Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

buildwithtract.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 80 posts

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#61

Post by blitzar »

mellosouls wrote: post #25
blitzar wrote: post #16

> Between May 2023 and March 2025, Tract attempted to build a venture-backed company to address Britain’s housing crisis by improving the planning permission process. After raising a £744,000 pre-seed round in April 2024, we explored several business models: a site-sourcing tool for developers (Tract Source), a free land-appraisal tool for landowners (Attract), becoming tech-enabled land promoters ourselves, and fina…

That's quite a cynical take. They say they returned left over cash to investors though without details.

A quick scan of the company liquidation & accounts - they wrapped up with fixed assets of £4,000 (2 laptops?) and £300,000 in cash. So they only burnt through £400k in the year.

They do say fail fast.

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#62

Post by enaaem »

mellosouls wrote: post #26
enaaem wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with right wing populist parties isn't just that they don't adhere to some "woke" abstract moral concepts, but they are just terrible at governing. They are not serious in understanding the causes of any problem.

They are not serious in understanding the causes of any problem Thats an ideological accusation that can be just as easily aimed at the left.

I agree. That's why I am neither.

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#63

Post by antisthenes »

brudgers wrote: post #2

Tract was founded to build software to fix Britain’s housing crisis. Though there are problems software can fix, software cannot fix most problems because most problems are not software problems. In the case of real-estate, it is a mistake to assume general market inefficiency. For example, the "housing crisis" might be a crisis for people looking for housing, but it is not a crisis for land owners and land owners ar…

> A good rule of thumb is "if you think software can solve a problem, you probably don't understand the problem."

Someone let American health care startups know that. Not sure what any of them are doing, but it's not lowering health care prices for anyone.

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#65

Post by automatic6131 »

SilverBirch wrote: post #42
mellosouls wrote: post #11

Depressing that the main lesson learned is "Move to the US", the others also pretty standard HN/PG/SV tropes I think. A useful, quite clear-eyed document though I think. Aside, one of the co-founders websites is an unusually broad affair for a young founder: https://www.henrydashwood.com/

The "move to the us" thing seems to just be absolute twitter brain. The biggest problem London founders face is raising funding and these guys seemingly raised plenty based on an idea that that didn't seem to understand the market they were targeting.

These buffoons started with a bad idea, raised a lot of money to do the impossible, unsurprisingly failed, and learned basically nothing. Or what they did learn was irrelevant to the reason why they failed.

It's very depressing, but at least I don't work for them. That would square my depression.

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#66

Post by vitorfblima »

nickdothutton wrote: post #39

Many of the worlds solvable problems are "information problems", and therefore have a good chance of being solvable by software. Sometimes you'll even encounter a problem that looks like something else, but is in-fact an information problem in-disguise as something else. However I do not think the UK housing crisis is an information problem, either plainly or in-disguise.

most "information problems" are by design, specially when dealing with speculative markets.

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#67

Post by pjc50 »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #46
21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually- there is.. if you give up on the idea of "stopping at the station".. you just pick up a car that raced ahead and up to speed- and drop a car that gets left behind and pulls into the station.. okay maybe not with the UK-Rail.. Basically the train never stops- it just reorganizes.

....wot

Despite how mad this sounds, a smaller variant was actually tried at the peak of French techno-optimism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramis_(personal_rapid_transit...

(obviously this is something that, even if you could get it to work for large 100mph trains, is going to be horrifically vulnerable to the first accident)

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#68

Post by guiriduro »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #48
brudgers wrote: post #2

Tract was founded to build software to fix Britain’s housing crisis. Though there are problems software can fix, software cannot fix most problems because most problems are not software problems. In the case of real-estate, it is a mistake to assume general market inefficiency. For example, the "housing crisis" might be a crisis for people looking for housing, but it is not a crisis for land owners and land owners ar…

Man I wish I had half a million to blow "exploring business models"... There is definitely too much money in the hands of stupid rich people

Maybe that's not as unlikely a prospect (or as bad an idea) as you might think. Do people know if there are relatively small idea-exploration pots of money (VC, angels, subsidies, startup and govt programmes) available in Europe/UK whereby a sufficiently well-qualified initial idea/plan, well-advised small founding team, and initially tested model can go to be funded for PMF exploration without being defocussed into hawking, door knocking and/or being dependent on 'who you know'?

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#69

Post by redwood »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #48
brudgers wrote: post #2

Tract was founded to build software to fix Britain’s housing crisis. Though there are problems software can fix, software cannot fix most problems because most problems are not software problems. In the case of real-estate, it is a mistake to assume general market inefficiency. For example, the "housing crisis" might be a crisis for people looking for housing, but it is not a crisis for land owners and land owners ar…

Man I wish I had half a million to blow "exploring business models"... There is definitely too much money in the hands of stupid rich people

Is this representative of how many Europeans think about technology startups? If so it's very revealing. You have to be willing to take lot's of bets tobhave any chance that some of them will take off and transform your job market, your economy, or how you live. If you only do things that are sure things guess what... stasis.

If you have a culture that denigrates failure rather than one that celebrates proactively trying to learn from it as this postmortem aims for then you're just going to be stuck

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#70

Post by jimnotgym »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #52
jimnotgym wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hence Andy Burnham's threat to build council houses again. It is a good threat, get on with building the houses before we reduce the demand

Except he will come to realise the UK relies massively on house prices continuing upward. Construction is 20% of UK GDP. So many people and businesses in the country rely on it. If house prices fall, or even stagnate, it'll start a chain reaction that leads to recession. Its basically free economic growth, and UK made it's money largely from empire anyway, so now the empire has largely fallen it's no surprise the cou…

Not necessarily true though... building houses for the council requires builders too
Post reply on HN