HN Explorer

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rjurney
"I was about to become the first person in America to sell condom key chains."

Just in case you didn't rtfa yet, this is how it opens :)

edu 

  There was no doubt about it: I had discovered The Next Big
  Thing. Like Edison and the lightbulb, like Gates and the 
  pc operating system
Ouch.
gord
I'll see your ouch and raise you one Gary Kildall.
eru
Discovered. Not invented.
eru
To clarify: Bill Gates discovered operating systems, and made a lot of money producing and selling them. He did not invent them.
jjs
I adore that customs clerk!
gord
Its always nice to read about how startups succeed, but maybe more can be learned from these postmortems.

I was thinking you almost want a dedicated site for these... but could that be achieved by just having tags and filtering by tag on HN ?

Tags would help with a range of scenarios, such as if I'm only interested in Erlang posts by squid-farming bodybuilders, for example.

ktharavaad
He has an MBA
djahng
Yeah...MBAs don't really teach you how to be an entrepreneur.
run4yourlives
Irrelevant, really. Most startups, by definition, will fail.
mixmax
Well I guess that shows which is easier: Investment banking or doing a startup.

;-)

flooha
This would have been a perfect fit for "sell before you build". If he would have secured a large order from a retailer and then put it in production, he would have been successful. Not securing a large order would have told him it just wasn't worth doing. I don't think the "sell before you build" method it is a good fit for all businesses though.
bemmu
Okay, let's think about how this could have been successful. My next suggestion would be to let the people in that Thai factory do all the packing etc. work such that a finished end product could have been shipped. I think a factory worker's salary in Thailand is around $100 / month.
flooha
Originally, the Thai company did do all the packing. The original shipment had seepage of the lubrication, so he sent them back. The reason he had to do a lot of hand work was because, after receiving the new shipment, he realized that: "According to the Food and Drug Administration, I needed to include a "how to use" guide with each key chain.". So, he was stuck doing this work himself.
sown
You know? This was one hell of an education, the kind of thing I wish I could read and learn more about.
callmeed
"Though I had a Stanford MBA and regularly consulted on multimillion-dollar projects, I didn’t know the first thing about starting a business."

That's a little scary.