Failed for the past 12 years as an tech entrepreneur
So I started to look for something easy to do work on that would not consume a lot of my time. Blogs were a rage back then and multi-million dollar exits were quite common. I bought a domain and installed WordPress and started blogging after my working hours. I started a technology blog in the hope to replicate the success of Mashable and Techcrunch. I spent about 4 hours every night covering tech news about companies and social media in general.
2 years passed and I burned out myself. Traffic to the blog was flat and I was not making any meaningful money. I shut it down.
A few months later, I started a website that pulled information from Amazon and displayed dresses in a fancy and intuitive website. I opened a Facebook page, spent a lot of time marketing it and eventually made a grand total of 2 sales in a span of 3 months.
I decided to give up.
The very next year, I decided to build a note-taking web app that was a mash of Google calendar and a to-do list app. The idea was that people would see today's schedule by default and they would easily add and manage tasks.
I hosted it for a few months and lost interest due to a lack of customers.
After taking a break for a year or so, I decided to do something ground-breaking. I built my version of Facebook Groups/Slack that would allow people to share something interesting with others. You could create groups and add/remove people from them. The UI was fancy and a few of my friends and family loved it.
A few months after running it, I shut it down. I found it hard to justify its existence since everybody else was using Facebook groups and with the rise of mobile apps that allowed seamless sharing, my application made no sense.
Sensing an opportunity in media space again, I then started a news aggregator website that aggregated news titles from hundreds of outlets storing thousands of news articles per day. The website was smart enough to cluster the news articles based on topics which, Google news does well. People loved it and it got great reviews, but it was not growing fast enough.
And like earlier, I ran out of patience after 6 months and I shut it down.
After multiple failures, I decided to take a longer break. I had pretty much given up my entrepreneurship journey knowing there was no way I could build a reasonably successful business.
A year passed and I started to feel uneasy with myself and my day job.
So, I built a stupid web app that cleaned new articles by stripping them off of ads and showing only the relevant content. I shared it and got no real feedback from others. Nobody cared.
That's where it hit me, why not pivot to and a link management platform? I thought it's so easy to build and manage it. I could feel the tingling in my body. I built https://blanq.io/ with the excitement of a toddler.
I was so wrong.
I spent the next 1 year building the landing page, the entire web app plus some extra features in a hope that it will take off.
For the first 18 months, I had no paying customers. I put everything into this. All my previous experiences of failures and learning went into building this platform. "How could I fail?" I thought.
I then decided to stick to it and give myself 3 years to decide its fate.
On the 19th month, my efforts started to pay off. I landed my first customers then 2nd and then 3rd.... and so on. It's been 8 months since then and I now have 10 paying customers using my platform almost every day and growing every month.
My learning:
1.Don't quit too soon and don't be too hard on yourself.
2.With each failure, you do get better at not failing.
3.You improve at everything as time passes - marketing, programming, sales, operations.
166 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadHave you tried to collaborate with people with tangential skills, e.g. someone with excellent sales/marketing background or in a niche like real estate or law or whatever that has a ton of insights?
Even for Blanq, maybe you could find someone that has a strong need for link shortening for their business, whatever it is?
Now I am 36 year old and as stated in the post, I am giving yet another shot with https://blanq.io with a hope of succeeding this time.
I'd rather work remotely for a US company and move my ass somwhere like Brazil or Nigeria or Philippines or Thailand.
You'd maybe feel the boredom and the lack of power in the decision making and the shame of having to report and reply "yessir" .
But once you clock out you can then be the boss of the hood and recoup all frustration accumulated during worktime, throw the weight of the mighty USD around, which is even more exacerbated by the tech salary as well as the possibility to invest every excess in the S&P500 so that you can keep on keeping on.
The west has essentially very few people (and diminishing by the day) and each and everyone of them have a telegraph pole up their you know what. It should only be used as the money making app
What did he mean by this?
The west is the money making and business app. Strictly business, don't even call or seek people for reasons which aren't business or money making.
Social relationships and genral life outside work app is Africa and South East Asia. Unlike the west they have loads and loads of people who are not spoiled by abundance vis-a-vis the west which has very few people and all with a telegraph pole up their as*hole.
Breathtaking nature accessible for days on end for the price of a burger in Manhattan
I notice similarities in what you're describing, particularly when it comes to your target market and products.
B2C not B2B.
And generic, anyone products, rather than targeted niche products.
A lesson that took me a long, long time to learn. Targeting consumers over businesses is doomed to failure unless you strike the Facebook / Instagram lottery.
Consumers don't buy software or pay for SaaS apps, businesses do. Netflix and Spotify are exceptions, not the rule. Building a generic app for consumers is futile.
