.
PS. I like your equity calc.