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

Because there are so few 150 person companies, most CTO jobs are for small companies.

This doesn't make them any less of a CTO job. In fact, the hard decisions for a CTO are often going to be at the start. Choosing the stack, building the initial team and engineering culture...

So stop questioning yourself.

Finishing a prototype this month and going to try it again, this time with a long time friend on the business side, and a developer who knows more than me on the tech side. As a leader you never want to be the smartest guy in the room.

Biggest take away was that leadership is far more about inspiring people than giving orders, you have to inspire people personally, and then inspire them on the shared vision.

But in essence, we figured that out quite late... moving from helping to assist building a community to having created an import tool and to push our numbers harder by simply moving existing forums/communities to us.

We hit the end of the runway before the impact of that was felt. We didn't manage to raise enough funds to continue.

We've open-sourced everything now, and I'm helping a couple of customers set up their own instances. Most customers are staying on a single shared instance though, as one of the larger sites is able to cover all of the costs of this (via the affiliate fee structure we had built in).

It's a hard thing, to fail in such a way. We had 44,000 users, 280+ forums, and some revenue. But the revenue was significantly lower than costs (when you have employees, founders, etc), so the crunch hit us.

I hope that the platform continues to live, and that it continues to shine. The customers are really happy, and some of the sales effort is still paying off (I spoke to a customer 3 days ago, who have 4k users, and they are joining the LFGSS.com instance of the platform).

It would be easier if we had failed more spectacularly, more obviously. Perhaps by just not getting any users at all.

Why did I fail? Well, basically what I wanted to achieve was only a nice idea, one that everyone loved when I explained it. But then, when we implemented it, it was so badly executed that it didn't do anything useful. Then we fell in the feature creep trap, I argued with my co-founder and he parted (because I didn't listen to him, and because he wasn't 100% committed), pivoted into another failing product (at least I managed to sell it and have some real customers) and finally entered into zombie mode for a while (actually the company is still officially in business as I had to take on some consultancy projects in order to pay back €50K in loans we took). Total time of my life spent: 4 years.

In the future, I will try it again, and of course I will do different. First of all, it'll be small from the start (I'm even thinking of doing something that just provides some passive side income, in the level of 1000€ a month). Then it will have to be profitable from the beginning.