Far better to build a targeted app for a niche business use case.
So indeed, consumers do not buy software - they buy other things (that businesses do not buy): Services and solutions to "real-world" problems.
For example, Netflix has all the benefits of scale, low cost of capital, etc. and their profit margin is 11% on a service that starts at $9/mo. So if your service has similar pricing power to Netflix, you might need order of 10,000 individual customers to cover a single engineer. And that's after the frequently massive investment required up front to build a product to B2C standards.
In B2B, it's often easier to find some niche that a) is underserved or not served at all, b) is relatively valuable to some set of customers, and c) can be served with a lower quality of finish because it's a business app.
In the B2B space, it's much easier to charge $49/mo, $99/mo, or higher because businesses tend not to be price sensitive in that range. Also, businesses often will need SSO or other "Enterprise" feature and so then you have a $10k+ annual contract for the same service. In this band of self-service B2B SaaS, there is typically not much of a "sales" process. Just post the info on the site and let prospects choose. You can do demos when it makes sense. But nothing like a 1-year intensive sales process. The sales process is closer to B2C, but for more money and less churn.
It's much easier to build a business when you only need to make 50 or 100 sales (and support 50 or 100 customers) to get to profitability.
Honestly, having bootstrapped & sold a SaaS myself, I would not consider bootstrapping anything with a starting price point of less than about $49/mo. And I would only go that low if customers were encouraged to land on a plan at $99/mo or higher.
But can this really be true? Plenty of B2C software companies make good and continuous revenue. Take for instance the German company Ashampoo. Their products are not exceptionally original and they were always in a crowded market. Yet this company is everywhere in the low-cost consumer desktop software space. I know this company even though I've never even used one of their products. There are many companies like that. Remember OO Defrag? Well, I just checked, OO Software is still around, located in Berlin, Germany. Ever written a novel in German? Papyrus Autor is used by enthusiasts and professional writers since the 80s. These are just examples from Germany off the top of my head but there are similar companies in nearly every country.
Perhaps what you say is true for "web apps" with subscription model, it seems very hard to reach private users and convince them to pay a monthly fee. But I doubt it's true for desktop applications and I'm also not sure it's true in general for mobile apps.
B2C - Customer/User has time, not money.
B2B - Customer has money, not time.
The revenue per customer is lower but the volumes higher. It is doable.
Enterprise sales has a long cycle indeed, but I'll say it depends on the pain you're solving and the target market.
When I see something like this I think of mass emailers. They tend to require link analytics but otherwise I can’t think of another use case. Maybe Twitter or other social media publishing.
Since publishing is an application where link analytics tends to be used I would focus there. I can imagine it would be much easier get customers for that more user-oriented product than for something that is lower in the stack and more abstract and will likely end up being used for that use case anyway.
Just my 2 cents, trying to help.
The good thing is that you can basically track anything. One of my clients uses short links on buttons and images to track conversions.
And yes, publishing industry can definitely benefit from this.
Consulting has gotten me here and I've had up to 4 direct hires with me, but my dream has always been to run a product business. I must have attempted 3 dozen different ideas by this point.
But on Friday last week, we reached our 100th subscriber. Combined with other free products, we now have over 130k daily active users which sounds more impressive than it is. The MRR is still tiny and we still rely heavily on consulting projects that have been more and more difficult to line up.
It's been difficult, sometimes extraordinarily so, but we have such happy customers with huge amounts of positive feedback. It feels like this could really go somewhere. The fire still burns brightly within me though I don't know how. I'm determined not to let opportunities pass me by again.
I have never shared this anywhere.
Consulting is an excellent way to hone the non-coding skills necessary for bootstrapping a company: Scoping projects, timeline estimation, choosing tradeoffs, finishing things, selling things, presenting products to others.
It's also helpful to be able to get out and talk to other businesses and people on a regular basis. Bootstrapping can be extremely lonely in a way that is hard to understand if you've only ever worked inside of companies with people to talk to.
Neither is better than the other, but one might be better for a given situation.
That is, being capital efficient is good, but being distracted by other non-core things excessively to try and conserve capital is bad.
But that doesn't mean that bootstrapping with a consultancy isn't a viable path. It's only when you do it when you have capital sitting around that's not put to good use that it's a problem.
However, take care to not let the consulting income misdirect your incentives (founder or business). A common trap is to chase good consulting income, and ignore the recurring SaaS income that creates a stellar business.
Consulting income: 1. leads to highly variable income, 2. is often dependent on you or a few star employees, 3. creates tiny businesses that get sold for small amounts, 4. misdirects the product direction, 5. strongly misdirects the sales team if they get a commission on consulting fees.
