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

On one hand it was culmination of widely known ideas and "intellectual property" that Will had been openly thinking about, talking publicly about, experimenting with prototypes and proofs of concepts about, shipping products about, and even producing reality TV spots [1] [2] and a cable TV show [3] about for decades.

And on the other hand it was also a lot of handwaving and vaporware and trendy ideas and creepy social networking and online privacy surrendering and crowd sourcing and user content creating clichés.

The "Serial Hacktreprenuer" had absolutely nothing useful to bring to the table other than the self professed ability to raise money (which he failed at) and a complete lack of shame and honesty (which is very useful in the games industry, and a skill that Will lacked), but no original creative ideas or track record whatsoever.

But he strongly believed he deserved all the rights to all the ideas that Will had been talking about his whole lifetime, and that if Will didn't go through with his deal (which was just misleading talk that he exaggerated), Will might turn around and sell the "Serial Hacktreprenuer's" intellectual property that he presumed he now exclusively "owned" to some other company if Will didn't go through with the deal that the "Serial Hacktreprenuer" (pretended to) make. You know: "genocide".

For example, he was in secret talks to sell the company to Zynga, who actually only wanted to acquihire the company to get Will himself just because he was Will, not because of any ideas or execution plan the "Serial Hacktreprenuer" came up with.

But he didn't consult with Will, who didn't want to drop everything he was doing (including his other companies) to work on the next Cow Clicker [4], and he wasn't honest with Zynga or anyone else. And EA (an investor in Will's other company) was not particularly pleased with the idea of losing Will and their investment to Zynga, either. It was totally untenable along many dimensions.

So many people just want to be the "idea guy" because it's easy and glamorous and means they won't have to do any hard work, since they think their own untested unoriginal ideas are brilliant and unique, and they will be able to simply tell other people what to do all day, then criticize and blame them for not living up to their own brilliant vision if and when they fail.

Will is the opposite of that, but when the "Serial Hacktreprenuer" had a real honest to god "idea guy" in his lap with ideas and experience and a plan of how to execute, but his job was just to raise money around that fact (not auction the idea guy's meat off to the highest bidder like a golden goose), he wanted to throw away all of Will's ideas and experience and substitute his own behind his back without consulting him, instead of trying to sell what he already had. (That's also why SimCity 3000 was delayed for so long, and EA ended up buying Maxis.)

The Venturebeat article [5] and the PDFs of the lawsuits [6] [7] explained and revealed some parts of it pretty well:

>In papers disclosed by Ansari, Ansari said that Hive Mind was in talks to be acquired by or receive an investment from Zynga, the largest social gaming company. That deal reportedly valued Hive Mind at $75 million. The talks took place in November, but nothing ever panned out. By December, Parekh and Wright resigned.

>It was unclear whether Zynga was really serious about buying Hive Mind at a high valuation, or if it simply wanted to hire Wright. Ansari alleges that Wright is trying to sell the Hive Mind ideas again, only through the Stupid Fun Club, as if that entity owned them. He also says Wright is trying to implement the ideas through yet another company, Friendly Gravity.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXrbqXPnHvE

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXsUetUzXlg

[3] https://www.engadget.com/2010/03/31/will-wright-to-produce-r...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker

[5] https://venturebeat.com/2012/06/03/game-pioneer-will-wrights...

[6] https://www.scribd.com/document/95620882/CA-HiveMind-Complai...

[7] https://www.scribd.com/document/95675531/Verified-Complaint#...

Was this MinOps? If so, what are you up to now?

My last failure was an idea so terrible and provocative it had to get some kind of traction. Never failed to get a "that's brilliant," laugh, but required more finesse to get people to follow through.

Burned some bridges, but really, who wants flammable bridges anyway.

I built an app for kids that created a family currency where kids would pick the chores they wanted to do each day, earn points based upon the difficulty of the chores, and then those points could be redeemed for real-life rewards that they also chose - hosting friends for a sleep-over, a fishing trip with Dad, learn a new card game with Mom, screen time, etc.

The problem came with the marketing. When I did my due diligence before building the app, it seemed cost per click for ads was around 20 cents per click. 20 cents * 2% conversion rate = $10 cost to acquire customer. My lowball avg. lifetime value of a customer was $18 if customers stayed for 3 months on average. $10 / $18 seemed like a decent ratio, and if I could get the conversion rate up or the churn rate down, it could be a good ratio.

So I set out to build the app, which took about a year and half. But, when I finished the app and went to launch my marketing campaign, I was shocked when I saw the cost per click had skyrocketed to $2 per click, meaning my cost to acquire a customer was $100 with an average lifetime value of $18. My backup marketing plans were content marketing based, with a networking campaign with Mommy bloggers, but this takes a lot more time to scale your customer base than blasting out an ad campaign. This caused me run out of runway with my cash timeline, and so the startup failed.

I learned that its important to not get too heads-down coding your product - its important to review your growth strategy every few months while you build your product, because things can come up that can dramatically affect the speed at which you can grow, and that can jeopardize the whole operation. In my case, if I had noticed the ad costs climbing, I could have started networking with more people earlier, doing more content marketing pre-launch, and slowly increasing the size of my waiting list, or evaluating alternative marketing plans before my runway got so small at the end.

"Selling and support is harder and takes more time and effort than writing code."

So is this.