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My Startup Failed. Fuck.

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Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.

#171
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PPC + Landing page works wonders. Avoid the confirmation bias of your peers, and target people actively looking for your idea. Build a fake checkout that collects no data, and thank your 'paying' users for signing up to be notified when X goes on sale. (You should also probably tell them that no financial information was actually stored.)

"Build a fake checkout" Are you serious? That's a criminal act called fraud. Please don't follow this advice. Just do something legal like having users sign up for a mailing list.

I'm genuinely curious - if no money ever exchanges hands, how can this be classified as fraud?

Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.

#172
Sorry to hear it didn't work out. I might just share two thoughts that occurred to me:

1. The site's tagline is "Sell your $h!t with Social Sales!" which I would think is kind of off-putting in the context of a vendor relationship

2. Your sales model appears to be in contrast to how supply and demand work. Your model is that as more buyers sign up, the per-unit price goes down. I understand your theory is this causes people to share it with their friends. But, people who are buying indie music not only don't want to screw the artist -- they're also not going to bother talking their friends into something just to save a nickel.

3. I think this would have made more sense for the artist if the price went up (slightly, like from $4 to $5) as sales went up, with the early people locking in their price.

Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I like the idea of a catalog of mistakes. TechCrunch makes it easy to get caught up in all the success stories, but there's no easy way to learn from the failures, which can be far more enlightening. I decided to start a Twitter profile to collect all these post-mortems in one place. If such a resource already exists, let me know! https://twitter.com/StartupGrave

There's the TechCrunch deadpool.

http://techcrunch.com/tag/deadpool/

Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.

#174
post #171
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Build a fake checkout" Are you serious? That's a criminal act called fraud. Please don't follow this advice. Just do something legal like having users sign up for a mailing list.

I'm genuinely curious - if no money ever exchanges hands, how can this be classified as fraud?

This will probably seem obvious afterwards...but if you sign a contract with someone to provide a good or service for $0 and then fail to do so, that could be considered fraud.

Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.

#175
post #174
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely curious - if no money ever exchanges hands, how can this be classified as fraud?

This will probably seem obvious afterwards...but if you sign a contract with someone to provide a good or service for $0 and then fail to do so, that could be considered fraud.

You could put some sneaky stuff in a ToS in theory

Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.

#176
post #146
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine being anything other than angry after filling out a payment form and then being told that there was no reason to have done that. On a new web application?

Although I consider the practice unethical, the other side would (does) argue: "Who cares? You are trying to get 20,000 customers and you pissed off 100 to get there." I still can't bring myself to do it, though.

This is advice Tim Ferriss actually gives in his first book. I generally agree with your sentiment.

Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the idea of a catalog of mistakes. TechCrunch makes it easy to get caught up in all the success stories, but there's no easy way to learn from the failures, which can be far more enlightening. I decided to start a Twitter profile to collect all these post-mortems in one place. If such a resource already exists, let me know! https://twitter.com/StartupGrave

There's the TechCrunch deadpool. http://techcrunch.com/tag/deadpool/

True, but those are more like PSA's than post-mortems. There's not much one can learn from those announcements.

Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was referring to the dig at Christians. Not the vulgarity.

Sorry if you took my comment as a dig at Christians, I was merely stating an observation based on the data we collected. I personally encountered a handful of Christian musicians who stated our use of vulgarity and drug references were the reason they were not interested in our product. For example, we also had some female musicians who were not excited about our video because it was geared towards guys. not a dig at…

"I don't apologize for what I said, merely how you took it."

Re: My Startup Failed. Fuck.

#180
post #170
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the worst advice I've ever seen on HN. Much better to have PPC + landing page and a "tell me when this is available" signup.

Isn't this exactly what leads to the "a lot of people said they'd pay for it" false assumption? Not such a sound advice either...

The distinction is your landing page is only found by people looking for the solution you want to offer. They've already decided they have a problem, and need to fix it.

Contrast that with polling a random sample of your target demographic, where any number of things can spoil the results. People could say they like the idea just to be polite. People could have never thought about the problem you're solving before, but think it's neat. People can misjudge how much they care about it. People can have an enthusiastic initial reaction, but think the idea is dumb on further reflection.

It's the same sort of problem with polling for election results: you can't ask a whole bunch of random people who they're going to vote for and turn the raw results into a pie chart. To get useful data, you have to carefully predict which of your respondents will actually turn up for the election, and which ones aren't going to change their mind between the time you poll them and voting day. And even then, in the end, it's not the pre-election polls that determine the new leader, it's the election itself.

That distinction is what's being presented here; asking a bunch of people is only useful if you're very careful about filtering out the junk answers. You should instead measure people who have already decided, without your prompting, that they have a problem and have decided to seek out a solution for it.

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