I guess no body is doing this, everyone talks about making money.
So, let's use this post to share our failed projects and the learnings with other founders.
I had my own company in design and development. Too much administration regarding everything and taxes. And thought I could do it ALL by myself... (Administration, Development, design, getting new customers, giving support etc)
Next time I would do this, I'll probably will pay someone to do administration and taxes!
I don’t have a site to point to anymore, but me and some cofounders built out a physical therapy vertical saas (patient management + mobile patient portal).
The issue: many PTs are VERY analog—sheets of papers with exercise, very few touch points, no data collection, etc.
The solution: modern patient management system for doctors, a mobile app that will remind you to do your prescribed exercises, track your response, have reminder videos so you’re doing everything right, and feed difficulty levels, etc to the doctor in real time to monitor recovery.
The problem: selling to doctors is hard. Replacing their entire day to day interface for their whole staff is a giant barrier to pass. Many patient management systems bundle in handling insurance, so his ended up being a “solve everything, then we’ll talk” type of system.
What I’ve learned: you need to make sure you’re MVP is ACTUALLY viable. We talked to a lot of PTs, and they were interested but not forthcoming with exactly what they would need to switch—still not sure how to pry out that info. Vertical saas is a double edged sword: the customers are bigger and stickier, but the sales process is slower and harder. Doubly so if you are trying to dethrone other deeply ingrained saas businesses from day one. A better approach likely would have been an extension to improve existing ones, then our own system.
Do you think offering some kind of onboarding/deployment service would have helped? Helping them migrate all their data and workflows into this new tool?
It likely would have helped on the margin, but honestly it seemed like we were selling a much better experience to patients, and only marginally better experience to doctors. We really needed to nail the doctor experience, but there is some nuance there. Generally, PTs have front office people who spend their day in these tools, while doctors have fairly limited exposure. The shortcomings of the existing tools aren't as obvious to them.
One thing was completely clear---this was not as close to product market fit as we expected it to be, so we decided to back away from the project instead of raising money and doubling down on trying to force a solution to a problem that wasn't very important to our direct customers. In other fields, tools that affect our customers customers are very successful IF that drives more sales, or can affect the bottom line in some way. Physical Therapy is less of a sales business and more of a referrals business (from other docs), so we didn't have much impact. If anything, we may have prevented business by increasing exercise adherence and improving outcomes, therefore cutting "recurring business" (decreasing the amount of visits/injury, or the overall amount of recurring injuries).
“ In other fields, tools that affect our customers customers are very successful IF that drives more sales, or can affect the bottom line in some way.”
Very insightful - whatever solution you have must actually drive enough $ for someone to really want to give it a try. Which is a huge ask if someone’s business isn’t really tech oriented and they don’t really believe the optimization is worth breaking through existing ways of doing things.
My spouse is a PT and hates her software. I get the sense that she also has an above average appreciation for the needs of the admin staff. They quote literally make the difference between a good day and a bad one by the choices they make around scheduling.
The problem is that she works for a large chain and the people with purchasing power are not clinicians.
Good point, and this was another problem we hit. Procurement for larger practices was done outside of the individual offices, making the sales less direct and more complicated to find the right person to talk to. Ultimately, we decided to target smaller practices hoping for a more straight forward sales process due to this.
It seems to me that really successful entrepreneurship requires enough time in that field to really understand the rough edges of the domain, but not so much time in the field that you actually start to accept the existing solutions as “good enough” in a sort of stockholm syndrome.
You need to be an expert with a beginner’s mind, which is extremely difficult.
I didn't work in the field, but I had a good friend who was doing weekly product planning calls and getting us in front of PT's on a regular basis to show our product and discuss what they felt was important. I agree with you, it would have been better to have some personal experience, but I'm not sure if this was sufficient or not.
Ahh yes, I know a few people who work in healthcare tech in Germany and it seems like you're way ahead of us. I'm glad you're able to leverage tech a bit more effectively over there. My impression is that the tools the US uses are far behind due to over regulation, which I hope is changing as a result of covid.
And don't be sorry! Most people who have a successful startup have many failed startups behind them, there's only one way to learn most of these lessons.
How many doctors did you ask? I've considered a similar startup idea with some colleagues. I think what's important in this field is that you find _a_ doctor / therapist willing to work with you on this, others will follow suit once they realize that it works. Further, finding this doctor will be hard. So you have to ask and pitch to many, many doctors, until you find one that is willing to work against the "tried and tested" method, risking going bankrupt, but also having a chance of being at the front if the next disrupting change.
"perfect is the enemy of good enough" I learned a few years ago. Thanks for sharing, this is really interesting as I'm working a multiplayer project right now. What was your marketing budget like? How did you get those 4000 people? Do you have a postmortem or dev log from the time?
