I'll start with one from my side: I started this project which was essentially a social networking site, but focused on Indian parents. Signed up some 500 plus users, but then realized that I had to keep getting content up, to keep the site interesting - I had some 5 users out of the 500 that contributed any content whatsoever. which did not make a lot of sense. The site is now offline.
1. A sms polling site that I ended up selling flippa for less than I'd like to admit.
2. A component that made authorize.net easy for .net developers. Over the years, I made quite a bit of money off of it, but stripe released, I decided to sell the site and component off to someone for about one month's revenue.
I had an idea that never reached conception, maybe someone can take it and succeed.
A while back I had to go into the city and didn't know how many coins I needed for parking. I thought I took enough until I saw it was $4.5 an hour. I considered creating a website/app package where users could see where they're going and the parking details associated i.e. ticket parking, free until 8pm, clearway zone etc.
I sadly lack the time and more importantly the technical know how to do it though.
Parking is a clean opportunity space for such small, useful apps. I remember the app that helps you get back to yor car in large parking areas, for example.
If you answer to yourself "none of them", there are two possibilities. No, three.
Third one first: you're young enough to not feel guilty about not taking enough risk. First one: you're not taking enough risk. Second one: you know who you are.
I would count that as 1. If we wait till we are financially secure to do things we want to do, We might as well never do it. Your idea of financial security changes as you earn more money !.
http://decisiverobot.com
Looking at the stats it averages zero views per day. It was only a fun throwaway idea to experiment and extend my web development skills, but I thought it might least get some traffic.
I have several ideas I never started working on. I guess they don't count. Then I had some others that I never finished/validated.
http://gclimbing.com is not really a failed idea, more like a failed project. Some years ago, I administered a shared climbing blog in Austria. After some time, nobody was using it anymore (It was quite complicated to use). I wrote a new software and put it online, which is gclimbing.com - but it didn't really take off. Everybody was on facebook by that time.
Another idea I tried was http://scribblingspree.com - A player would draw a picture, the next would describe it, the next one draw something based on the description. This started as a project to practice wicket and javascript. It was just not that much fun to play after a couple of rounds. Note that I did not know DrawSomething when I wrote it.
I leave both projects online so I can link to them from my CV, but otherwise both are pretty much dead.
I was pretty interested in scribblingspree.com, sounds fun! But got frustrated by how hard it was to draw (especially if you accidentally release your click off of the drawing space). In the short term you could listen for mouseup on the whole body/document instead of just the canvas, I think that would help.
Thanks for trying it! Yes, it is pretty much unusable with a mouse, but it was kind of fun on an iPad or with a Wacom Tablet. I remember that I had some problems with the touch events on the iPad - I eventually solved them (http://davidtanzer.net/canvas_ipad), but I'm not sure if I deployed the fixed version...
As I said, the project is pretty much dead now. But your idea (listening for mouse up on the document) would probably solve several problems, thanks!
The idea was that you could combine all your social media news streams (fb, twitter usw..) into one stream (just like a rss reader). It never got above a few users, and i did not have any ads or anything in place. Still use it myself though...
I have many, but the one that I invested most time in was QuoteVault http://www.quotevault.org/ It's a website where you can save interesting quotes from other sites or even pages / books. There's also a browser bookmark that allows you to select text on a website and import it into quotevault right away. Finally, there's a small public stream (much like your twitter stream) where you can share interesting quotes.
I've used the tool a lot, but I never really advertised it, in fear of failure I guess, so there're very few other users except for me. I still have a huge database of assorted business and entrepeneurship quotes in there though.
I would have js bookmarklets and remove need for signups initially. Make it into a sort of pastebin. Also, make it a summary tool too (for oneself and for sharing.) Allow users to enter alternate headline, summary, quote/s, ranking, judgement.
Check out quote.fm and drop me a line if you want to see my screenshots, brainstorm or see my other research into this idea.
