Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 453 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#231

Post by restalis »

subhobroto wrote: post #58
notyourday wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turning off a customer and refusing to turn them back on until the wire hits the account solves all kinds of problems.

Might not work in all cases. I have excellent clients who could not afford to pay for a consultation because they themselves were waiting on the client they were farming out jobs from. They still work with me because they know I understand their cashflow issues.

This really irks me. Are you my customer or are you some kind of onerous business partner so that I have to share the consequences of your business decisions? Sorry, get a bank loan and pay me, then solve the rest of your problems with your client and the bank (i.e. without me).

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#232

Post by zopa »

mmsimanga wrote: post #219

I come from a coal mining region. For over a 100 years there has only been one mine in the area, a big mine. There is plenty of coal in the surrounding areas. This is Africa. An uncle of mine had the idea that we start a mine. He invited about 20 of us, all related. We started putting aside money to register a company, pay a geologist to prospect for the coal and get mining permit to mine the coal. We all contributed…

A contract is an agreement, not a piece of paper. If you all agreed that he would represent you, than he was bound to do so, no matter what got written down.

That, at least, is the theory. There are of course many, many steps between a theoretical case and successful claim. And it's certainly easier to win a case if you have a written contract as evidence --- though 20 people's testimony is pretty strong evidence, too.

I am not (quite) a lawyer, and certainly not in your country. But it doesn't sound like you did anything wrong: it sounds like fraud.

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#233

Post by tixocloud »

the_clarence wrote: post #152
god_bless_texas wrote: post #4

I chased and successfully won a huge customer for my small and fledgling startup. I chased and successfully won a sole service contract for a key part of their business process. I allowed a credit situation with them to grow over the course of 3 months while I allowed them to have 60 day terms. And then, they went out of business and left me holding the bag with $150,000 in unpaid AR after I spent $90,000 generating…

Can someone in this thread summarize what are the terms? AR, AP, APR, retainer, etc.

AR: Accounts Receivable (money owed to you)

AP: Accounts Payable (money you owe)

APR: Annual percentage rate (usually converted from a different timeframe so you have a consistent timeframe to compare with other metrics)

Retainer: A fee that you pay to get priority from a consultant, which may or may not come with services included.

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#234

Post by jaytagdamian »

ravivyas wrote: post #216

I think the most important one was people say one thing and do another. This is true both from the sales perspective and a user experience/user testing perspective. Here are a few examples - People wanted cheaper mobile app analytics, but they wanted a brand they could trust - People wanted a lot of insights, but they would never understand most of the charts On the whole, products which are used during firefighting…

Link was broken. https://ravivyas.com/2018/09/03/mistakes-to-avoid-when-scali...

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#235

Post by tixocloud »

gfarah wrote: post #163

On my first startup right after university, we were doing an IoT device (hardware + software), our MVP was good enough to make a couple of sales amounting to 550 consumers. At that point the board decided the best way to grow was to bring in “adult supervision” aka a seasoned CEO to run the company. Even though I did all the software, I had only around an 8% stake in the company at the time. The person in question de…

That’s poor oversight by any CEO, big corp or not. In my view, the biggest asset is you guys, the engineers. Without you, there’s no product - should’ve focused more on landing prospects and contracts and getting them to define features rather than blindly come up with a go-to-market strategy.

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#236

Post by kryogen1c »

god_bless_texas wrote: post #4

I chased and successfully won a huge customer for my small and fledgling startup. I chased and successfully won a sole service contract for a key part of their business process. I allowed a credit situation with them to grow over the course of 3 months while I allowed them to have 60 day terms. And then, they went out of business and left me holding the bag with $150,000 in unpaid AR after I spent $90,000 generating…

This is something my IT MSP does that surprised me: if one of our clients doesn't pay their bill, we stop servicing them.

Even more surprising is that it happens pretty frequently.

Companies (small to medium) aren't some machine with automatic parts; it's just people, and sometimes people don't pay their bills.

