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Ask HN: I failed at my startup, what's next?

8 points by shyhacker ↗ HN
For a long time, I've been the only person working on my startup; and I've now lost all confidence.

We decided to build a a solution much like PagerDuty but then rapidly expanded the scope to include features from cloud-resource utilization, web-performance budgets etc. [mistake 1 of many.]

Initially we built monolith web application, for demos and initial few users, but held up on the release arguing redesign, scalability, and loosely coupled services. [mistake 2 of many.]

After almost an year I'm no where., product is a pile of mess I cant get myself to work on.

I bike or run upto 20miles, to blow off steam but still find it hard to move on. How do people recover from such clusterfks?

9 comments

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sharemywin
Blow the project off until you can't stand it anymore. and you need to work on something. then work on generating landing pages for free trials of your new project. so, you can get users when you start. you can focus your landing page on the one main benefit and a few features the really wants.
shyhacker
thank you for the advice, really appreciate it. i've just started looking into - mautic.org.
Communitivity
Learn. Live. Grow. Rinse. Repeat.

Being an entrepreneur is not being the person that has a light bulb of an idea, shoots for the moon and either makes it or falls flat never to be heard of again. Sure, sometimes that happens.

A more apt analogy is the guy who wants a date for the prom. He asks 50 women he knows, in a forthright manner. 49 of them slap him. The fiftieth says yes.

Another analogy is from the movie Lone Survivor, where one SEAL asks another "Can you fight?" and is told "I've been shot.". This prompts the asking SEAL to tell the other "We've all been shot...can you fight?"

You've gotten slapped, or shot, and it sounds like hard. Good chance you'll get slapped by your next startup too, but it won't be as hard a slap if you learn from your failure through careful analysis, and apply what you learned to your next startup. Eventually you may make it to the prom, if you learn well, have some luck, and surround yourself with good people.

shyhacker
thank you for taking your time, that's an inspiring example. time to do some careful analysis.
_jdams
Strip out all the bullshit you called "rapidly expanded the scope" until you have one core feature, and implement that one feature to the best of your ability. Keep things simple and you will progress, I promise you. I think you found yourself at the bottom of a heaping pile of spaghetti and no longer see the exit. Don't let your frustration stop you!
shyhacker
thank you, i've been thinking the same.
alex4Zero
you just need time to get rest. Visit other countries, travel somewhere. After you go back, just work on new startup
shyhacker
Thank You! Yes, that's been on my mind, just somewhat tight on the finances :P
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