Hey, thanks, that looks really nice. I mostly gave up on QuoteVault since I'm busy with other projects now. However, one thing I still lack is a good solution for reading texts offline and highlighting quotes in there. There's instapaper, kippt, and many others, but they all just allow offline reading, but no offline highlighting. There's one solution, which does kinda work, but the offline support is wonky. I'm seriously considering building a small app that reads read-later lists from different services and saves the quote data somewhere else via an API. Would quote.fm allow something like that? I see there's a read-api, but I haven't seen a way to add an article or add a quote for an article. Or did I misunderstand something? You can also hit me by mail for further discussions if you're interested. terhechte AT gmail com
Wondering what is the "conversion" rate? Around how many unique visitors do you get monthly? Your site looks good and something seems off if the coverage is good...
Too many to remember/list, unfortunately - some of them before I even started, many when I was halfway through building sort of an minimum product, and some after I'd actually launched them.
The one that hurts the most is an advertising analytics service (one of the first of its kind) I built over a decade ago - I was young and stupid, so there were some technical things I did wrong, but I also failed spectacularly at marketing. Looking back on it, I can see a huge amount of potential, and if I'd just done a handful of things differently, it could have made me a bunch of money.
I ended up selling it for a few thousand dollars, and the new owners didn't do anything with it.
Perhaps somewhat more interesting - why my side projects have failed.
For the longest time, I didn't really mind - side projects were at least partially a way for me to learn new techniques/languages/frameworks, and the experience generally made the effort worthwhile, even if I didn't make any money directly in the process. For the most part, I think this was fine for a while - I'm in a decent spot career-wise, and I think part of it is due to all the knowledge and experience I've gained from working on side projects.
That said, earlier this year I realized I needed to get more serious about making money directly off of these things - one of my long-term goals is having enough passive income to live semi-comfortably off of, and building websites or software seems like the best way to do this for me. Part of rectifying this situation has been identifying why I've failed so many times. Here are some reasons I came up with:
1) Not thinking an idea all the way through
2) Getting hung up on petty things, like choosing a domain name
3) Getting hung up on the design (I'm unbelievably bad at design)
4) Getting hung up on the technology choice (I've built something in probably just about every semi-common language/framework over the past few years)
5) Not being very good at marketing and not taking the time to learn or employ the services of someone who is
6) Not committing to one idea/project at a time
So, my goal for the next little bit is to sift through my ideas and find one that can hold my interest and has long-term profit potential, use technology that I'm already comfortable with, set aside money to pay for things I'm not good at (design and marketing, for example) and devote some time to building it.
I made a website where you put sunglasses on a photo - seemewith.com. After face.com shut down its facial landmarking service I deleted it, but it was a failure anyway. I spent a ridiculous amount of time implementing various strategies for turning photos of sunglasses into 3d models (using bundle adjustment, advanced appearance models, and some symmetry specific photogrammetry) - in the end I did the simplest thing I could think of and it worked better than any complex option. The results were still a bit poor though.
Another side project was a flash based plugin to do teeth whitening on photos. End up implementing a decision tree approach that worked ok, but it didn't seem to really have legs as an idea.
What else... I spent an inordinate amount of time on the Netflix prize, that really amounted to nothing - although it was fun to try a lot of different approaches at a tricky scale.
Such a small sampling of my many failures. I do try to celebrate them though.
Lessons learned? Well I did a full run down of all the projects I could think of (that got somewhere at least) a little while ago and I did have some interesting insights. Mostly I try to invent new categories of things and fail (both the idea and the newness thereof tend to fail in case you're wondering).
The promising direction that I hadn't followed was my first ever paper, and I think thats because it was a Human Computer Interaction project. At least for this project the focus was on new ways of doing tasks that people already do with computers - so it had some built in relevance. So now I'm trying work with my own psychology and find innovation in interaction - not in the entire category of product.