To get the list of people: We went to a lot of indie meetups/presentations, posted all over Reddit at every opportunity (got on the front page of many gaming subreddits a bunch of times), constantly spammed our friends (there were 5 of us working on it), got involved with faculty and students at Full Sail University, anything we could. We were all very passionate about it and it pretty much consumed every waking hour of our lives; I even refinanced my home to pay for development.
It was an incredibly fun endeavor... until it wasn't. Haha.
We never did a post mortem because it didn't actually end... It just fizzled out (it did end some friendships though). I (lead dev and co-founder) left the project and my ownership share (after the Kickstarter failed) to the other partners;
. They then tried to find someone to either buy or invest in the development of the project for a few years. I only got notice that they finally stopped paying the server bill a week or so ago.
Is Fullsail university a good place, or a diploma mill? Their commercial spots of a decade ago made it seem 1:1 to places like Everest University or ITT Tech.
I don't know. We thought it was the best graphics school in central Florida (where I live) and we had an in with a professor there. We paid some students there for most of the 3d modeling work we needed.
> Don't let perfectionism get in the way of shipping.
I see this a lot. I wonder if a lot of creatives have obsessive personalities that cause us to want to fiddle endlessly with something before we release it?
You say that your team should have had the willingness to ship a flawed product sooner, and that maybe that would have changed your fortunes.
If you're ok with sharing, I'd be interested in learning more about why you believe that. Did you hear that from former beta customers later on down the line? Is it an intuition you have from your reflections on the period?
Also, what brand of "perfectionism" are were talking about here? Chasing down minor performance boosts? Gold-plating existing features?
The way I worded it was weird... we never shipped to beta, despite having 4000+ people sign up to be beta testers. We only shipped a "closed beta" (you had to ask one of the devs personally to let you in) to people in our own city. It was a location-based game (like Pokemon go), so there has to be a bunch of people in the area if your actually wanted to do anything fun.
Regarding perfectionism: the game was very rough around the edges in regards to in-game assets. Performance was also a concern, both on the device and the back-end. The device could slow to 1-2 FPS if there were enough assets (100s of troops firing at once - which was easy to do with a few friends playing together at once) animating at once. The server would slow to 4s+ response times if there was enough activity in a single geographic area.
I was okay with shipping with these issues, but the other partners weren't.
"I was okay with shipping with these issues, but the other partners weren't."
Maybe on a different timeline, you would have regretted shipping too early - because first impression matters, too and many people who walk away, after the first try will not come back for second try.
"Really though, we probably would have failed either way, mostly because we didn't know the right people."
Maybe, but from the little I read, it seems like it might have been more the technical challenges (performance) too hard to overcome with the given ressources/target hardware.
Maybe you're right. There were lots of performance issues that were easily solved, like: we were writing to PostgGreSQL for every single game action, our poly counts were in the several hundreds to thousands but could have been well under 100 in many situations, and we were always globally consistent but could have been eventually consistent (through geographic sharding and a "speed of information" data propagation rule -- since all cells don't need any game state from distant cells due to players having to be in a physical geographic location to play). Though I'm sure there were even more huge issues not yet anticipated.
Ultimately, failure was always the mostly likely outcome here, even if we had millions to spend.
The most unfortunate part for me is that we didn't ever get to learn if people actually liked or disliked the game, since we didn't release it outside our own circles.
Monetization was tricky because we didn't want any pay-to-win type of gimmicks. Instead, we were planning on game customization and in-game promos for fast food places and theme parks (e.g., show up at a McDonald's and you could win something you can't get anywhere else in the game).
High acquisition costs and high churn meant the unit economics made no sense.
If you have a subscription model and you're dependent on ads for acquisition, it's not enough to believe that with enough optimisation your business model will start to make sense. If it doesn't make sense from day one, it's highly unlikely there's a viable, reliable business there.
I'm sure you'll get a fair number of interesting stories here, but you'll find a _ton_ at IndieHackers (https://indiehackers.com) which is a sort of spin-off community from HN that's focuses more on bootstrappers and solo founders.
For me, I launched a five projects in 2021 that were a mix of total flops and sorta-flops, and they all flopped for the same reason:
* Saascast.io (https://saascast.io/) -- revenue forecasting for Stripe-based SAAS businesses
* Offramp (https://offramphq.com/) -- Get automatic feedback from unsubscribing customers
* Donel.ist (https://donel.ist) -- like a TODO list, but more motivating
* Sandpiper (https://sandpiperhq.com) -- inventory tracking for people who hate inventory tracking
* Rent Robin (https://sandpiperhq.com) -- automatic rent collection for small businesses
Saascast and Offramp are more or less total flops; I keep them running because I use 'em in all my other projects and I find them useful. They're flops almost entirely because I don't know how to market them, and I'm not convinced that they have enough value-add or PMF to be worth pouring money down the search ads sinkhole.
