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Ask HN: Founders whose startups have failed, where did life take you afterwards?

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Re: Ask HN: Founders whose startups have failed, where did life take you afterwards?

#41

Post by BIackSwan »

Failed at a bootstrapped startup (http://shoutt.me/) earlier this year after a painful 2 years. Learnt a lot and failed a lot - in practically everything - marketing, sales, growth, tech, operations. Lost a fair bit of money too. Failed because the product was wrong and it took us 2 years to accept it.

Succeeded in one thing - found the right co founders.

In 2 months started working on the another idea (https://doctorc.in) with the same co founders - moved to India. Got funded this August. Could execute infinitely better on this one because of all the lessons learnt in Shoutt. The experience of failure of the first startup is paying off now in the second one.

I wouldn't have it any other way.

Re: Ask HN: Founders whose startups have failed, where did life take you afterwards?

#42

Post by jeremyriney »

kartikkumar wrote: post #38
jeremyriney wrote: post #36

I went and lived in a monastery for a little over a year. Then started something new. Couldn't stay away for long.

Wow, where was that? Sounds like a fascinating experience. Did you cut off from tech altogether for that period?

It was near Redding, CA. Unfortunately the monastery needed a website built for them so I spent quite a bit of time working online. I couldn't escape it. But building and maintaining a website for a few hundred users was much more relaxing then building and maintaining one for tens of millions.

Re: Ask HN: Founders whose startups have failed, where did life take you afterwards?

#43

Post by benologist »

Moved onto idea #2 which was a refined #1 that skipped a lot of mistakes, it wasn't financially viable to work on it so I moved on to idea #3 while mumsy picked up the rent.

Idea #3 was this 'passive revenue stream' idea of making tablet jigsaw puzzles, I figured it would be very quick + easy to set up and generate enough income to cover me for something else. That quickly changed into a full time effort to grow the company as it was so enjoyable having a product that makes money + could be better.

Re: Ask HN: Founders whose startups have failed, where did life take you afterwards?

#44

Post by blrgeek »

Startup failed (early employee).

Did my own startup; growth was insufficient. Ran out of runway (7yrs of doing startups).

Looked around & got a position as a Product Manager in AdTech, since I didn't want to get back into a dev role, and wanted to move more into the prod/mktg side.

Since then moved into an accelerator working with early-stage startups on mktg/prod.

Life's been much better than I expected when I failed.

Re: Ask HN: Founders whose startups have failed, where did life take you afterwards?

#46

Post by prezjordan »

BIackSwan wrote: post #41

Failed at a bootstrapped startup ( http://shoutt.me/ ) earlier this year after a painful 2 years. Learnt a lot and failed a lot - in practically everything - marketing, sales, growth, tech, operations. Lost a fair bit of money too. Failed because the product was wrong and it took us 2 years to accept it. Succeeded in one thing - found the right co founders. In 2 months started working on the another idea ( https://do…

Shoutt was a great idea. I'm not sure why all startups like this fail to take off - Vark, Jelly, etc. Is it a timing thing? I mean everyone has a smartphone now, right? So how come it never works out?

Wishing you and your team the best of luck with the new venture!

Re: Ask HN: Founders whose startups have failed, where did life take you afterwards?

#48

Post by unclebucknasty »

Another startup. And another, until it worked.

Here's a question that is less frequently asked: to founders whose startups met with moderate success wherein it turned into a lifestyle business that could be sustained indefinitely, but never appeared to be reaching the life-changing initial vision, what did you do?

We focus a lot on success and failure as binary concepts, but I think there are a ton of businesses that meet with some success, but fall well short of the initial goal.

Re: Ask HN: Founders whose startups have failed, where did life take you afterwards?

#49

Post by mrfusion »

joshmn wrote: post #23

Had a startup (rather, small company that was established in the hosting space), sold it when I was 19. Took that money, paid out employees, and tried to start something new and fresh. That failed. Had a co-founder that wasn't dedicated. Had some tech that I could sell and did sell, but I still considered it a failure because I never hit the mark I wanted. Consulted, took some jobs with startups here and there. Those…

What do you mean about not being a popularizer?

Re: Ask HN: Founders whose startups have failed, where did life take you afterwards?

#50

Post by kbouw »

Began a startup senior year of college (Thryv). Managed to build a team, get sales, generate revenue and score a large partnership. Long story short, I was a customer of my own product and assumed I knew what other customers wanted. I spent the next 6 months having a product built without validating my initial assumptions before launching. The product was too niche only fitting customers who had my specific workflow and I ultimately found this out too late when we ran out of steam/resources. Total timeline (including fuckups) was 3 years.

I was non-technical at my first startup (domain expert & business/marketing/sales) and after I shut it down, I spent the next 8 months teaching myself how to build software programs, becoming a now tech co-founder.

I then started my second startup (http://notiontheory.com/) by getting $20k pre-sales in 2 weeks to validate my idea before committing to it.

Attempt 2 has been far more successful and we're already beginning hiring in month 5 bootstrapped.

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