I can understand that that app does not fly; recognizing faces and showing matching animals outsode the original photo just does not look too enticing.
I can think of various ways to, IMO, make this an interesting app:
- put the heads in the photo, and tween a movie between the two (probably fairly hard because you will have to reliably cut out the background)
- use the camera to record video, animate the animal head in sync with what the head does (ideally, adjust the voice sound; more bass for a bear, twitter for a duck, etc) (probably not too hard to do)
- make it a game: using the camera, "let's see who can make his face best like this elephant", with solo games for practice and for fun ("can you beat your record of ten faces in 30.34 seconds?) (technically simple, but it probably will be a lot of work to get the game 'right', collect funny animal photos that humans can learn to match, etc)
It was a programming language called TSL built in python.
It failed because I didn't learn parsing and I just used simple string processing and then regex but yet I couldn't write the right parser.
1. Before the craziness with Netflix I had created an iPhone app called 'Flickscan' which let you go into Target/BestBuy and scan the barcodes of movies and have them automatically added to your queue.
2. I used to run Fabjectory, which created 3d printed statuettes of figures for SecondLife and Nintendo Wii characters, but shut it down with the demise of people who considered themselves Secondlife consultants (who were the main source of business).
AppointmentReminder for doctors. The idea was to build an appointment reminder system that was also an insurance eligibility checker(eligible API has actually made me want to reboot the project). The end goal was to be a Yelp for physicians.
It turns out selling to doctors is fucking hard. Their attitude towards salespeople is to treat them like pharm reps and make them buy you lunch and then wait 2+ hours. No thanks.
I sell products now. I will never go back to selling anything that isn't a product.
Most of these failed because I couldn't build a good team, or the one I had fell apart. I'm working on another project now with a great partner, hopefully this will work out this time.
Built as a dating site for redditors...got off to a bad start because it required reddit credentials..never bothered taking time to fix it. Maybe one of these days..
Killed several months on CertTime - a digital time-stamping service for graphic and logo designers. Got very enthusiastic support for the idea, but then got zero interest in actually using the service.
I was working on a book social site where users earn badges after reading books. (Basically Foursquare for books. There would be badges for reading the top 10 books of a genre/author, milestones, etc.)
Thanks. I was relying on book lovers' desire to "show-off" about how well read they (we) are.
I started using Amazon, but when I started thinking about adding badges and it would need the book database to be very specific about authors/genres/titles, (which Amazon's wasn't) I realized it was way out of my league.
Probably www.tagmark.org
A Chrome and Firefox extension for - Tagging (i.e Bookmarks), Tasks, Notes.
I still use it everyday but I never really followed through with marketing or getting feedback on it. One day maybe.
The first version of http://jobstractor.com was meant to be an alternative to advertising revenue for bloggers. I worked on it for about 3 or 4 months, built a huge amount of functionality (which no one ever saw) then finally did some market research. I discovered to similar offerings which had gone and failed before me. Contacting the bloggers involved in those generally turned up people who had not made any money from those efforts.
Ultimately I learned the value of doing the research before writing ALL the code. My subsequent project on the same domain was thrown together in a few weekends and evenings, was buggy as hell and put out with the intention of killing it if people didn't like it.
The slide machine [1] to make latex/beamer slides out of mind map. See also [2].
The core is an xslt that we use almost daily, we did a quite old-style web site which is still running with almost no users, but unfortunately we have absolutely no time to redesign/maintain it.
If anyone wish to contribute, we'll be happy to release code and share ideas.
99 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] thread1. A sms polling site that I ended up selling flippa for less than I'd like to admit.
2. A component that made authorize.net easy for .net developers. Over the years, I made quite a bit of money off of it, but stripe released, I decided to sell the site and component off to someone for about one month's revenue.
A while back I had to go into the city and didn't know how many coins I needed for parking. I thought I took enough until I saw it was $4.5 an hour. I considered creating a website/app package where users could see where they're going and the parking details associated i.e. ticket parking, free until 8pm, clearway zone etc.
