Ask HN: I'm crushed, share with me your failure story

The failure was mostly one of spending months building out a product that no one actually wanted (the classic move!) But it was also one of not working hard enough and having very wrong mental models about startups and the nature of the world.

I took almost a year off to do it and had basically nothing to show for it by the end. The psychological effects of that kind of failure are pretty rough in the wake of it. I felt pretty ashamed. All my friends and family were convinced it was impossible to lose and told me as much all the time. I think had kind of convinced myself of that too because of how easily the software field had come to me up to that point. I assumed I'd try to start a startup and do nothing but kick ass and cash checks because frankly, thats how my career had gone up to that point for the most part.

After the dust settled I got a new job, it paid well. Even failed startups seem to be a resume booster. I also got the chance to reevaluate how I approached life and thought about myself. I had my identity and self worth all wrapped up in material success. This might have been the crux of the failure. I was enamored with the idea of earning money and status rather than focused on the actual problem I was trying to solve. Particularly the status of being able to tell people that I did it - I started my own company. I also felt like I got something back from my childhood that I had lost, my curiosity. What did I really care about money or status? When I was a kid all I had cared about was poking around at interesting problems. Where had I gone off track?

I learned a lot. I feel like I emerged on the other side as an almost entirely different person. There was trauma but I grew from it and wouldn't trade it. And it didn't feel that way in the immediate aftermath by the way. At the very end I just felt terrible all the time.

I'm going to try again. I'm happy I tried it and know just how damn hard it is now.

I've found that most of the failures in my life tend to be that way, big growth experiences. It sucks that you have to experience something like that to grow but it tends to be the case for me at least.

So as for this failure you've experienced I understand how bad it feels. With time I hope you'll be able to look back and learn from parts, laugh about others.

Good Luck.

My wife hated it. She wanted me to get a real job and after three years she moved out, to a new city so she could follow a job, a year later she asked for a divorce, I kept working on the project while looking for work. Now, two years later I've had to admit it was a failure and I threw away an absurd amount of time and money. Along the way positive feedback kept me going and I thought if I kept improving something would stick, it never did. But hey I learned a lot about PHP and the subtle are of SEO on my path to failure! My take away, don't follow your dream, don't do what you love, don't build the products you want to see.

If you want to actually make a game, use something like Godot, Unreal or Unity. If you want to do all the ”fun parts” of designing a rendering pipeline, implementing shaders, inventing a scripting language but not actually make anything, roll your own engine..