HN Explorer

How many failed startups have you launched?

1 points by steelebillings ↗ HN
I think I just launched my 14th. No, buying a domain and doing nothing with it doesn't count.

To count as a startup you:

- You launched a website or - You turned on Stripe payments or - You formed a LLC or Corp - You started paid advertising - You got 1+ paying customer - You raised $1+ dollar from outside funders

19 comments

[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 51.3 ms ] thread
HN-user2345
i just started a startup which i will not tell the name of for personal reasons , im still having many difficulties .. The problem isnt how good the startup is but how good you can advertise.
jmstfv
1. uptime monitoring service [1]. launched in 2019. decided to enter a crowded niche so as not to reinvent the wheel and try to figure out distribution, but gave up. sold in early 2021. total sales before selling: $1,686

2. notion backups service [2]. launched in late 2021, total sales $100k, while still growing ~60% YoY. in hindsight, I should have picked an adjacent niche, since this business is technically difficult and not as easy to sell as, a Notion site builder, for example.

3. churn analytics for stripe [3]. got accepted to the stripe marketplace, but still haven't gotten a single customer because I haven’t marketed it much. I use it daily and it is very helpful. for that reason alone, i don't want to kill it.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210515005206/https://tryhexade...

[2] https://notionbackups.com

[3] https://dunningbear.com

genx-joe
So I have many, but sold a few too. Right now I am in that uptime monitoring service but I went a different route and just made it 100% free. I started https://boxwatch.app awhile ago, was going to go pay but then I sold another business and said screw it.. 100% free. I am currently working on a companion ios/android app to go with the service but still totally free.
jmstfv
oh good luck, it's a tough space to be. some indie makers have managed to make it work (like healthchecks.io for example) but it requires patience and dedication, esp dealing with some entitled people on the free plan.

btw, your docs pages look malformed; seems like markdown metadata slipping into the page content: https://boxwatch.app/docs/api/authentication

genx-joe
ahhh thank you. Just went through the huge process of converting to 100% free.
ramon156
For people who are looking for a mostly succesful steady product, find a niche that others would not even consider because of how boring it is. Usually you end up doing research about the most boring logic that ends up being kind of fun. The people who QA will happily tell you why your product is broken, because it'll beats anything manual they're doing right now.
kprkr
Any examples handy?
jasonjmcghee
For future reference, you need to put newlines between lines to preserve formatting.
maxlin
None that have failed
nerdsnipe
Sadly - too many.

Still pushing what has now turned into a pet project, serves many free members, but none that feel its worth paying for.

sph
1. The idea and implementation was decent, but very hard to effectively get companies to pay for it and would have been destroyed by the bot apocalypse on the web. Also, turns out I don’t really want to run a SaaS. Still happy I challenged myself, shipped and convinced a few people to pay for it.
[dead] moxza
[flagged]
purple-leafy
2 formally. First one lost money, second one made money but killed it off.

Failed projects though?

Probably in the 30s-50s number now, including my latest project which I spent 6 months on - almost all my spare time.

CM30
Only 1 at the moment. A media platform for posting articles that you could charge people access for, sorta like Medium or Substack. What I realised pretty quickly was the following:

1. Getting paid to pay for text based on content was extremely difficult, and there's a reason things like Blendle didn't work out.

2. UK investment into B2C startups is minimal compared to in the US, since the former tends to be a lot more... substainable than the moonshot focused investment landscape in Silicon Valley.

3. While I had some experience as a web developer at various agencies, I wasn't really technically skilled enough to implement the kind of features and systems I'd need for a system like this.