I sadly lack the time and more importantly the technical know how to do it though.
Third one first: you're young enough to not feel guilty about not taking enough risk. First one: you're not taking enough risk. Second one: you know who you are.
Or is that the same as not taking enough risks?
http://gclimbing.com is not really a failed idea, more like a failed project. Some years ago, I administered a shared climbing blog in Austria. After some time, nobody was using it anymore (It was quite complicated to use). I wrote a new software and put it online, which is gclimbing.com - but it didn't really take off. Everybody was on facebook by that time.
Another idea I tried was http://scribblingspree.com - A player would draw a picture, the next would describe it, the next one draw something based on the description. This started as a project to practice wicket and javascript. It was just not that much fun to play after a couple of rounds. Note that I did not know DrawSomething when I wrote it.
I leave both projects online so I can link to them from my CV, but otherwise both are pretty much dead.
Edit: Oh, and I forgot: http://davidtanzer.net/node/82
As I said, the project is pretty much dead now. But your idea (listening for mouse up on the document) would probably solve several problems, thanks!
The idea was that you could combine all your social media news streams (fb, twitter usw..) into one stream (just like a rss reader). It never got above a few users, and i did not have any ads or anything in place. Still use it myself though...
Here's a public quote from my public stream: http://quotevault.appspot.com/public/terhechte/261221
I've used the tool a lot, but I never really advertised it, in fear of failure I guess, so there're very few other users except for me. I still have a huge database of assorted business and entrepeneurship quotes in there though.
I would have js bookmarklets and remove need for signups initially. Make it into a sort of pastebin. Also, make it a summary tool too (for oneself and for sharing.) Allow users to enter alternate headline, summary, quote/s, ranking, judgement.
Check out quote.fm and drop me a line if you want to see my screenshots, brainstorm or see my other research into this idea.
The income does not cover the hosting as is! Early on I expected it would be a small earner (maybe $50/mo) but we're not there even.
On the other hand, it had a fairly positive impact on the consulting/learning side of things (ETL, data processing etc).
I'm currently focused on a SaaS product (profile for info), but who knows, maybe I'll get back to it a bit.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvUEclt_oCPedHV...
The typical conversion rate (after removing SU visits which are basically bouncers) is at 0.43%.
The earnings is around $5 for 1000 pageviews (without SU) or $3 (with SU included).
Any thoughts on improving this?
But the tweetmeme idea is good, I'll keep that in mind, thanks!
http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/Amazon_Sales_R...
http://web.archive.org/web/20030729051353/http://www.jungles...
(also scanning (sub)reddit)
But thanks for the note that said! I have that migration marked in my TODO list :)
The one that hurts the most is an advertising analytics service (one of the first of its kind) I built over a decade ago - I was young and stupid, so there were some technical things I did wrong, but I also failed spectacularly at marketing. Looking back on it, I can see a huge amount of potential, and if I'd just done a handful of things differently, it could have made me a bunch of money.
I ended up selling it for a few thousand dollars, and the new owners didn't do anything with it.
For the longest time, I didn't really mind - side projects were at least partially a way for me to learn new techniques/languages/frameworks, and the experience generally made the effort worthwhile, even if I didn't make any money directly in the process. For the most part, I think this was fine for a while - I'm in a decent spot career-wise, and I think part of it is due to all the knowledge and experience I've gained from working on side projects.
That said, earlier this year I realized I needed to get more serious about making money directly off of these things - one of my long-term goals is having enough passive income to live semi-comfortably off of, and building websites or software seems like the best way to do this for me. Part of rectifying this situation has been identifying why I've failed so many times. Here are some reasons I came up with:
1) Not thinking an idea all the way through
2) Getting hung up on petty things, like choosing a domain name
3) Getting hung up on the design (I'm unbelievably bad at design)
4) Getting hung up on the technology choice (I've built something in probably just about every semi-common language/framework over the past few years)
5) Not being very good at marketing and not taking the time to learn or employ the services of someone who is
6) Not committing to one idea/project at a time
So, my goal for the next little bit is to sift through my ideas and find one that can hold my interest and has long-term profit potential, use technology that I'm already comfortable with, set aside money to pay for things I'm not good at (design and marketing, for example) and devote some time to building it.