Donel.ist is, arguably, a total success because it got me out of a moderate depression (being fired and immediately going into lockdown sucks) and back into the habit of building things. It actually has a fair number (50ish) daily users, but it's not monetized at all so in that sense it was a failure at launch!
Sandpiper and Rent Robin are spin-out projects from another, not-failed project -- and while they're not setting the world on fire, they see slow-but-steady growth and the folks who use them seem to love them.
The running theme between all of these is that the projects I build where I already had an audience -- even if that was just myself! -- are successful, and the ones that I built because I had a clever idea but no committed users are failures.
Two of these (plus another, Price Parrot, that I forgot to include: https://sandpiperhq.com/pricing !), are spin-outs of a side-project (https://quailhq.com) that I started in 2014and that I've been working on for 7 years -- and that became my full-time job in 2021. That one definitely isn't a failure!
The five (six including Price Parrot) are just the failures from this year. I try to live by "fail fast"!
I finished a NASA SBIR before Thanksgiving with my buddy. Mixed results on the technical end and, after lots of discussions with potential gov/industry customers, we realized the market is probably not big enough if we could productize it.
I learned a lot about myself. Was previously in a stagnant job, in my opinion due to management. After managing my own project I am even more certain this was the case.
Besides my partner, there was no one else to get things done. I wrote the proposal and most of the budget, selected and integrated many hardware components, learned to use a CNC and pour foam and solder 17-pin connectors. Constructed and operated an off-grid sensor site for a few months with great uptime. Lashed together an ETL system with Python and Postgres. Wrote and delivered briefings to potential gov and industry partners who knew A LOT more about the topic than I did. In the middle of the thing we were selected
as finalists in a pitch contest, though didn’t win.
Gave me back a lot of confidence lost in that other job. I know I can jump into a relatively new area and do decent enough work as judged by experts in that area. I doubt we’ll get a Phase II (and sort of don’t want it as I’d pay myself dookie for two years with questionable payoff), but will crank through some leet code or something for a few weeks and have a eye-catching project on my resume!
very cool! I once wrote a proposal (for a proposal) for a NASA/FAA SBIR phase I grant. we didnt end up submitting/competing based on mine. but it was a great experience.
How about the multitude of ideas I start - get all excited by this great new idea, start working on landing page picking just the right colors and font, look into the coding and hosting, all the while researching and checking out the competition only to say to myself there's no way this will work, look at all those features the other players have, I can't market, don't have a following...Fail. Next idea - rinse & repeat.
Then only to see a month or whatever later a similar idea posted to HN with them saying how they have customers and inflow. Could I have done the same? Maybe. Was it just because they could market well? Maybe. Will I ever really know? No. Cause I never tried. Will I ever learn my lesson? I can only hope.
Sorry if this comes across as a bit harsh but it sounds like you go straight for the low hanging trivial stuff that wastes your precious time before even starting work on the core value proposition.
I'm no founder (never successfully launched anything that has generated financial gain) and have only lurked in the shadows, listened and read what others have tried. Both on the failures and successes.
One thing I've noticed repeatedly is that there can always be a possibility for a product in a crowded market (it will be more difficult for sure) if it solves a niche problem that OTHERS have as well. It is not enough to assume that others know or even have this problem that your product solves. So first step should be to talk to potential customers before working on anything.
By this point you should also know what it is that you are making and why it matters for others (the value proposition). Start working on that first.
- Don't create a landing page for a product you don't have.
- Don't select colors and fonts for days when there is no product.
- Don't do SEO when you have nothing to sell.
Be ready to have it all fail as most startups do, and try to minimize the amount of lost time that goes into these endeavours.
Me and one my acquaintance built a online grocery delivery service from scratch. We launched it in a small tier-3 city in India. It was ahead of time compared to all the services which later became successful. We had things like automated phone number verification as a first in apps launched in India. What we have learned is that:- do not do things that are ahead of it’s time. Launch a mobile app, when pretty much everyone has a smart phone for themselves.
I tried to do this, didn't get past validation stage. A lot of developers were hostile to the idea. This was around 2010 though. I didn't expect Steam to survive with that kind of hostility but it did. It's not even a shitty incumbent like WhatsApp, it's genuinely changed how we purchase and own games.
You'd probably have to do the Epic approach to even have a fighting chance: give out AAA games every month. Or the itch approach: lower the bar completely.
Yep. It's the classical critical mass problem: no users to attract publishers, no publishers to attract users. You need money to jump-start it, and we didn't want to seek investment.
Our plan was instead to create a solid client that integrated all of the other platforms into one, without even needing to have them installed. But out of the hundred or so people we asked, I could count on one hand how many actually cared.
If it had been successful wed introduce our own store as just another backend, low dev cut so we'd compete, and then subsidize sales with some investment later on.
It just didn't pan out. Steam has a death grip on the market despite having terrible software.
