Someone should start a blog interviewing failed startup founders and letting them tell their stories and share their lessons, really in-depth. Maybe even bring in other people for multiple perspectives.
You mean http://mixergy.com/ ? :-)
Ask HN: Founders whose startups have failed, where did life take you afterwards?
131–140 of 181 posts
Re: Ask HN: Founders whose startups have failed, where did life take you afterwards?
#132I am working now. I am going to stick with this for a long time now.
Whenever I want to go into a venture, anyone I work with seems to have serious issues. I worked with someone who was a bit too controversial, another too attached to the business model, believing things will turn around.
All I can say is: Know your founders. I'd go far as to focus on their personal situation, like their risk tolerance, their "philosophy", their personal attachments, etc. The goal for a company is not to save the world, but to make money for you and your partners. If any personal attachment can get in the way, like "saving the world", or "keeping control of the company", it will. My major failure was not seeing this.
At least for me there is a regular salary now.
Re: Ask HN: Founders whose startups have failed, where did life take you afterwards?
#133Failed, job, startup -success...gave up company because of co- founder,started again.. startup- success...amazing journey first 3 years...next 4 years hell with business partner. I have failed in the year 2011 after 7 long years at my bootstrapped company. My business partner didn't want me around, I was pretty emotional after so many years, I felt it's time to accept fate n move forward. Broke up with my gf, I quit…
I'd advise you to not go back to your ex business partner.
Re: Ask HN: Founders whose startups have failed, where did life take you afterwards?
#134I read "consulting" a lot in your comments, but what does that actually mean?
Re: Ask HN: Founders whose startups have failed, where did life take you afterwards?
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a really interesting path. Could you supply more info for each phase? Like a sentence or two and the maybe the time you spent on each?
He really should write a book. It's going to be one of the most interesting stories in start-up land.
Seconded. The whole HavenCo story is genuinely fascinating.
Re: Ask HN: Founders whose startups have failed, where did life take you afterwards?
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't blame you. I know a bunch of german companies who did everything wrong, but still operate for years. Many of my friends worked for so called "web agencies" who build shitty typo3 pages en masse. Most of the people working there were interns. I worked at a academic spin off. They had good tech but bad UX. They worked on for about 14 years and didn't make any money. Somehow the founders were good at raising money…
> "web agencies" who build shitty typo3 pages en masse This is what our initial success was built on. We had a two-pronged approach. First, in the homeland of typo3, we got massive mileage out of our own CMS product which could do everything that was oh so painful with the usual products in this space. We became the "can do" guys, and we could do everything so much faster and more elegantly than the competition. Our…
> Everything else we did wrong
lol, implying completing "the illusion that everything was done in-house at the agency" wasn't wrong in the first place.
Anyway, I still can't imagine why people found agencies.
If I want to do consulting, I'd become a freelancer, this pays much better and there is plenty of work.
If I don't, I would work at a real software company that builds and sells software products...
Re: Ask HN: Founders whose startups have failed, where did life take you afterwards?
#137During the past 10 years I tried launching startups a few times, failed most of the times within 6-12 months. After each failure I spent 3-6 months trying some more relaxing things (public speaking, dancing, standup comedy), and then got back to doing startups again and again. Right now I'm quite tired of all that, but fortunately the past micro-startup & investments brought in around $300k which would be enough to l…
In what universe is stand-up comedy relaxing??? My god I would be nervous.
Re: Ask HN: Founders whose startups have failed, where did life take you afterwards?
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our story is here: https://medium.com/@buro9/the-journey-of-a-london-startup-wh... 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'…
Having read through your post I think your stagnation was due to the wrong pitch, and, secondly and as odd as it sounds, due to that dorky faces illustration at the top of your landing page. I can't think of a single case where a forum maintainer would say "gosh, I need a better community building tool " rather than "I think I need a better forum". Then, say, he lands on your page and the first thing he sees is a bun…
> You got the "hello" completely wrong.
Agreed.
We knew it too. But that wasn't the reason for our failure. Our sales pipeline was already quite full and so our focus wasn't on changing the pitch even though it was sub-optimal.
Instead we were trying to optimise the slow sales and onboarding processes as those were what held us back at that point.
It's the usual thing: We had limited resources, and so we prioritised based on what would achieve the most at the time. Even though our pitch was bad we didn't have a problem with populating our pipeline, we had a problem converting due to slow committee-based decision making and then onboarding an existing customised/bespoke forum.
Re: Ask HN: Founders whose startups have failed, where did life take you afterwards?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Was it http://www.monasteryofstjohn.org/? I grew up there (the town not the monastery).
Re: Ask HN: Founders whose startups have failed, where did life take you afterwards?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "web agencies" who build shitty typo3 pages en masse This is what our initial success was built on. We had a two-pronged approach. First, in the homeland of typo3, we got massive mileage out of our own CMS product which could do everything that was oh so painful with the usual products in this space. We became the "can do" guys, and we could do everything so much faster and more elegantly than the competition. Our…
> Everything else we did wrong lol, implying completing "the illusion that everything was done in-house at the agency" wasn't wrong in the first place. Anyway, I still can't imagine why people found agencies. If I want to do consulting, I'd become a freelancer, this pays much better and there is plenty of work. If I don't, I would work at a real software company that builds and sells software products...
I have a good friend who works at an agency and he does it for these reasons:
1) As a consultant you have to be constantly networking, and selling yourself, to keep the pipeline full. He hates that, being on the antisocial side.
2) As an employee at a traditional firm one works on one product in one industry, for multiple years in a row. He works on about 4 products in 4 industries a year.
3) Working for an agency he makes more than he would as an in house employee, yet has a number of employee like perks. This is largely because he's good, and has negotiated hard - but this stuff would be harder as a freelancer.