See the video at: http//:www.heystartup.com
Another side project was a flash based plugin to do teeth whitening on photos. End up implementing a decision tree approach that worked ok, but it didn't seem to really have legs as an idea.
What else... I spent an inordinate amount of time on the Netflix prize, that really amounted to nothing - although it was fun to try a lot of different approaches at a tricky scale.
Just released 'What animal?' on the App Store, that's pretty much doing nothing download wise - http://scottvallanceapps.com/app/what-animal-are-you/
Lessons learned? Well I did a full run down of all the projects I could think of (that got somewhere at least) a little while ago and I did have some interesting insights. Mostly I try to invent new categories of things and fail (both the idea and the newness thereof tend to fail in case you're wondering).
The promising direction that I hadn't followed was my first ever paper, and I think thats because it was a Human Computer Interaction project. At least for this project the focus was on new ways of doing tasks that people already do with computers - so it had some built in relevance. So now I'm trying work with my own psychology and find innovation in interaction - not in the entire category of product.
I can think of various ways to, IMO, make this an interesting app:
- put the heads in the photo, and tween a movie between the two (probably fairly hard because you will have to reliably cut out the background)
- use the camera to record video, animate the animal head in sync with what the head does (ideally, adjust the voice sound; more bass for a bear, twitter for a duck, etc) (probably not too hard to do)
- make it a game: using the camera, "let's see who can make his face best like this elephant", with solo games for practice and for fun ("can you beat your record of ten faces in 30.34 seconds?) (technically simple, but it probably will be a lot of work to get the game 'right', collect funny animal photos that humans can learn to match, etc)
2. I used to run Fabjectory, which created 3d printed statuettes of figures for SecondLife and Nintendo Wii characters, but shut it down with the demise of people who considered themselves Secondlife consultants (who were the main source of business).
It turns out selling to doctors is fucking hard. Their attitude towards salespeople is to treat them like pharm reps and make them buy you lunch and then wait 2+ hours. No thanks.
I sell products now. I will never go back to selling anything that isn't a product.
2005: Fo.gg: Calendar and scheduling tool with a focus on time-zone usability, aimed at international travellers.
2009: Enjoble.com: SaaS for embedding job postings by topics to any site.
2010: Stellient.com: P2P real-time networking platform.
2011: Seenery.com: AirBnB for sightseeing tours.
Most of these failed because I couldn't build a good team, or the one I had fell apart. I'm working on another project now with a great partner, hopefully this will work out this time.
Built as a dating site for redditors...got off to a bad start because it required reddit credentials..never bothered taking time to fix it. Maybe one of these days..
[1] http://certtime.com
Gave up on getting a good book database.
Just curious - why not utilize Amazon's book database, since that is likely how you'd make your money anyway (via referral fees)?
I started using Amazon, but when I started thinking about adding badges and it would need the book database to be very specific about authors/genres/titles, (which Amazon's wasn't) I realized it was way out of my league.
Ultimately I learned the value of doing the research before writing ALL the code. My subsequent project on the same domain was thrown together in a few weekends and evenings, was buggy as hell and put out with the intention of killing it if people didn't like it.
The core is an xslt that we use almost daily, we did a quite old-style web site which is still running with almost no users, but unfortunately we have absolutely no time to redesign/maintain it.
If anyone wish to contribute, we'll be happy to release code and share ideas.
[1] http://www.sli-m.com
[2] http://security.polito.it/doc/public/torsec_didamatica2011_s...