It's the streaming service problem. Entrepreneurial me wants competition and a free market, but end-user me wants everything on one service because bugger having 10 different game launcher/library apps installed.
> Sad thing is, sport clubs don't have much to spare. So I gave up on this project.
I had the same conclusion working on a motorsport app. Most people in grassroots motorsport put all their money into getting onto the track, and there really aren't any needs they would want solved for ~$15/month on a phone that they can't solve with a spreadsheet.
https://geolua.com (On mobile it gives you a "consumer" view. Check it out on a desktop for a complete impression of what was possible)
I built a programmable and multiplayer capable way of doing geocaching. I keep it online because I still think it's neat, but back then I didn't think of any reasonable way to monetize or market it. It got some interest from the geocaching community, but IIRC links to it got banned from some geocaching forums because they wouldn't allow third party tools. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So I guess: 1) Think about what you build before you do. 2) Make sure the possibility to make money exists at all. 3) Don't rely on third parties. 4) Use what you've learned in your next project
I built an app to help people create balanced teams during pickup games for any sport. The app had every player register themselves, then each player ranked everyone, including themselves, from best to worst, then the app would spit out n number of (probably) balanced teams.
It turns out that complaining about team balance after the match is a feature, not a bug, of the experience for most people and our app was just extra work.
Just this week my kids basketball coach is trying get all the parents to "use the app" for scheduling and announcements and its just NOT working so back to email which works for everyone.
As both a player and in the past as a coach, my experience with "sports team apps" has been that nobody wants to be the end user's IT department and on any team with more than X players the odds of someone's phone being messed up approaches 100%. "Oh I have an android and you have an iphone so I can't help you" and its just infinite headaches.
If you could find a way to "do the sports team app" thing but over multiple incompatible messenger chatbots or over a web page it might get more traction.
If apps "just worked", which they certainly do not, it would be nice. An app-like experience over a web page might work.
Could you give me some examples of what you would think would be needed? Have a sister whos kids are going to be getting into sports and feel like this would be a fun side project
It won't be. I've run youth sports league websites on a variety of platforms. The platforms all suck in one way or another (most actually suck in many ways), but that's not the real problem. The real problem is that some portion of the user base/parents are hopelessly incompetent with technology and will consume your time with their problems or questions. Another segment will feign problems to try to get you to do their work for them, and at some point you will do it because it takes less time than spending time on a back-and-forth of questions and getting nowhere.
throwawayboise is not wrong in any way, but if you want an answer anyway, I think it would be some kind of multi-platform massive automatic fusion. Good luck not accidentally creating, or automatically detecting, forwarding loops LOL.
So if you're one of the minority of parents smart enough to import a calendar into their google (or other) calendar, they can get the game schedule there, but the less competent (to put it nicely) can continue to get a stream of emails or even plain old text messages of upcoming games. Or they could join a FB group or a different platform.
Or there's people out there whom could never handle installing or using slack, but if you could spam them text messages maybe they could still participate, or even participate fully.
Nobody wants to work in IT, especially not for free.
We went thru an internet era, then a social era, then the era of notifications, and I have a gut feeling the next era is going to be something like smooth automatic operations across semi-hostile deeply silo'd platforms, but it'll have a cooler name. FB wants to replace the internet with FB, but literally nobody else wants that, repeat for all platforms, meanwhile you get 5 users together somehow you'll get 6 preferred platforms, the next era will be anti-vendor lockin. People old as me will remember when Ma Bell provided both your phone service and your physical phone and times were better post-divestment and that's probably how we're going to look at the past once we're beyond the era of the social media silo. Rather than "the world is viewed thru my website for my profit" the future will be something like "the world is viewed thru my REST API or maybe many other API providers" And where the profit comes from is mysterious. Likely the gateway tech will be workable microtransactions. Such that every time Sally Softball Mom checks the team schedule she will get billed and you will get a hundredth of a cent, which isn't going to scare away 10M daily users but would be a nice side gig for you personally. Assuming you get 10M DAU of course.
I built OneKeynote.com - the idea is to create podcast streams of an individual you like to hear, across all the various podcasts they go on.
My original motivation was hearing Chamath speak on Kara Swisher's podcast and I loved him. I wanted to hear more of him but realized the only way to do so was to search his name. This was fraught for one big reason, many, many podcasts include his name in the description, even if he isn't a guest (ex try searching Elon Musk!). So I built a quick site and used ListenNotes.com to create custom feeds. I started with tech personalities since that is my area of interest and everyday I would conduct a search on ListenNotes and add to the custom feeds.
