Ask HN: What does your failure resume look like?

I truly believe that success is a culmination of a lot of failures. Serial Hustlers/Entrepreneurs tend to have done a lot of things before they struck gold. A lot of them believe these failures are what made them what they are today.

While I have not struck Gold yet, here is how my failure resume looks like -

2011 - Conceptualized a T-shirt printing business. Got samples, got first order. Partner bolted before we could service the order

2013 - Built an intersection of Twitter and Rotten tomatoes. Shipped it but couldn't monetise.Had big plans..had to shut down

2017 - Helped a few friends build web version of a quizzing app. Policies got in the way. Lost momentum

2019 - Built a landing page to validate an idea about highlights of favourite topics. Got close to 80 subscribers..mostly friends and family..Never launched.

2020 - Hustle continues....

What does your failure resume look like?

1998 - automated troubleshooting program for use by people on the production line for power conversion hardware. Worked, but system abandoned by employer after I quit.

2001 - 'real-time' monitoring and analysis of data coming from the ATE stacks on the factory floor with various trending graphs and other stuff for consumption by quality and manufacturing engineers. It worked well, but politics in the Mexico factory sunk it to create more jobs to do this stuff manually.

2006 - automation of XRF process. The technician blew the power head, so most of this testing was eventually outsourced to a local lab.

2007 - automation of "Type" tests and high-speed data acquisition for single fault conditions and thermals and other stuff. UL was too stupid to understand anything, and would not accept data unless the tests were done manually and data was hand recorded.

2019 - 'universal' environmental recording and control systems for use in test chambers and agricultural. Reliable and accurate, but too expensive and required the customer to understand a bit of physics to implement the zone mixing feature.

Alas, it isnt. I got the upcoming, in theatres and opening soon movies information from Rotten Tomatoes using their API and then used the movie name to fetch all the tweets that had the movie name in them.

For that type of stuff, probably a stupid idea because the root cause was poor process control by the factory. Typically modern production lines mitigate troubleshooting and re-work by building it correctly, which was supposedly the original reason for all of the ISO 9k hoopla. And re-working stuff on the factory floor does bad things to long-term product reliability, so my solution to the problem at hand was doubly stupid.

Wow. That is impressive.How as the Desktop app for creative writers that you created in 2017 different from the one you created in 2005?

And true, building B2C apps is always a gamble unless you have a product that contributes to user's forward movement.(What i mean by forward movement is that there is no going back to life without that product). Almost all of the B2C products that have made it large satisfy that criteria.

All the best for your B2B app. By the way, your username seemed familiar - just looked it up on Indie Hackers and Bam! there you were. Followed you :)