Failed for the past 12 years as an tech entrepreneur

257 pointsby start123over 3 years ago

Back when I was 24, I pretty much hated my 9-5 job because of lack of control over my destiny, the limit of earnings and growth and the idea of going to the office every single day. I realized I could start something of my own.So I started to look for something easy to do work on that would not consume a lot of my time. Blogs were a rage back then and multi-million dollar exits were quite common. I bought a domain and installed WordPress and started blogging after my working hours. I started a technology blog in the hope to replicate the success of Mashable and Techcrunch. I spent about 4 hours every night covering tech news about companies and social media in general.2 years passed and I burned out myself. Traffic to the blog was flat and I was not making any meaningful money. I shut it down.A few months later, I started a website that pulled information from Amazon and displayed dresses in a fancy and intuitive website. I opened a Facebook page, spent a lot of time marketing it and eventually made a grand total of 2 sales in a span of 3 months.I decided to give up.The very next year, I decided to build a note-taking web app that was a mash of Google calendar and a to-do list app. The idea was that people would see today's schedule by default and they would easily add and manage tasks.I hosted it for a few months and lost interest due to a lack of customers.After taking a break for a year or so, I decided to do something ground-breaking. I built my version of Facebook Groups/Slack that would allow people to share something interesting with others. You could create groups and add/remove people from them. The UI was fancy and a few of my friends and family loved it.A few months after running it, I shut it down. I found it hard to justify its existence since everybody else was using Facebook groups and with the rise of mobile apps that allowed seamless sharing, my application made no sense.Sensing an opportunity in media space again, I then started a news aggregator website that aggregated news titles from hundreds of outlets storing thousands of news articles per day. The website was smart enough to cluster the news articles based on topics which, Google news does well. People loved it and it got great reviews, but it was not growing fast enough.And like earlier, I ran out of patience after 6 months and I shut it down.After multiple failures, I decided to take a longer break. I had pretty much given up my entrepreneurship journey knowing there was no way I could build a reasonably successful business.A year passed and I started to feel uneasy with myself and my day job.So, I built a stupid web app that cleaned new articles by stripping them off of ads and showing only the relevant content. I shared it and got no real feedback from others. Nobody cared.That's where it hit me, why not pivot to and a link management platform? I thought it's so easy to build and manage it. I could feel the tingling in my body. I built https://blanq.io/ with the excitement of a toddler.I was so wrong.I spent the next 1 year building the landing page, the entire web app plus some extra features in a hope that it will take off.For the first 18 months, I had no paying customers. I put everything into this. All my previous experiences of failures and learning went into building this platform. "How could I fail?" I thought.I then decided to stick to it and give myself 3 years to decide its fate.On the 19th month, my efforts started to pay off. I landed my first customers then 2nd and then 3rd.... and so on. It's been 8 months since then and I now have 10 paying customers using my platform almost every day and growing every month.My learning:1.Don't quit too soon and don't be too hard on yourself.2.With each failure, you do get better at not failing.3.You improve at everything as time passes - marketing, programming, sales, operations.

64 comments

orasisover 3 years ago

I’m sincerely not trying to be mean, but it’s possible you were previously simply bad at entrepreneurship.There is this dominant narrative that entrepreneurship is primarily about raw willpower and persistence despite the odds. As a 20+ year entrepreneur I do not believe this to be the case.I believe the primary skill is observation. Yes, we need to try different ideas, but what really makes a product work is listening to the market and identifying opportunities to create value. You’re not fixed on a product/solution ahead of time, but are just paying attention to needs and how those needs intersect with our unique abilities to create value.When this is working well, it looks like luck. Over time we develop multiple viable business options and we get to choose the very best ones. Instead of a slog, success comes relatively easy.

