HN Explorer

Poll: How many times did you fail before succeeding?

35 points by JeremyChase ↗ HN
My ventures haven't worked out exactly as planned, and I'm wondering how you have made out.

For this poll, define 'success' as generating significant income; whatever that means to you.

21 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 57.0 ms ] thread
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
ax0n
I'm still a broke hacker living in flyover country, USA but I've always had wild success in everything I've done in some way or another. Usually, it's in lessons learned, contacts made and people helped. Kind of disappointed at the narrow scope of "success" for this poll. Should have been labeled "How many times did you fail before getting rich?"
bradhe
Do you cover your bills? Significant income.
ax0n
Due to my wife's medical issues, we are in significant medical debt on the scale of half my annual salary even with my insurance. So, not really. And while we're at it: I really don't want legislation forcing others to foot our medical bills, but it'd be absolutely stellar if we could get rid of the price fixing and collusion between medical service providers and insurance companies.
andre3k1
I wonder what the mean age for "Have never honestly tried" is, and a follow-up question: "By what age do you plan on trying?"

I'm only 20, I haven't tried to go it alone because I would like to graduate from University first.

vaksel
depends.

if we are talking individual ideas, I went through 4 before I found something that was actually profitable(~$2-3K of affiliate marketing). 5, before I found that "million dollar idea"(it's not making 6 figures/mo yet...but it'll get there)

if we are talking individual projects that number is closer to 50-60(since I made like 40 2-3 page made for adsense/affiliate marketing sites and 10 Q&A sites)

exit
so, just to be perfectly clear, your success is in spamming - right?
vaksel
not really.

those tend to die very quickly and generated either $0 or maybe $1-5 every 2 months.

the ones that actually worked were those that were actually useful to the people using them...so they linked it on other sites and kept it relevant.

i.e. I have a site that lists all available exhausts(even those I'd get no affiliate revenue from) for the nissan 370z...it shows the pictures, the specs, and the soundclips which allows them to make the right decision.

and it has an exact match domain - http://370zexhaust.com/

so I rank #1 in Google for 370Z Exhaust, and rank highly on pretty much any combination of BRAND 370Z Exhaust

so even though the target market is very small(that site gets less than 1K hits a month)...it's very targeted, so I get 3-4 sales a month(and that number will go up as more and more people get the car).

And since each sale tends to be in the $1.5-2K range...that one site brings in $500-600 a month.

klbarry
2-3 major failures.

Failed many times, starting from trying to start a cereal company for religious children at age 15.

I am successful now by my own standards which would not have happened without the failure experiences.

klbarry
I also have a theory that I've never seen data on. They say that 95% of new businesses fail; I'm willing to bet that the percentage is much less for a person's second or third try.
ahmedaly
Well, I failed for more than 4 yrs.. and only since the last year, I started to see a results of what I was doing..

Of course I am responsible on this failure, but when you live in a poor country like Egypt, lack opportunity and education, and everyone is trying to stop you and call you a loser and never believe you.. then it makes me feel better that I am not fully responsible on this failure..

But when you make success, you just become so proud of yourself, and you look at those people who stopped you before and tell them: I was right about what I was doing, and here are the results!

Osiris
As others have said, it depends on how you define success. My first attempt at a business was/is selling a software application in a freemium model. I made $400 the first month, $1800 the next, and it's gone up and down since then. I don't make enough to quit my full-time job, but enough to pay down my mortgage and save up some capital for my next business that I'm working on getting off the ground.
punnned
I think success is what you define it. At the moment - my own definition for my start up is enough earnings for me not to rely on getting another job on the side.
jaxn
Outside of tech-startup-land I think that is most entrepreneurs definition of success. Then you start adding goals to success like "not have to get a job and can take a vacation every once in a while"
tylerd
If youre looking at statistics you probably have no idea of what you're doing.

Information is alienated experience.

Try something diferent. Also: if you're doing the same that 95% of the people: you're doing it wrong.

patio11
If not starting is a failure, then I failed a lot.

I have literally never had business go according to plan, which stands to reason, because for some unfathomable reason we plan before execution instead of after when we know the results. This has always struck me as wasteful.

jacquesm
The second is wasteful, the first can be useful. It will help to plan before execution so you have a good mental model of the parameter space that your business is operating in which will help you with guidance when decisions need to be made. It would be delusional to think that you can completely model the problem before you have data so as you go forward you'll have to adjust the model and therefore the plan.

It basically is an instrument to cut down on the number of surprises that you'll encounter along the way and it gives you some measure of control.

Some people get stuck at the planning stage, they never make the jump to implementation, but at some point further planning becomes a pointless exercise and you just have to bite the bullet and do something.

known
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw
garply
It's funny, I crossed the profitability line a while back after several failed attempts, but I don't really feel much different. When I finally did make a "successful" company, it was a little like when you've been practicing a song on an instrument for a while and you look at one bit that has always felt a bit not right, and you tweak it a bit and you realize that you just corrected a mistake that you had been unknowingly repeating. Or when you're speaking a foreign language and your ears can suddenly hear a place where you've always been speaking with a slight accent but which you didn't know about before.

My point is, from the beginning, I've made many such realizations and corrections and at some point I guess I just made enough to be able to create a profitable company.

The flip-side is, I feel like I'm still playing my instrument badly, just slightly less badly than before. Every day I wake up anxious about sales and think about my latest expansion plans - just trying to add stones to the wall that stands between me and starvation, which is what I've been doing all along.

I'd be interested to hear if others have had a similar experience as I.