Ask HN: What was your biggest startup fail?

Two stories:

1. Shortly after I started working on Tarsnap, I was introduced to a "serial entrepreneur" who expressed an interest in getting patents on Tarsnap's technology and licensing it out to other companies. I wasn't interested in doing this myself -- I wanted to provide the world's best secure backups, not sell patent licenses -- but I agreed that if he covered all the costs and paid me an up front fee plus a share of royalties then he could resell the "spinoff" IP. Distracted me for about a year before he backed out. And then he asked me to pay for the money he had spent on lawyers (I laughed).

2. About five years after Tarsnap launched, I got a phone call from a YC company saying they were interested in "working together with me". The conversation went around in circles for half an hour before I figured out that was a euphemism for them being interested in acquiring Tarsnap.

This one: https://www.dsebastien.net/2021-01-04-20-months-in-2k-hours-...

Built for two years, failed to go to market, failed to raise funding, and ran out of time. What followed was even worse.

Its https://automatio.co. We built initial version back in 2019 (actually the first MVP was in 2017).

And after 3-4 years, we paused development to explore the world of blockchain.

We are all in and back fully on Automatio. Gonna catch up with lost time.

I was in 2nd Year of my engineering. as many engineers before going to the college i used to make computer games on C++. Games caught my interest really early, because thats what is really fun and challenging in programming. One day while making a ping pong game, i thought what would happen if both the sides computers will play? who will win? from that i developed a programming game, in which you need to write algorithm for your battleships to destroy other battleships. You could try really good algorithms to test them for eg. min-max, monte-carlo tree search, RL, Deep learning etc.

Since i was in India, people here do programming for the sake of coursework or to get jobs. Really passionate people are difficult to find.

I tried to launch the product in my college, but sadly no one would want to play it. The game was really challenging to grasp at the beginning, I also pitched it to my professors to include it in the course curicullum of AI, they liked the idea, but refused it by saying it will be an overhead for the students to learn first about the algorithm and then about the Game API.

for an year i dejectedly saw that not everyone is as passionate as you are. I found no market for my programming game. If it would have launched somewhere in US, it could have been better, since MIT has such a kind of competition in which students needs to make the bots. it is not that programming games have no market, there are games like : Battlensakes, coderOne etc. but their market share is very less.

I learnt the lesson the easy way i guess, because i had a safety net since i was still in college, and had a job from the following year.

But then i really understood about product market fit, which i used to ignore while they taught in entrepreneurship classes. If anyone wants to see how the game looked : https:\\aiplaygrounds.in . I have revamped by business idea and working on something else.