ListenNotes does allow you to track who subscribes but it's inaccurate. I did see people start to subscribe to various feeds. However it was very hard to receive feedback. The other problem is it was really time intensive. I would spend about 30 minutes each morning going through all these personalities trying to find new episodes. Eventually I cut the time down as there are some people that don't go on podcasts very much (ex. Andrew Mason) and some people that are on podcasts a lot (Harley Finkelstein) so I adjusted how often I would search. 20-30 minutes might not seem like a lot, but I have a full time job, a family, other projects. My end goal was to insert ads into these feeds but never got the traction to get there. I eventually stopped updating the feeds and I should update the site to reflect that (although the site doesn't appear to be working right now anyways).
I still think this is a good idea but there is probably a better way for it to be done.
I launched ByteVitae (https://bytevitae.com/) a couple of years ago, got a decent launch here and in Product Hunt, a bunch of users the first days ~3500 and a steady influx of users over the following months. I didn't know how to convert most of those users to clients, didn't talk to them, lost all interest after the initial launch and moved on after an amazing -26€ in benefits :P
I learned so many things and was such a fruitful ride that for me it is far from a failure. But on the business side, definetly a complete failure!
Lesson learned: Talk to your users. Don't neglect the business/marketing side, specially if you are a techie who loves to code. Talk to your users. It is a marathon run, forget about the overnight millionare launchs, the launch is the "easy" part, growing steady from there is the real challenge. Talk to your users!!
Right!. But did you inform your customers that You were shutting down, what did you do with all the Datum that you collected(User Auth). Did You give them the opportunity for them to properly delete their account data stored on some DO droplet VPC waiting to be harvested?
Great questions! I thought a lot about those at the time, I didn't felt comfortable sitting on a pile of data waiting for an attacker to try get it. So this is what I did:
Once I decided I was going to kill the project, I removed the option to become a paying customer to not get more, waited for the last of my paying customers period to finish (it was a yearly subscription). And released an update that made the app work strictly locally, user data does not reach my server (edit: there is no server anymore) and stays in the user's browser (it works like that now).
Kept the data for a couple of weeks in case anyone wanted to recover it to help them use it with in the new "local" version, but enventually no one did, so finally I deleted my db. So right now I have no access whatsoever to that data.
I was a regular at the options trading subreddit. Lots of questions about how to modify strategies kept coming up (I also have been thinking about it for a while) so I built https://putcalltheta.com.
Got some buzz when i first announced it but things went cold after that. I still get a few user signups occasionally. Need to do some work on it but my mind is wandering off to other projects.
Edit: lessons learned
1. I probably should have had a mobile version of the webapp at launch.
2. Marketing is hard
Me and a few friends made a web app to calculate property investment returns. Lots of time sunk in but the app got no traction. Lesson learned we need to determine if there’s a market need before starting development, and a better effort on marketing wouldn’t hurt either.
Inspired by my dad scanning 20,000+ old photos, I created "Smallest Day". Photo organizing apps didn't (and still don't) handle old scanned photos well.
For example, Google Photos would not allow any photo to be dated before the 1970 unix epoch. Picasa required an email address for anyone tagged, which was problematic for nineteenth century photos!
In hindsight, I really needed a co-founder, especially someone more of a "hustler". I also should have committed more fully to reaching a GO/NO-GO decision instead of letting the project peter out over a year while I gradually took on more consulting work. Should have bought some ads to determine market appetite.
Still, I'm mostly happy that I didn't pursue it too far. 1000 Memories (a YC company) was also in the space and had an only mediocre exit. I'm relieved that no other company seemed to knock it out of the park. But a little sad that so many old photos (and the stories behind them) are not getting digitized and may not get preserved.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 390 ms ] threadNext time I would do this, I'll probably will pay someone to do administration and taxes!
Or marry them (works for me). ;0)
The issue: many PTs are VERY analog—sheets of papers with exercise, very few touch points, no data collection, etc.
The solution: modern patient management system for doctors, a mobile app that will remind you to do your prescribed exercises, track your response, have reminder videos so you’re doing everything right, and feed difficulty levels, etc to the doctor in real time to monitor recovery.
The problem: selling to doctors is hard. Replacing their entire day to day interface for their whole staff is a giant barrier to pass. Many patient management systems bundle in handling insurance, so his ended up being a “solve everything, then we’ll talk” type of system.
What I’ve learned: you need to make sure you’re MVP is ACTUALLY viable. We talked to a lot of PTs, and they were interested but not forthcoming with exactly what they would need to switch—still not sure how to pry out that info. Vertical saas is a double edged sword: the customers are bigger and stickier, but the sales process is slower and harder. Doubly so if you are trying to dethrone other deeply ingrained saas businesses from day one. A better approach likely would have been an extension to improve existing ones, then our own system.
One thing was completely clear---this was not as close to product market fit as we expected it to be, so we decided to back away from the project instead of raising money and doubling down on trying to force a solution to a problem that wasn't very important to our direct customers. In other fields, tools that affect our customers customers are very successful IF that drives more sales, or can affect the bottom line in some way. Physical Therapy is less of a sales business and more of a referrals business (from other docs), so we didn't have much impact. If anything, we may have prevented business by increasing exercise adherence and improving outcomes, therefore cutting "recurring business" (decreasing the amount of visits/injury, or the overall amount of recurring injuries).
