Ask HN: Should I quit my project and move on?
I’ve been working on a project called Expose Menu for the past few weeks. It’s basically a website that returns reviews that reference a specific menu item regarding a specific restaurant. I’m really close to being done but I’m being plagued by the thought that nobody will use it. Honestly, I don’t even know if I would—I’d have to see what the final product looks like. But building it out would require spending some money and a significant chunk of my time. And I really don’t want to build something no one wants - I’d die of embarrassment and I’d just be sad about wasting my time.
This is my first time doing something like this, I’d really appreciate any advice!
45 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 90.8 ms ] threadThe more fundamental problem with reviews is:
A) People have shit taste in food (grandpa who can't taste salt anymore and the family in BFE where every Sunday dinner is at IHop shouldn't be reviewing food)
B) Food is inconsistent
Health Department reviews of restaurants however, is a great indicator of quality and care.
I assume you believe you have good taste in food and I very well might find what you think is good to be terrible. It is not impossible the majority finds what you think is good to be terrible too.
My experience is that the only way to know if I like a dish is to eat it and reviews are completely useless.
You will get some valuable experience and learn a lot about the process of going to market and about yourself personally too.
Go on the journey, or in your case finish the journey. The next time you get a good idea, it will no longer be your first time and you will have lessons from the is experience to draw from. You will make mistakes and by the end of this you will look back and know what you would and wouldn't do again. If you derive no other value, that by itself is a worthy prize.
Go get your hands dirty and get your first time behind you I say. Nobody builds Facebook on their First Rodeo and you won't either. Consider it an exercise to prepare you for the future.
If you don't finish it, nobody will use it. If you do finish it and nobody does, so what?
building it out would require spending some money and a significant chunk of my time
Working is the hard part of working on ideas.
I really don’t want to build something no one wants
Wanting to build something is the reason to build things.
I’d die of embarrassment
No you won't.
I’d just be sad about wasting my time
Inefficiency is the luxurious reward of creative work. Good luck.
That's okay, build it anyway.
Put your ego down and finish it. Set goals about completion of the project, not receiving accolades and making sweet user acquisition graphs.
Ship it.
Build and use stuff for fun. No room for ego with software hobbying. I use Foursquare/Swarm and now none of my friends do but I have a blast with it.
Post your Github repo to get feedback!
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/14/kevin-roses-oink-shuts-dow...
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/kevin-rose-joins-google-2012...
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20170609232551/https://www.winen...
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/05/wine-n-dine-is-a-meal-revi...
[2] https://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html#:~:text=For%20examp...
Welcome to entrepreneurship!
Doing something hard knowing very well that it's most likely is going to be a waste of time is just part of the game.
Every once in a while, you may strike gold and make it big. But a lot of the times, you strike silver and it's just promising enough to keep you going.
Striking silver is the exact "waste of time" failure mode you want to avoid. I speak from experience when I say that I blew ~3 years of my career chasing after a product idea that hovered just at breakeven. In hindsight, I should have given up in the first 3 months and moved on to something else.
But you won't know until you release something to users. Don't give up before you start, obviously.
My sense is users want this, but no one will pay for it. Yelp does this already. Grab doesn't, but if we did, we'd do it in house and not pay a 3rd party. The human capital within these companies would be excited and capable to build such a project internally, so this would be challenging to sell b2b to review marketplaces.
Maybe, there is use for e-commerce websites that don't have an army of engineers that can diy?
Take the risk!
Actually, seriously, how did you come up with the idea, and did you test it with anyone?
I’d go for it. You are better off embarrassed and learning than safe and stagnating.
In terms of embarrassment, there's no inherent shame in creating something that fails. Most ideas don't work out, that's fine, it's what you learn and what you push forward that matters.
Not trying to discourage you, but you should know what you're getting into.
Some reasons I could be wrong: if you're actually excited about it, but the potential embarrassment is clouding your judgment. Honestly, nobody cares if you have a failed project. Or even a failed startup. I've watched people blow seed rounds on things they were passionate about but couldn't get traction with, and they don't have any regrets. And more importantly — nobody else really cares. Try to think about why you started building it in the first place. Do you still care about the problem you're solving?
One more thing — I've been pitched this same idea multiple times over the past 10 years (some seed-funded, some bootstrapped). Not saying that it's a bad idea, but it's not clear what's unique about your iteration that would give it better odds of success than previous attempts. In my opinion, it suffers from the "not 10x better" problem. If I want an awesome burrito, it's not that hard to find an awesome burrito place without going through item-level reviews. And if I want the best item on a menu, I can usually ask the waiter or go through some of the reviews (Google sometimes highlights certain menu items).
Will it remain a thorn in your side, like that idea that actually could have worked, and that you'll finish it later? or will you just be able to move on without second thoughts?
If the former, then ship it now, it'll fail, and you'll get experience in understanding how hard it actually is to reach people.
If the latter, drop it now and move on.
Honestly, no one is going to use this.
- you're in a restaurant, you look at the menu and think "ah I wonder what the internet is thinking about the ragout", I don't buy it for a second, but let's imagine it happens
- then you take your phone out
- then you authenticate
- then you look for that app that you barely use, what's the name again?
- then the app locates the restaurant through GPS, nice.
- then you need a way to tell your phone which dish you're looking at, will you type it? too long. Will you dictate it? in a restaurant? Will you shoot it with your camera, in a dim-light environment?
- then the app connects to other services to compile reviews, this is slow af.
- then you see an ad, cause monetization
- then 80% of the time, the app responds that no review talks about the dish you're looking at.
- and by the time you're there your date is gone. A shame, cause that ragout was pretty good.
> Honestly, no one is going to use this. - you're in a restaurant, you look at the menu…
IMHO, you’re making a lot of assumptions, the primary being that it’ll be used while in the restaurant. Why not at home, whether you’re planning to go to a restaurant and trying to decide if it’s worth or just ordering a take out. How about planning a party? And so on.
There are several definite use cases, of course that doesn’t mean it’ll be successful, it’s just that it’s not clear but that no one will use it. Only post launch data will tell you.
Bad reasons to work on a personal project – You expect it will get tons of users and gain broad adoption, and will consider it embarrassing and a waste of time if it doesn't.
With that in mind, what do you have to lose or feel embarrassed about? You'll most likely fail either way, but you will never know unless you try. By shipping, you'll have accomplished more than 95% of the developers out there.