Your startup may have failed for other reasons.
Just saw the promo video on your website, am not impressed. It actually looked like a parody video. And the reference to drugs (are you saying that all musicians take drugs?). NOT impressed.
Product with maybe a good idea but seriously poor execution/marketing.
Be more serious when doing a startup (unless your intention is to be less serious, ala 9gag) or risk being a terrible parody joke.
My Startup Failed. Fuck.
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Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.
#92Reading about failures can be more illuminating and educational than reading about success. It's interesting to see how you reached a number of gateways where you could have terminated but instead continued to pursue your goals/dreams (despite going against what many would consider the logical conclusion to close). I wonder how many other business have adopted that strategy (of ignoring initial reduced interest in yo…
I think part of the difficulty of knowing when (or when not) to quit is that opportunity lurks even inside failure. My first startup attempt was a coaching marketplace and community for poker players. My co-founder and I were both successful professional poker players and coaches at the time, but we were young (20ish) and all but clueless about technology. I still think the market opportunity was there, but we hired…
I bought into a couple poker training sites. What killed a lot of that business was Poker Black Friday, I'd guess most the income for these sites was coming from US players, and that dried up immediately. There might be another opportunity coming up though. I can hardly wait to play when on-line poker starts up again in the US.
Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Startups often live on the cusp of 'other people think we should quit but we're not going to!' I appreciated these sorts of posts because they are illustrative. The only thing to be bothered by is if you don't find anything to learn from the experience.
I feel like this is a point that is often lost. It's why being an entrepreneur is such a huge risk. You have to be stubborn enough to succeed in a world where the majority of people will tell you you're going to fail, you have to ignore all that. Often times however, you do fail.
Life is difficult. Not just start ups.
Almost anything worth doing is difficult and to an extent risky. You are likely to fail both wasting time, money and other resources. But you are also likely to win big.
Anything that is easy is either already solved, or leads to mediocrity or pays too less.
To succeed at your goal you either need to get lucky or simply persist until you get there. Some can, many can't. Some just get lucky.
Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.
#94Reading about failures can be more illuminating and educational than reading about success. It's interesting to see how you reached a number of gateways where you could have terminated but instead continued to pursue your goals/dreams (despite going against what many would consider the logical conclusion to close). I wonder how many other business have adopted that strategy (of ignoring initial reduced interest in yo…
Learning from failures is invaluable. Focusing only on successes is like getting a math exam back and only studying the ones you got right. Paraphrasing Tolstoy: all successes are alike, each failure is unique. It seems like there are far more ways to go wrong than right, but developing that catalog of mistakes from which to learn is difficult when it can be so painful to share (and often to listen to) unpleasant exp…
Great pull in from Tolstoy!
Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.
#95If there's a common thread between endless startup failure stories, then it is "we talked to a bunch of people who said they'd spend money on this" and when push came to shove said people didn't actually spend money.
We're not failing, but even from a (modestly) successful startup perspective, the vast gulf between "people who like to talk to you as if they will spend real money" and "people who will actually spend money" is painfully apparent.
Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.
#96A lot of comments have thrown flak, justifiably, at your landing page video; it is terrible. But the reason is not simply aesthetic, it's because you chose to present an image of musicians that relies on tropes which could only possibly be relevant to non-musicians, and even they would probably think it was not funny. Nobody who is seriously pursuing art thinks of themselves or their work in the way you portrayed them.
Your problem wasn't amazon payments, or flakey artists jumping ship. It was that your audience wasn't even on your radar.
Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.
#97seems like it shoulda really taken off for independent artists.
Mmm, if you look at the site it's really not that surprising it didn't take off. http://zillionears.com/ Landing on that site and seeing the big 'Create Sale' button is pretty confusing. I don't think 'oh this is a site for musicians to sell their music directly to fans'. It also claims I can use 'social sales' but is that a meaningful term? I've never heard it before and it sounds pretty buzzwordy. edit: Just watche…
Hahaha, i'll take the honesty!
Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.
#98Can you go indept about what you did wrong that allowed payment processors to freeze your accounts? What about your software didn't comply with their terms that it had to be rewritten?
We were a middle-man to the artists. We had to setup so when a fan bought their music all of the money went directly to us, and then we paid out the artist. That is where we went wrong. You need to use "recipient tokens" so the money is split by Amazon. This was the money goes directly to the artist and we get send a cut directly from amazon
Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.
#99Reading about failures can be more illuminating and educational than reading about success. It's interesting to see how you reached a number of gateways where you could have terminated but instead continued to pursue your goals/dreams (despite going against what many would consider the logical conclusion to close). I wonder how many other business have adopted that strategy (of ignoring initial reduced interest in yo…
So, I guess I'll be the wet blanket here. It's pretty clear to me reading this that this person and their partner were nowhere near ready to found a startup. It highlighted the potential benefits for some people of getting a corporate(ish) job, learning about the business world, and learning the trade a little more before trying to starting a company. It's like the demotivator for "Mistakes", this is probably best as…
I'm not sure anyone is completely ready to found a startup.
If you are, you're probably not all that hungry.
Obviously a line, but these guys demonstrated plenty of competence.
Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.
#100You have a tangible yet unmarketable product. Rather than abandon it completely, would you consider open-sourcing it? Any contribution to the open source community is a positive use of time (in my opinion).
I did want to open source it, but the problem is all of our passwords and keys for amazon and everything are in the code. Is there a way to get around that?