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Ask HN: Why do we fail? We were sure it would work.

6 points by dudeson ↗ HN
How many times we believe that our idea will work. That our start-up would rock. That even our submission on HN will get many up-votes. Personally I get disappointed each time that I try to make reality the ideas that were theoretical in my mind(ideas that seem to me very very possible to happen and succeed).

What do we do wrong? Any idea on why theory is so much different from reality(at the field of internet and businesses).

9 comments

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karamazov
This is an incredibly broad question. Can you give some details on what happened, specifically?
adam419
I've thought about this myself too. I think it has to do with the fact that when you become convinced of something enough to actually work on it, you depart from the exploratory/learning approach and begin what more closely resembles a waterfall development approach.

That's why I think going the route of doing (or at least testing) the things you may believe won't work is better, because you just simply don't know what you don't know.

I also think a lot of successful companies were like this. They were sort of welcomed and blessed by serendipity.

jesusmichael
There are many things that can disrupt an idea. One is your communication of its benefits. The other is the readiness of the target audience's collective mind for such a solution.

Take electric cars. Its a great idea, some of them are really cool and could save the planet, etc. However, drivers aren't ready to give up 400 miles on a tank of gas that can be refilled in 5 mins vs. 90 miles on a charge that takes 8 hours to recharge.

In my opinion, its not that we, you or I are doing anything wrong. We just are not fighting hard enough and getting a passionate core of believers that will carry us to the next iteration of our idea. Eventually electric cars will become as useful as gas powered cars... but it will be entirely due to the belief of a small core of people that want to see that happen.

Your ideas aren't bad or wrong... they are just ill timed.

anthony_franco
It's because we all have an incomplete and biased simulator in our head.

Every time you have an idea, you run it through the "real world simulator" in your head. And as smart as we think we are, this simulator is terrible at predicting the effectiveness of ideas. And worse off all, it's usually biased and leading you to believe your ideas are amazing.

That's why the lean startup movement is so effective. It makes you get out of your internal simulator and run your experiments in the real world as fast as possible.

chintan39
Its because theory is always based on some assumptions that we start with.And then we keep on adding assumptions on top of it. It may be a huge startup Idea when you start but to people its just another business or website. You have got to explain that theory to people, to make it big.
AbhishekBiswal
"That even our submission on HN will get many up-votes" Err I don't think a startup's success depends on the number of upvotes it gets on HN? Right?
timmm
This is HN - we value everything but profits, get with it already!
wz3chen
In execution, there's benefits of being over confident (google it) e.g. taking it upon yourself to be the leader of a group, if you'r not confident about your course of action, you may lose the confidence of your followers.