Very insightful - whatever solution you have must actually drive enough $ for someone to really want to give it a try. Which is a huge ask if someone’s business isn’t really tech oriented and they don’t really believe the optimization is worth breaking through existing ways of doing things.
The problem is that she works for a large chain and the people with purchasing power are not clinicians.
It seems to me that really successful entrepreneurship requires enough time in that field to really understand the rough edges of the domain, but not so much time in the field that you actually start to accept the existing solutions as “good enough” in a sort of stockholm syndrome.
You need to be an expert with a beginner’s mind, which is extremely difficult.
https://rehabit.co.za/
They've been building it in public for the past year, but I haven't seen updates for a few weeks:
http://whatgotdone.com/michaelcampbell/2021-11-05
My PT uses a software exactly like this, and that made it possible that my progress was tracked during my months long vacation too, all online.
The app: https://medbase.physiapp.com/ (in German)
PS. it worked, my back problems are gone.
And don't be sorry! Most people who have a successful startup have many failed startups behind them, there's only one way to learn most of these lessons.
We already had 4000+ people sign up to play once it hit beta, and even had local news cover us: https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/terra-mango-could-be-the-n...
We vastly underestimated our ability to market the game and to influence people, even our own friends.
We should have shipped a somewhat slow and buggy beta version to those 4000 people who signed up to beta test.
Don't let perfectionism get in the way of shipping.
Or maybe we just had a bad idea
It was an incredibly fun endeavor... until it wasn't. Haha.
We never did a post mortem because it didn't actually end... It just fizzled out (it did end some friendships though). I (lead dev and co-founder) left the project and my ownership share (after the Kickstarter failed) to the other partners; . They then tried to find someone to either buy or invest in the development of the project for a few years. I only got notice that they finally stopped paying the server bill a week or so ago.
Good luck on your game endeavors!
You may probably tell what went in hindsight, but even then, it's just one if in the lifetime of the project.
"Oh, we could've released when x was done". Maybe, but maybe not too.
I see this a lot. I wonder if a lot of creatives have obsessive personalities that cause us to want to fiddle endlessly with something before we release it?
Perhaps this is true. There can also be pain associated with shipping too early: gnarly bugs, data migrations from hell, technical debt to name a few.
If you're ok with sharing, I'd be interested in learning more about why you believe that. Did you hear that from former beta customers later on down the line? Is it an intuition you have from your reflections on the period?
Also, what brand of "perfectionism" are were talking about here? Chasing down minor performance boosts? Gold-plating existing features?
Regarding perfectionism: the game was very rough around the edges in regards to in-game assets. Performance was also a concern, both on the device and the back-end. The device could slow to 1-2 FPS if there were enough assets (100s of troops firing at once - which was easy to do with a few friends playing together at once) animating at once. The server would slow to 4s+ response times if there was enough activity in a single geographic area.
I was okay with shipping with these issues, but the other partners weren't.
Maybe on a different timeline, you would have regretted shipping too early - because first impression matters, too and many people who walk away, after the first try will not come back for second try.
The trick is, to find the right time.
Maybe, but from the little I read, it seems like it might have been more the technical challenges (performance) too hard to overcome with the given ressources/target hardware.
Ultimately, failure was always the mostly likely outcome here, even if we had millions to spend.
The most unfortunate part for me is that we didn't ever get to learn if people actually liked or disliked the game, since we didn't release it outside our own circles.
High acquisition costs and high churn meant the unit economics made no sense.
If you have a subscription model and you're dependent on ads for acquisition, it's not enough to believe that with enough optimisation your business model will start to make sense. If it doesn't make sense from day one, it's highly unlikely there's a viable, reliable business there.
For me, I launched a five projects in 2021 that were a mix of total flops and sorta-flops, and they all flopped for the same reason:
Saascast and Offramp are more or less total flops; I keep them running because I use 'em in all my other projects and I find them useful. They're flops almost entirely because I don't know how to market them, and I'm not convinced that they have enough value-add or PMF to be worth pouring money down the search ads sinkhole.Donel.ist is, arguably, a total success because it got me out of a moderate depression (being fired and immediately going into lockdown sucks) and back into the habit of building things. It actually has a fair number (50ish) daily users, but it's not monetized at all so in that sense it was a failure at launch!
Sandpiper and Rent Robin are spin-out projects from another, not-failed project -- and while they're not setting the world on fire, they see slow-but-steady growth and the folks who use them seem to love them.
The running theme between all of these is that the projects I build where I already had an audience -- even if that was just myself! -- are successful, and the ones that I built because I had a clever idea but no committed users are failures.
