Ask HN: Decided to start a business and regret later. Share your story.
There is a lot of stories about employed professinals that quit stable job to start a business. Most of these stories are told by successful enterpreners so survivorship bias takes place. It would be nice to get more balanced view. Whould you share not so successful stories. Not about failed first idea or ideas but have got a lot of experience and don't regret anything but rather "decided to start a business lost a lot a lot of money/health have got family problems and could not find decent job after that"
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 27.4 ms ] threadI created the world's first DVR in 1998. I was so excited about it, I convinced my friends to join my startup. It was basically Tivo plus the Free PC and internet model.
I was able to raise some funds from friends and family, but we all agreed to take less salary and have stock instead. We all worked hard, but the dot com bomb came along and killed all advertising partnerships.
I was lucky enough that I was able to wind down gently - the company did not go bankrupt. It took years, but I was able to pay back all my friends that invested in Free.TV, but I personally lost hundereds of thousands of dollars.
I learned a lot, but this set me back 10 years in my career and retirement. However, it did help me get the next level working for other companies. It was very stressful and hurt my marriage, but my wife stood by me and I know she is the one for me.
I still love startups for today but now that I am older, I wonder if I am now in the famous "ageism" problem in SV. I still have great ideas and want to change the world - just need another VC to take another chance in me.
That being said, I started the freelancing after dropping out of college in my 3rd year. After that, I metaphorically fell down some steps, through a concrete floor, got back up and decided to do stuff with data.
3 years later I'm backpacking in the valley doing sales AND implementing crazy deep learning data tech.
It seriously just takes persistence. Screw the naysayers. You SHOULD listen to criticism and consider it objectively though. Making money is a good guiding compass.
Most people just to expect VC to fall in to their lap. I don't understand the mentality of these consumer startups that are hoping for these instagram exits.
They'll spend years with no revenue, no freedom if they get funding, because they realize that they have responsibilities now. Not to mention the engineers they hire with the allure of a tennis table and beer on tap. What does that do for you? Now I'm doing more by myself than many teams could dream of.
I'm hoping to find the right cofounder if one comes along, but really the only thing that's missing to scale is a designer/hustler (yes both) .
We over-estimated the appeal of "goth" in the mid-2000s. There was still a good turnout at goth events in Chicago, but it was mostly adults who liked to dress up on the weekends for old-time's sake, but didn't identify as goths in everyday life anymore. We paid for tables at concerts, hearse shows, and fan conventions, and usually didn't make enough to cover the table. At least the music was good. At one point we pulled up the Seattle Goth site hoping to do a sponsorship deal with them, and their home page was just a picture of Fonzie on waterskis.
There was still a decent-sized market of younger goths & "emos", but they didn't have the money for a $25 gift basket of jewelry, incense, candles, and such…and THEN shipping on top of that. We were told to offer something closer to $10 shipped, but that barely covered the cost of an empty basket, shipping materials, and postage with a tiny profit.
Twilight was pretty big, but our vampires didn't sparkle. We put together a Browncoat basket with a complete set of Firefly action figures and assorted other stuff…even had custom marketing materials made to distribute at fan conventions for it. Didn't sell a single one.
Magazine advertising was expensive, and resulted in zero orders. Emailing our customer list a 20% discount code every couple months resulted in 2 orders in three years. We were flooded with emails from events & meetups wanting us to donate baskets for raffle prizes, which we could at least write-off on our taxes & get some publicity for. No sales ever came of these sponsorship deals, but we did get some sweet thank-you letters.
The last year we were in business, we were hit with a $200 chargeback. We asked Paypal if they could validate the address or something on that big of an order, and they said there was nothing they could do. We took the risk, and lost the money, merchandise, and shipping. That one incident cancelled out our entire profit for the year.
We donated all the remaining merchandise to charity & took a write-off just so we could get our spare bedroom back (it became my "man cave"/computer museum). Our time is better spent volunteering if we're not going to make any money anyway.
Again, no huge crisis, no health problems. But, a lot of extra stress, a couple thousand bucks wasted on top of what we paid for the company, and an entire room our our house tied up for 3 years and nothing to show for it.
Edit: Oh yeah, let's not forget the month I got a bill from my hosting company for extra bandwidth because a picture of me from the site ranked high for "goth" in Google Images and people were hot-linking it in forum posts all over the place going "goths are so stupid. look at this guy he thinks he's spooky ooooh".
In fact, I think that was the biggest flaw in the business. "Goths" in general had no problem spending $200 on a new black dress from the vendor next to us, but balked at a $45 gift arrangement with etched goblets and candle holders. Expensive gifts are their own niche, and really need to be more general-purpose. $10-15 really was the sweet spot for a gift, but the quality would have suffered.
Another issue was payment processing. Our margins were thinner than we were comfortable with, so we didn't want the added expense of a proper merchant account & something like authorize.net. There wasn't anything like Square yet, so we used Paypal Checkout. Our analytics showed something like a quarter of checkouts were abandoned at the point where we redirected to Paypal.
My goal was to grow this into the "CafePress of gifting" where people could build their own gift arrangements from a selection of general & niche items: balloons, teddy bears, whips & chains...a bunch of things to choose from. And then they could sell their creations in their own branded store for a percentage of the price. I should have accelerated that plan, but it might have required outside funding which I wasn't ready for.