My failed bootstrapped startup: a retrospective.

It's my mistake - I made two wrong assumptions.

1) Firstly, that you were in business to add value to customers and that was the primary motivation. It seems your primary motivation was to learn/experience it. Which is fine - it's just not what I assumed it was.

As Zig Ziglar would put it - To get everything you desire in life you just have to give enough other people what they want from life.

* Who knows what approach works better. For me, the Zig Ziglar approach has worked much better but that's a sample size of 1 person.

2) Secondly, my mistake in assuming your post was meant to help other people. If you could have added a note that it was meant mostly as a catharsis and written for yourself.

Then I wouldn't have assumed that there might be a lot of value for me.

Right now the value is in seeing a few things but the amount of effort is just not enough to actually know whether any of your mistakes other than not putting in enough work matter.

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See, the key thing is your line on work being from 0 to 10 hours per week with some weeks being over 10 weeks.

How can you know your ideas and business were right or wrong with that amount of time?

For entirely selfish reasons (to help myself) I wanted to learn from your experience. However, if your experience is based on working an average of 10 hours a week, then it doesn't really say anything about what the market opportunity really is/was.

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On a related note there seems to be a fascination on hacker news lately on apps done in 5 days and 'passive income' and how to succeed without working hard.

Are there any people there who are succeeding after working really hard? Who are spending 5 months on their app and not 5 days?

You seem intent on believing the worst about my experience and efforts, and that's okay, as I said before, "take it for what it's worth." :)

But you did nail item #1 - I was primarily interested in learning/experiencing, and secondarily interested in adding value. That's one of the reasons I lost motivation and shut down the site, it is extraordinarily difficult for coupons/discounts to add value to businesses across the spectrum of business. Some businesses it works great for, many it doesn't. It was when I had that realization that I decided to end it.

I did spend time (sorry, probably not "much time") brainstorming business ideas that actually would add value to the businesses I knew, and I think some of those ideas are good, but just not feasible for me to do alone, so I'm not even pursuing them either.

I have a friend that has spent _years_ and tons of his own money working on his startup, and it's still struggling to succeed. I learned a lot from him as he was my mentor through this process. I hope his endeavor takes off, but it's a long road, and he has worked incredibly hard. I can connect the two of you if you actually want to talk to someone like that.

I'm not.

My suggestion to you would be to consider whether you can put in more effort into your next startup.

We each have our own beliefs on what works and then there's reality. So there's probably a chance that there is something that works very well but both of us would have to look at things from a different perspective.

For me I tend to believe that you can't really succeed unless you're 100% in it. That having a family pretty much rules out having a successful start-up. That's obviously not true as there are exceptions. Perhaps lots of them.

I think in the end it comes down to not giving up. However, again, that's just a belief and who knows what the reality is.

Thanks for offering to connect me to your friend. Not interested at the moment as I'm quite overwhelmed and already places like Hacker News are putting too much of the possibility of failure into my head.

My attitude is that failure isn't really possible and it's working amazingly well so perhaps I should only read posts that are very positive like the Yoghurt business one.

Looks like he made the two classic mistake of a software guy with a startup (i made them too)

1. Spend too much time futzing about with the technology. No one cares.

2. Spend too much time futzing around with stuff you think a business needs to be a 'real' business.

"Failing fast" and "10,000 hours to expert" are two entirely different kinds of learning. "Failing fast" is a lean startup idea where you are trying to learn, as quickly as possible, whether you have a viable product. You do the least you can do to determine this. After you have learned this one thing, if you find that no one is interested in your product, you are done. Move on to the next idea.

"10,000 hours to expert" is a different idea. Here, the idea is that to become an expert in a specific skill, you have to put in 10,000 hours of 'deliberate' practice.

These are two different kinds of learning. The '10,000' hours approach is not the kind of learning you need or want to do to determine the validity of one business idea. In this case, time invested is not necessarily correlated with learning.