SaaS income requires discipline to chase, but often creates a business with far more long term value (yearly dividends, and market value, hopefully plus a $$$ growth rate bonus).
Here's what I learned via trial and error.
A long time ago, when investors and accelerators and MBA programs began to dominate the startup scene, founders got distracted.
I saw (and sometimes created) half-baked apps and websites, useless market research, chasing trends, chasing vanity metrics, investor pitching contests, startup theatre, and "build it and they will come" BS.
Build something people want and will pay for.
Not just say they want.
Not just say they'll pay for.
Make something that they see and will immediately take out their cash/cc/paypal/venmo and pay for on the spot.
If you can get that far, things start to fall into place. As others have noted, consulting may be necessary to keep things going.
This may not be applicable to capital-intensive fields, regulated industries, enterprise SaaS, but it works for a lot of B2C and even B2B startups.
> Not just say they want.
> Not just say they'll pay for.
Thanks. From my point of view these are the most important points.
Also listen to your customers and pick the things that meet your goals of the product but avoid including features that are very likely not scalable/adaptable/useful for other customers.
It does also not hurt if you are convinced about your product and stick to it for an even longer period (years in my case). But sometimes it is necessary to jump off much earlier (months in my case) e.g. when the market is not big enough or competition is too crazy or similar.
I share your frustrations, but I see things from a different perspective when doing side projects for a few reasons:
1. I treat innovative ideas as potentially growing to something amazing and see them more as passion projects that help me to grow in many ways, including learning new technologies, learning other trades (e.g. marketing, sales).
2. I use my skills learned in side projects as bolsters to my resume. I can testify that I've been approached by employers and been seen as a better candidate than others based on the side project experience I've done. Further, I've gotten other side-gigs that are paying as a result of the side-gig skills I've acquired. Adding these hard and soft skills to your resume makes you a better candidate overall and opens opportunities otherwise unavailable without.
3. I still work a main gig that I (mostly) enjoy, which enables me financially to be able to spend my off-hours working on and funding my passion projects. This to me feels safer than going all in, although it could be argued things inevitably develop more slowly this way.
4. My reward for hard work is similar to open source development in that I'm creating something for humanity that wasn't available before, which may or may not make money, but benefits me for the reasons stated above.
Perspective helps here, and if it grows into something bigger then all the better. If it doesn't, then there are other benefits to doing it that help shape you and your skillset.
I'm not really a business expert, but when I hear about your failed projects it sounds like the marketing and distribution channels weren't really fully fleshed out. It's quite hard to get people to pay for things when you don't know exactly who they are, what they value, or where they hang out. This is a really common problem for developers creating product businesses apparently — you build something and nothing happens because nobody knows about it. I'm glad you feel like you have more momentum now though!
When you reflect on what you were doing in the last 12 years what do you think was going on that you could have improved?
I do tech for an email security service and we start blocking these very quickly once we see any anything we don't like.
So what we find is that as new ones come into the market they are eagerly adopted and we start to see evil links. From our point of view the earlier we put in place a wholesale block the better, because otherwise they may become "too big to block" like bit.ly etc... Although even these are blocked by gmail from time to time (for example).
Instead we expand them later and visit and scan them after the fact. But at that point the email is often already delivered.
But bottom line url shorteners are so abused as to be a de facto sign of spam.
The way I counter this is by not allowing people people to create generic links in the first place unless you are a paid customer. Plus, you need to add your custom domain to do something meaningful on the platform.
That pretty much weeds out 100% of scammers.
Took me about a decade. I also tried a note-taking app (every new developer's rite of passage it seems), an event guide, digital magazine, and an assortment of other projects whose domain names no longer resolve.
Suck as it may, each failure is a lesson in what not to do. If you find yourself back at square one and still have the drive to keep trying then it's only a matter of time before you create enough value to open wallets.
I think the experience was invaluable, and I don't regret it, but I arrived at the conclusion that doing a startup is largely overrated.
Why stress out for 60 hours a week for years on end watching your savings dwindle when you could have been making great money at a medium or a big company with great benefits that doesn't force you to work on the weekends and allows you to take paid time off? If you land at FAANG or similar, you'll make more money than most startup people ever do anyway.
The startup community loves to talk trash about regular corporations, but for me the work/life/stress balance has been a great trade off.
Shameless plug: we are using software to combat climate change (https://bractlet.com) and we're hiring (just like everyone else)! Feel free to email me directly (brian at bractlet dot com) if you are interested.
Most of my business ideas have failed. Some have had limited success (a few hundred per month at most), and only ONE (my latest one) has been pretty noticeably successful right off the bat.