The five (six including Price Parrot) are just the failures from this year. I try to live by "fail fast"!
Can you update the link for rent robin? A quick google search points to a property management company from Kansas.
I learned a lot about myself. Was previously in a stagnant job, in my opinion due to management. After managing my own project I am even more certain this was the case.
Besides my partner, there was no one else to get things done. I wrote the proposal and most of the budget, selected and integrated many hardware components, learned to use a CNC and pour foam and solder 17-pin connectors. Constructed and operated an off-grid sensor site for a few months with great uptime. Lashed together an ETL system with Python and Postgres. Wrote and delivered briefings to potential gov and industry partners who knew A LOT more about the topic than I did. In the middle of the thing we were selected as finalists in a pitch contest, though didn’t win.
Gave me back a lot of confidence lost in that other job. I know I can jump into a relatively new area and do decent enough work as judged by experts in that area. I doubt we’ll get a Phase II (and sort of don’t want it as I’d pay myself dookie for two years with questionable payoff), but will crank through some leet code or something for a few weeks and have a eye-catching project on my resume!
Then only to see a month or whatever later a similar idea posted to HN with them saying how they have customers and inflow. Could I have done the same? Maybe. Was it just because they could market well? Maybe. Will I ever really know? No. Cause I never tried. Will I ever learn my lesson? I can only hope.
I'm no founder (never successfully launched anything that has generated financial gain) and have only lurked in the shadows, listened and read what others have tried. Both on the failures and successes.
One thing I've noticed repeatedly is that there can always be a possibility for a product in a crowded market (it will be more difficult for sure) if it solves a niche problem that OTHERS have as well. It is not enough to assume that others know or even have this problem that your product solves. So first step should be to talk to potential customers before working on anything.
By this point you should also know what it is that you are making and why it matters for others (the value proposition). Start working on that first.
- Don't create a landing page for a product you don't have.
- Don't select colors and fonts for days when there is no product.
- Don't do SEO when you have nothing to sell.
Be ready to have it all fail as most startups do, and try to minimize the amount of lost time that goes into these endeavours.
And keep on trying. It is what I have been doing.
Our tech was genuinely better. Didn't matter. You can't compete with Steam.
You'd probably have to do the Epic approach to even have a fighting chance: give out AAA games every month. Or the itch approach: lower the bar completely.
Our plan was instead to create a solid client that integrated all of the other platforms into one, without even needing to have them installed. But out of the hundred or so people we asked, I could count on one hand how many actually cared.
If it had been successful wed introduce our own store as just another backend, low dev cut so we'd compete, and then subsidize sales with some investment later on.
It just didn't pan out. Steam has a death grip on the market despite having terrible software.
But what software do they need?
Personally I just need to buy, download and play some game
it annoys me when I buy games on steam and want to play it and it tells me to create some ubisoft / epic games account, like what the hell.
Started a side project (https://javfilms.com) that aggregates popular Japanese adult videos (NSFW site by the way).
It didn't fail, but it never picked up to a substantial point.
It actually works pretty good ( member management for sport clubs), but I'm going to turn it off.
Only 1 club is using it consistently, while i didn't have to do anything for it since 2014 ( except moving it off Azure to reduce costs).
Failed to gain any traction, had an email list of prospects but it didn't have any results.
Sad thing is, sport clubs don't have much to spare. So I gave up on this project.
I had the same conclusion working on a motorsport app. Most people in grassroots motorsport put all their money into getting onto the track, and there really aren't any needs they would want solved for ~$15/month on a phone that they can't solve with a spreadsheet.
I built a programmable and multiplayer capable way of doing geocaching. I keep it online because I still think it's neat, but back then I didn't think of any reasonable way to monetize or market it. It got some interest from the geocaching community, but IIRC links to it got banned from some geocaching forums because they wouldn't allow third party tools. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So I guess: 1) Think about what you build before you do. 2) Make sure the possibility to make money exists at all. 3) Don't rely on third parties. 4) Use what you've learned in your next project
My lessons:
1) Keep your day job, most projects fail
2) Fail fast, 20% effort gets you 80% of the project and that's when you ship it to see if it works, doesn't have to be perfect
3) Don't hang on to failures, move on
It turns out that complaining about team balance after the match is a feature, not a bug, of the experience for most people and our app was just extra work.
Just this week my kids basketball coach is trying get all the parents to "use the app" for scheduling and announcements and its just NOT working so back to email which works for everyone.
As both a player and in the past as a coach, my experience with "sports team apps" has been that nobody wants to be the end user's IT department and on any team with more than X players the odds of someone's phone being messed up approaches 100%. "Oh I have an android and you have an iphone so I can't help you" and its just infinite headaches.
If you could find a way to "do the sports team app" thing but over multiple incompatible messenger chatbots or over a web page it might get more traction.
If apps "just worked", which they certainly do not, it would be nice. An app-like experience over a web page might work.
