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Ask HN: What are your failed projects / ideas?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your failed projects / ideas?

#81

Post by herval »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #26

1. Before the craziness with Netflix I had created an iPhone app called 'Flickscan' which let you go into Target/BestBuy and scan the barcodes of movies and have them automatically added to your queue. 2. I used to run Fabjectory, which created 3d printed statuettes of figures for SecondLife and Nintendo Wii characters, but shut it down with the demise of people who considered themselves Secondlife consultants (who w…

The fabjectory idea still seems pretty interesting, imo... Was it too time consuming/expensive to keep it up?

Re: Ask HN: What are your failed projects / ideas?

#82

Post by no_more_death »

thibaut_barrere wrote: post #18

http://www.hackerbooks.com is a direct financial failure. The income does not cover the hosting as is! Early on I expected it would be a small earner (maybe $50/mo) but we're not there even. On the other hand, it had a fairly positive impact on the consulting/learning side of things (ETL, data processing etc).

I use and appreciate your site. I've been meaning to pick up some of those books next time I get cash to buy books.

Re: Ask HN: What are your failed projects / ideas?

#83

Post by consultutah »

brandoncapecci wrote: post #17
consultutah wrote: post #3

My biggest failures have been: 1. A sms polling site that I ended up selling flippa for less than I'd like to admit. 2. A component that made authorize.net easy for .net developers. Over the years, I made quite a bit of money off of it, but stripe released, I decided to sell the site and component off to someone for about one month's revenue.

Your two biggest failures were acquisitions? Must really suck to be you :)

Very very small $ for the time I put in. Like a few hours of work at my std rate.

Re: Ask HN: What are your failed projects / ideas?

#84

Post by thibaut_barrere »

no_more_death wrote: post #82
thibaut_barrere wrote: post #18

http://www.hackerbooks.com is a direct financial failure. The income does not cover the hosting as is! Early on I expected it would be a small earner (maybe $50/mo) but we're not there even. On the other hand, it had a fairly positive impact on the consulting/learning side of things (ETL, data processing etc).

I use and appreciate your site. I've been meaning to pick up some of those books next time I get cash to buy books.

Thank you!

Re: Ask HN: What are your failed projects / ideas?

#85

Post by bigriver »

I was building a micro blogging platform similar to a reddit or HN for singer/songwriters but the developer lost interest and the script broke so the sites were never launched.

Was going to launch: http://lyricpost.net http://haikufriday.com

Users can could create editable drafts of their works, publish to the lyricpost/haikufriday online communities and pre-schedule posts to post to their facebook accounts. Bloggers could also visit the communities and schedule lyrics/haiku they wanted to post to their facebook page. I still use lyricpost as a tool to work on and save my lyrics/songs in progress but I can't publish anything to the community. I thought starting with the lyrics would be an interesting way to discover music.

Re: Ask HN: What are your failed projects / ideas?

#86

Post by Someone »

greendestiny wrote: post #24

I made a website where you put sunglasses on a photo - seemewith.com. After face.com shut down its facial landmarking service I deleted it, but it was a failure anyway. I spent a ridiculous amount of time implementing various strategies for turning photos of sunglasses into 3d models (using bundle adjustment, advanced appearance models, and some symmetry specific photogrammetry) - in the end I did the simplest thing…

I can understand that that app does not fly; recognizing faces and showing matching animals outsode the original photo just does not look too enticing.

I can think of various ways to, IMO, make this an interesting app:

- put the heads in the photo, and tween a movie between the two (probably fairly hard because you will have to reliably cut out the background)

- use the camera to record video, animate the animal head in sync with what the head does (ideally, adjust the voice sound; more bass for a bear, twitter for a duck, etc) (probably not too hard to do)

- make it a game: using the camera, "let's see who can make his face best like this elephant", with solo games for practice and for fun ("can you beat your record of ten faces in 30.34 seconds?) (technically simple, but it probably will be a lot of work to get the game 'right', collect funny animal photos that humans can learn to match, etc)

Re: Ask HN: What are your failed projects / ideas?

#87

Post by adrianwaj »

chrischen wrote: post #48

Shopwisely.org. This was a site that donated affiliate link revenue to charity when you shopped online. Absolutely zero people used this. This site made me lust for anything that at least one person would use. Like.fm, the original version. The MVP was an applescript that published your iTunes play history to a web page. It got users by itself as soon as I put it online. There weren't many users, but greater than the…

Can you turn like.fm into a dating site? Last thing I want to do is share my playback history with other humans.

Re: Ask HN: What are your failed projects / ideas?

#88

Post by adrianwaj »

terhechte wrote: post #16

I have many, but the one that I invested most time in was QuoteVault http://www.quotevault.org/ It's a website where you can save interesting quotes from other sites or even pages / books. There's also a browser bookmark that allows you to select text on a website and import it into quotevault right away. Finally, there's a small public stream (much like your twitter stream) where you can share interesting quotes. He…

this is a great idea, I had a similar idea.

I would have js bookmarklets and remove need for signups initially. Make it into a sort of pastebin. Also, make it a summary tool too (for oneself and for sharing.) Allow users to enter alternate headline, summary, quote/s, ranking, judgement.

Check out quote.fm and drop me a line if you want to see my screenshots, brainstorm or see my other research into this idea.

Re: Ask HN: What are your failed projects / ideas?

#89

Post by adrianwaj »

thibaut_barrere wrote: post #71
jc123 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wondering what is the "conversion" rate? Around how many unique visitors do you get monthly? Your site looks good and something seems off if the coverage is good...

I collected a few stats here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvUEclt_oCPedHV... The typical conversion rate (after removing SU visits which are basically bouncers) is at 0.43%. The earnings is around $5 for 1000 pageviews (without SU) or $3 (with SU included). Any thoughts on improving this?

Make it a tweetmeme.com for Amazon items. Can you also pick out ebay items?

Re: Ask HN: What are your failed projects / ideas?

#90

Post by armaanahluwalia »

pilgrim689 wrote: post #52

A site about ideas, where people share business ideas and discuss them. It would allow you to find other people interested in their development. It would also you to see if your idea has already been implemented (if it were like a database of existing business ideas), and it would show you the progress of the idea's implementation, who's building it, etc. Didn't end up building this since it would be hard to make mon…

I guess it's not specifically or business and unfortunately doesn't attract a ton of content but I think http://ideeeas.com is great.
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