[flagged]
Ask HN: What was your biggest startup fail?
21–30 of 60 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your biggest startup fail?
#22Forming a partnership with a salesman who couldn't sell and who worse kept me from selling work I could have sold myself. Boy did we get a lot of calls and we learned a lot about the industry we selling into, competitors, etc.
Why couldn't your partner sell? Was it 'cause they didn't know how, didn't want to, or something else? What did you do different when you took over? (Just curious)
(1) He was more ambitious in terms of the scale of the work. I could (and did) sell and execute small consulting jobs that would have never made me rich but could have kept me cashflow positive. For him anything had to be bigger so he could get a commission. I did sell a few projects after he left and also had another collaborator for a consumer product startup who I didn't feel was listening to our subject matter experts so I gave up on him and got a job for somebody else's startup.
(2) As a team we were highly effective at getting calls and getting people to talk, often about things they shouldn't have told us. We found out a lot about the internal tools at startups, failing projects at three-letter agencies, cloud migration plans at the world's most secretive hedge fund, etc.
(3) The worst problem with this guy was that he was (at least sometimes) dishonest. One person who we were talking to warned me that he'd lied to him and I didn't take it too seriously. Then he lied to me in the heat of the moment and I accepted his apology. There was a third time that I went down to NYC to meet somebody I had met through all the marketing activity we had done and he told me how my partner had told him totally different things with him individually as opposed to the group and that was the initiator of the breakup.
Even if you're willing to put up with small dishonesty from someone or you don't take it very seriously you can be sure that it can have a deadly impact on your business.
Re: Ask HN: What was your biggest startup fail?
#23Hiring people to do a startup for me from the beginning.
Re: Ask HN: What was your biggest startup fail?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do the same thing! How do you find people who want your product before you make it? It's hard to get people to know about it without showing them something first. What if I don't have any distribution or social followings? P.S. I'm in the same boat.
If you can't find people before you make it, then you won't find them after you make it either. Which makes this an excellent question. Indeed perhaps the most important question to ask before you build anything. Too many programmers subscribe to the school of "if you build it through will come'. (Hint: that's not how it works.) Firstly you don't have to show anything to potential customers, (and even when you have i…
This is actually a really informative answer!
This quote really stod out tho: If you can't find people before you make it, Then you won't find them after you make it either.
literly every time i just wasted money in business was because i didn't work by this quote!
Re: Ask HN: What was your biggest startup fail?
#25This is from work over 30 years ago on our garden simulator by my wife and me. Being too ambitious (and perfectionist) at the start with product plans for software. Building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) instead which prioritized essential needs would have engaged customers years sooner in our case and provided valuable feedback for deciding on future directions for new features or changes. A couple of people early on warned us to simplify and prioritize, but we ignored that. Learned lots of other lessons from that project and others, but that was the biggest and most costly lesson overall.
Re: Ask HN: What was your biggest startup fail?
#26Taking 7 months to figure out the build problem in Python when we only had 6 months.
7 months for a Python build? That's brutal. What was the root of the problem? Deps, codebase size, or something else?
We had a team of data scientists who were developing models (in the abstract sense) that we would then train on specific and then deploy as concrete models.
This was just before the BERT paper came out, we were working with a few different models, sometimes the classical models from scikit-learn, sometimes these were
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolutional_neural_network
for text trained with a GPU. Ideally I wanted to make it easy for the data sci's to put their models in front of customers so it was not about getting one model up and running but developing a process to grease the skids. Back then, for instance, a particular version of Tensorflow required that you had a particular version of the CUDA libraries installed. We'd start with models we downloaded off the net so it was important that we could support whatever version of Tensorflow the model needed and have to click-click-click on various permission forms the way NVIDIA insisted on. (Turned out the CUDA libs are just userspace libraries and you can pack them up in a wheel)
There was that and the fact that pip's resolving algorithm was and is incorrect (e.g. works OK all the time for very simple project, screws up occasionally for medium sized projects but it is easy to work around and maker excuses for, a big project might fail to build with complete reliability) that you can sabotage all your virtualenvs with this one weird trick
pip install --user
After seven months or so I'd figured out close to 100% of the reason why our Python builds (really anybody's Python builds) were not reliable but the wetware problems in our organization and outside of it were severe. (If there was one root cause for "python builds being unreliable" it is that the Python community was willing to live with unreliable pip for so long)
Management though was sick and tired of Python and we were also focused on other aspects of our value prop so we quit working on the Python trainer and they had me working on another part of the system in Scala + Typescript. (There it was frustrating that we had a data analysis pipeline that didn't give the right answers consistently because even though we'd thought a lot about how to initialize it nobody had thought about the problem of how to tear it down)
I thought it was quite "incredible" (a favorite word of the CEO) when it was announced they'd been bought by one of the world's biggest footwear brands but it was true -- I really did believe in our vision and told everyone that I thought our product could make so much value for one of our customers that they'd buy us and that happened.
Re: Ask HN: What was your biggest startup fail?
#27[dead]
Re: Ask HN: What was your biggest startup fail?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do the same thing! How do you find people who want your product before you make it? It's hard to get people to know about it without showing them something first. What if I don't have any distribution or social followings? P.S. I'm in the same boat.
If you can't find people before you make it, then you won't find them after you make it either. Which makes this an excellent question. Indeed perhaps the most important question to ask before you build anything. Too many programmers subscribe to the school of "if you build it through will come'. (Hint: that's not how it works.) Firstly you don't have to show anything to potential customers, (and even when you have i…
That’s a mistake I see too many people make. They try to solve a problem and build a product from afar, using their imagination or trying to copy an existing product without having personal relationships with people having that problem (or without having it themselves). I guess it’s possible to create a product first and then find people who need it and iterate from there, but I’ve found that having personal relationships and then making something in response to a common problem they have is the only way to start and grow. That’s what I’ve found “talk to users” actually means.
Re: Ask HN: What was your biggest startup fail?
#29amazon.com
it was supposed to be a folksy, communal, whole-earth inspired bookstore that would interact synergistically with actual book stores and the rest of the world.
instead, we built a fucking monster that is awesome for consumers and a nightmare for almost everybody else.
sorry.
Re: Ask HN: What was your biggest startup fail?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why couldn't your partner sell? Was it 'cause they didn't know how, didn't want to, or something else? What did you do different when you took over? (Just curious)
(1) He was more ambitious in terms of the scale of the work. I could (and did) sell and execute small consulting jobs that would have never made me rich but could have kept me cashflow positive. For him anything had to be bigger so he could get a commission. I did sell a few projects after he left and also had another collaborator for a consumer product startup who I didn't feel was listening to our subject matter ex…
> (1) He was more ambitious in terms of the scale of the work. bigger so he could get a commission.
Finding a sales person is definitely a two-edged sword. Have them eat what they kill means they have to constantly sell small jobs, or wait for that perfect big kill. Pay them a base rate they are comfortable with, and they have no motivation.
Other sales related issues we've all probably seen where sales make promises that are damn near impossible to deliver or fail to recognize an valid sales because the truly do not understand the product. I've been hit by both of these from the same person.