Just use email and/or text messaging.
So if you're one of the minority of parents smart enough to import a calendar into their google (or other) calendar, they can get the game schedule there, but the less competent (to put it nicely) can continue to get a stream of emails or even plain old text messages of upcoming games. Or they could join a FB group or a different platform.
Or there's people out there whom could never handle installing or using slack, but if you could spam them text messages maybe they could still participate, or even participate fully.
Nobody wants to work in IT, especially not for free.
We went thru an internet era, then a social era, then the era of notifications, and I have a gut feeling the next era is going to be something like smooth automatic operations across semi-hostile deeply silo'd platforms, but it'll have a cooler name. FB wants to replace the internet with FB, but literally nobody else wants that, repeat for all platforms, meanwhile you get 5 users together somehow you'll get 6 preferred platforms, the next era will be anti-vendor lockin. People old as me will remember when Ma Bell provided both your phone service and your physical phone and times were better post-divestment and that's probably how we're going to look at the past once we're beyond the era of the social media silo. Rather than "the world is viewed thru my website for my profit" the future will be something like "the world is viewed thru my REST API or maybe many other API providers" And where the profit comes from is mysterious. Likely the gateway tech will be workable microtransactions. Such that every time Sally Softball Mom checks the team schedule she will get billed and you will get a hundredth of a cent, which isn't going to scare away 10M daily users but would be a nice side gig for you personally. Assuming you get 10M DAU of course.
* "Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22397720 (222 comments)
* "Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25580637 (582 comments)
* "Ask HN: Failed project you spent 15 hours/week for 5 years on?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27838479 (74 comments)
My original motivation was hearing Chamath speak on Kara Swisher's podcast and I loved him. I wanted to hear more of him but realized the only way to do so was to search his name. This was fraught for one big reason, many, many podcasts include his name in the description, even if he isn't a guest (ex try searching Elon Musk!). So I built a quick site and used ListenNotes.com to create custom feeds. I started with tech personalities since that is my area of interest and everyday I would conduct a search on ListenNotes and add to the custom feeds.
ListenNotes does allow you to track who subscribes but it's inaccurate. I did see people start to subscribe to various feeds. However it was very hard to receive feedback. The other problem is it was really time intensive. I would spend about 30 minutes each morning going through all these personalities trying to find new episodes. Eventually I cut the time down as there are some people that don't go on podcasts very much (ex. Andrew Mason) and some people that are on podcasts a lot (Harley Finkelstein) so I adjusted how often I would search. 20-30 minutes might not seem like a lot, but I have a full time job, a family, other projects. My end goal was to insert ads into these feeds but never got the traction to get there. I eventually stopped updating the feeds and I should update the site to reflect that (although the site doesn't appear to be working right now anyways).
I still think this is a good idea but there is probably a better way for it to be done.
I learned so many things and was such a fruitful ride that for me it is far from a failure. But on the business side, definetly a complete failure!
Even wrote a little post mortem at the time: https://vilva.io/blog/1-year-of-building-reflections.
Lesson learned: Talk to your users. Don't neglect the business/marketing side, specially if you are a techie who loves to code. Talk to your users. It is a marathon run, forget about the overnight millionare launchs, the launch is the "easy" part, growing steady from there is the real challenge. Talk to your users!!
Once I decided I was going to kill the project, I removed the option to become a paying customer to not get more, waited for the last of my paying customers period to finish (it was a yearly subscription). And released an update that made the app work strictly locally, user data does not reach my server (edit: there is no server anymore) and stays in the user's browser (it works like that now).
Kept the data for a couple of weeks in case anyone wanted to recover it to help them use it with in the new "local" version, but enventually no one did, so finally I deleted my db. So right now I have no access whatsoever to that data.
Got some buzz when i first announced it but things went cold after that. I still get a few user signups occasionally. Need to do some work on it but my mind is wandering off to other projects.
Edit: lessons learned 1. I probably should have had a mobile version of the webapp at launch. 2. Marketing is hard
For example, Google Photos would not allow any photo to be dated before the 1970 unix epoch. Picasa required an email address for anyone tagged, which was problematic for nineteenth century photos!
Short demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAObvfnDso4 Presenting at the Personal Archiving Conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzBkuXvqEo4
In hindsight, I really needed a co-founder, especially someone more of a "hustler". I also should have committed more fully to reaching a GO/NO-GO decision instead of letting the project peter out over a year while I gradually took on more consulting work. Should have bought some ads to determine market appetite.
Still, I'm mostly happy that I didn't pursue it too far. 1000 Memories (a YC company) was also in the space and had an only mediocre exit. I'm relieved that no other company seemed to knock it out of the park. But a little sad that so many old photos (and the stories behind them) are not getting digitized and may not get preserved.
https://joeldare.com/how-to-lose-money-with-25-years-of-fail...