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#237

Post by tixocloud »

ragebol wrote: post #164
iandanforth wrote: post #84

I started a consumer robotics company with no more than a software and hobbyist robotics background. The grand plan was to sell furry robot pets and we got as far as the prototype stage and a demo at Maker Faire. After that we hit a huge wall. There is essentially no path from hobbyist, off the shelf components to a real product. After that company died I joined a real robotics startup with some seriously talented fo…

I worked at a small robotics company in the Netherlands, technical university spinoff. We did tests in care homes for elderly and disabled people and we actually had clients that wanted to use our robots and were very positive about them. But we were just too early. The robot didn't even need to be very autonomous, shared autonomy was part of the plan (fake it till you make it and honest about it :-) ). I controlled…

Reading your story from an outsiders’ perspective, did you guys have a commercial person figure who was going to pay for the robots?

From my experience, healthcare usually comes down to figuring out who is willing to pay for it (insurer, user, govt, etc.) and less so about the tech. You are right that the tech doesn’t need to be fancy but funding model is usually the bit needed to be fixed.

A buddy of mine is successfully taking took a smart baby mat to market (so far anyway)

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#238

Post by ravivyas »

jaytagdamian wrote: post #234
ravivyas wrote: post #216

I think the most important one was people say one thing and do another. This is true both from the sales perspective and a user experience/user testing perspective. Here are a few examples - People wanted cheaper mobile app analytics, but they wanted a brand they could trust - People wanted a lot of insights, but they would never understand most of the charts On the whole, products which are used during firefighting…

Link was broken. https://ravivyas.com/2018/09/03/mistakes-to-avoid-when-scali...

Fixed it.

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#239

Post by restalis »

mmsimanga wrote: post #219

I come from a coal mining region. For over a 100 years there has only been one mine in the area, a big mine. There is plenty of coal in the surrounding areas. This is Africa. An uncle of mine had the idea that we start a mine. He invited about 20 of us, all related. We started putting aside money to register a company, pay a geologist to prospect for the coal and get mining permit to mine the coal. We all contributed…

"He invited about 20 of us" then "instead of owing 5% I ownwed 0.00086% of the mine."

Have you made explicit the share you will end up with or you just assumed that all of you would get 100% / 20 people, i.e. equal share? It sounds that your uncle worked a lot more (from the moment he looked for partners and invited them into the venture till the end of the paperwork and beginning of the operations). I concede though that your share was way too small. If the rest of the partners (18, without you and your uncle) received the same share, your uncle gave you all only a little over 0.015% which is just below any justification I can imagine.

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#240

Post by mmsimanga »

zopa wrote: post #232
mmsimanga wrote: post #219

I come from a coal mining region. For over a 100 years there has only been one mine in the area, a big mine. There is plenty of coal in the surrounding areas. This is Africa. An uncle of mine had the idea that we start a mine. He invited about 20 of us, all related. We started putting aside money to register a company, pay a geologist to prospect for the coal and get mining permit to mine the coal. We all contributed…

A contract is an agreement, not a piece of paper. If you all agreed that he would represent you, than he was bound to do so, no matter what got written down. That, at least, is the theory. There are of course many, many steps between a theoretical case and successful claim. And it's certainly easier to win a case if you have a written contract as evidence --- though 20 people's testimony is pretty strong evidence, to…

I get where your questions are coming from but the real problem was that we were first a family then business people. In my culture, there is a alot of respect accorded to the elderly. We brought up not to question people older than us. So much so I struggled at work to call people older than me by their first name.

It is fraud. Some of the family members wanted us to get the others arrested but this isn't so easy when you are family. It literally ends up with you getting your cousin's dad arrested, the same cousin you grew up playing soccer with. We collected money for a lawyer to sort it out but that dragged on and on.

I now have first had experience of the saying that "the love of money is the root of all evil". None of us had quit our jobs so we moved on. I hold no grudge, just took the lessons.

Post reply on HN