31–40 of 58 posts
I spent a year and a half building a "startup" of my own (actually, a humanitarian nonprofit) that failed. I can relate to the author's painful emotions as he processes his experience. This emotional journey is common in entrepreneurship, but very few people talk about it, so I wrote the book I wish I'd had. The book is titled "Eating Glass: The Inner Journey Through Failure and Renewal", and I mention it whenever th…
Do some user research first, make sure the pain point is real, and current solutions are not a good fit. Ask yourself how long it will take your competition to implement your solution. More importantly: why haven't they done so yet? Ask yourself how you will reach your users with the resources in your disposal. Can you compete in this space in terms of marketing spend?
It's good to try and learn. Ideally, fail faster.
It feels like the only areas where a solo builder can gain traction are in B2B products, or B2C if you're riding the latest trend (crypto yesterday, AI today).
Everything else requires an audience or a ton of capital if you hope to capture even a sliver of attention. Patience and persistence may get you there too, but it's going to take more than a year.
"Build it and they will come" is almost never a winning strategy. Of course sometimes it works, you build the right thing at the right time and it goes viral, but most of the time you get crickets even if it gets to the top of Product Hunt or Hacker News (neither of which are of any importance outside of tech circles). The right way is to talk to prospective customers first in a given niche, listen carefully to their…
It really depends on your definition of "winning." My partner and I decided to make a small game together back in 2020, release it, and maintain it. "Winning" for me meant that it should earn $500 per year and have regular players who got the same joy from it that we got from making it. It was a really modest goal We kept working on it over the last three years. It has just been slowly, but consistently getting bette…
The OP however considered their effort a failure, because they aimed at making something that would be a successful business venture (they are not clear about this, but one can read between the lines).
just for motivation, facebook went 7 years without selling anything to anybody might not have been your idea or execution, just your pedigree
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It really depends on your definition of "winning." My partner and I decided to make a small game together back in 2020, release it, and maintain it. "Winning" for me meant that it should earn $500 per year and have regular players who got the same joy from it that we got from making it. It was a really modest goal We kept working on it over the last three years. It has just been slowly, but consistently getting bette…
Sure, if your aim is to build something for fun or learning or your portfolio, those are valid goals. The OP however considered their effort a failure, because they aimed at making something that would be a successful business venture (they are not clear about this, but one can read between the lines).
I guess my point is I just hope the author wasn't too quick to write off their attempt as a failure. Things can succeed after their first year, or even after their fifth
Ive done many projects in my life, none took off. I've got my first computer in 96 and been online around 2001. So I think i have seen the internet evolve for the past two decades. And what I have been observing ever since we left the 2010s is the rise of monopolization. The 2010s were magical years. Internet was amazing place where you could find a lot of things, communities, people... you could have made anything a…
Ive done many projects in my life, none took off. I've got my first computer in 96 and been online around 2001. So I think i have seen the internet evolve for the past two decades. And what I have been observing ever since we left the 2010s is the rise of monopolization. The 2010s were magical years. Internet was amazing place where you could find a lot of things, communities, people... you could have made anything a…
I kinda _depend_ now on syncthing, organicmaps (openstreetmaps), and maybe even Firefox's offline translation service (just to name solutions to those concerns you also mentioned).
Maybe the common theme here is "offline" (so that you are off the loop of big tech's services), and being offline has other positive consequence anyway.