Just keep trying and pushing forward. It has taken almost 2 years since launch, but my Google Sheets add-on that imports bank transactions called BudgetSheet ( https://www.budgetsheet.net ) is only just now very close to $1k MRR and still growing. It's funny to me because my most successful ideas have never been ones that were new or novel. Just practical, useful, and really well understood things that save people time or make their lives easier.
Then you created a note taking app. I don't know if note taking apps were that huge in 2010, but it seems like they were since Evernote was founded in 2000. Ditto with a social media platform, with a news aggregator, with a link manager. Don't get me wrong, massive kudos to you for launching and working hard on these products. It just seems to me that you've been making stuff that already exists and doesn't have any differentiation. Even if you had a new feature or two, to quote Steve Jobs, that's a feature, not a company.
And I wish I could share some pics of my failed ones, I did try my best to differentiate.
It feels like you're jumping on trends when they have existed for years already without bringing anything new to the table. That'll never get you anywhere.
With all due respect, who the fuck are you? And who the fuck do you think you are telling anyone they won't get anywhere? OP's current project has paying customers. That's more than most people ever get to.
Much respect to the persistence, and please ignore these naysayers. I have no doubt you know your space and customers better than they do.
I feel like this is the same thing that happens with musicians and artists - it's trend hopping and hoping to get a second of the spotlight for what's in vogue. One year it's brostep, then it's NFT, then its your vanlife miniseries on Youtube, then it's your hyperpop EP, then it's your "metaverse" art project, etc. I know a lot of people like this and few of them seem to find lasting success because they either aren't sticking in a certain domain long enough to really excel, or have no real passion other than chasing "success" which results in ventures that are half-baked and obvious clones of things that already exist.
I suspect for every $1000M unicorn, there are 1000x $1M businesses.
1. Many of those 1000 $1M businesses can be very derivative, but with some focus that is just too specific for competition (vertical, market, # of clients, feature focus, whatever). That link manager could easily be a yummy small business.
2. I suspect one can make as much money *adjusted-for-risk* with a $1M businesss as one can trying to make a $1000M business (cap-table and yearly profits are also often ignored, and one might make little especially if one is not the founder of a unicorn).
I would love to see the average return for the founders of ycombinator startups. Given the power law (Pareto) distribution, it can probably be calculated by knowing the number of founders from 2005 to 2010, and some rough estimates of returns for the major ycombinator success stories.
VC as an fund category has poor returns (“the Cambridge Associates U.S. Venture Capital Index averaged just 5.06% per year between 2000 and 2020”). Also VC returns compared with founders equity: have higher seniority (preferential), lower volatility, diversity, and the chance of getting the necessary outlier success story returns.
The median/average founder in the market is a loser.
Do a funded startup for social status, to learn, to gamble, or for kicks. Don’t become a funded founder because it makes financial sense for an individual.
Nassim Taleb says we should thank founders, successful or failed, for the risk they took, and I agree with him. So here it is, from the bottom of my heart: Thank you!
Also glad to see many others sharing similar stories about not giving up. Since we are on a christmas mood already, big hug to all of you.
Regarding me, I've been making and breaking stuff for about 15 years with moderate success. On 2017, I went to KAUST (flagship uni at Saudi Arabia) as it was offered to me as a place that was looking for talented people, to help them develop and thrive. I drank the kool-aid and gave it a try. It wasn't that great but not bad either, I was enjoying what I was doing so I decided to stay. Time goes by and on 2020, my daughter gets kidnapped by some of the staff there, after I refused to let my wife work for some guys who were doing some pretty questionable stuff. With (not so much) help from my embassy I was able to leave the country and put myself and my family safe again. Almost 4 years of work down the drain plus the psychological damage inflicted to us. That event truly, 100%, burned me out.
But, ..., came back right before the pandemic started, and that turned out to be a blessing for me. The world stopped so I didn't have much to do anyway. I spent time on me, doing things I enjoy, connecting with old friends, taking care of my parents, resting, etc. Earlier this year, the urge to make stuff came back and I launched a climate-related startup that is doing quite well. I have people who work with me (that's a first!) and they keep me moving, focused and motivated. We are about to start working with a HUGE client next January and that is making us feel quite excited. Highly recommend this to everybody, it's common for hackers to tend to "solve everything by themselves", but try to get more people involved, whether they're associates, coworkers, mentors, you-name-it, there's people out there that can make your journey much more enjoyable.
And, as other's have said, don't give up on your dreams, no matter what. If you have to start over, then start over, it won't matter, you will make it in the end!
Regarding your story, I mean wow, that must have been a scary and stressful situation. I am glad you are in a better place now.