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hardwaregeekover 3 years ago

I'm not an entrepreneur, so by all means you know far more than me. But it does puzzle me that a lot of your ventures seem very...generic. Like you made a tech blog in 2008. Great, but why is your blog special? That's like making a Twitter account now. There are some people who receive massive success from Twitter, but they're very rare.Then you created a note taking app. I don't know if note taking apps were that huge in 2010, but it seems like they were since Evernote was founded in 2000. Ditto with a social media platform, with a news aggregator, with a link manager. Don't get me wrong, massive kudos to you for launching and working hard on these products. It just seems to me that you've been making stuff that already exists and doesn't have any differentiation. Even if you had a new feature or two, to quote Steve Jobs, that's a feature, not a company.

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nhanceover 3 years ago

I'm 16 years in and have followed a similar path. I graduated college in 2004, started my business in 2005 and never took a job.Consulting has gotten me here and I've had up to 4 direct hires with me, but my dream has always been to run a product business. I must have attempted 3 dozen different ideas by this point.But on Friday last week, we reached our 100th subscriber. Combined with other free products, we now have over 130k daily active users which sounds more impressive than it is. The MRR is still tiny and we still rely heavily on consulting projects that have been more and more difficult to line up.It's been difficult, sometimes extraordinarily so, but we have such happy customers with huge amounts of positive feedback. It feels like this could really go somewhere. The fire still burns brightly within me though I don't know how. I'm determined not to let opportunities pass me by again.I have never shared this anywhere.

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DarrenDevover 3 years ago

I have a similar long history of failures, though my failures did generate income - just nowhere near enough to give up the day job. €20k a year at their highest point, €5k a year at other times.I notice similarities in what you're describing, particularly when it comes to your target market and products.B2C not B2B.And generic, anyone products, rather than targeted niche products.A lesson that took me a long, long time to learn. Targeting consumers over businesses is doomed to failure unless you strike the Facebook / Instagram lottery.Consumers don't buy software or pay for SaaS apps, businesses do. Netflix and Spotify are exceptions, not the rule. Building a generic app for consumers is futile.Far better to build a targeted app for a niche business use case.

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danr4over 3 years ago

Too much "I built", not enough "I asked".You didn't build things people want, you built things you thought people want.I hope you find success but really after 12 years I'd suggest you get coaching/mentoring/YC startup school, because while you definitely gained experience from your failures, it looks to me that you haven't learned the right lessons from your mistakes. Even if your current startup is making some revenue.

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ilamontover 3 years ago

Glad you kept at it and finally created something with traction.Here's what I learned via trial and error.A long time ago, when investors and accelerators and MBA programs began to dominate the startup scene, founders got distracted.I saw (and sometimes created) half-baked apps and websites, useless market research, chasing trends, chasing vanity metrics, investor pitching contests, startup theatre, and "build it and they will come" BS.Build something people want and will pay for.Not just say they want.Not just say they'll pay for.Make something that they see and will immediately take out their cash/cc/paypal/venmo and pay for on the spot.If you can get that far, things start to fall into place. As others have noted, consulting may be necessary to keep things going.This may not be applicable to capital-intensive fields, regulated industries, enterprise SaaS, but it works for a lot of B2C and even B2B startups.

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honkycatover 3 years ago

I've never understood the drive to own my own business.My parents were both entrepreneurs and it always felt so tenuous and stressful compared to other jobs.What percentage of small businesses actually end up making you more money than a traditional job? If my parents had worked at Walmart with their business degrees, they would probably be making way more $$ at a much more stable company than if they had run businesses.Of course, I say this as a person who has been very fortunate to decide on the right degree and career at the right time ( Software Engineer ), and has always been in enough demand to hold a well paying, steady job.My significant other has a less fun job. She works as a DBA at a museum. Every day I hear a new horror of being tech in a non-tech place. You don't realize how essential agile is until you see what it is trying to solve. [0]- 0: In my opinion, agile is about forcing stakeholders & product to commit to plans and communicate with tech in a timely manner, in order to avoid blame shifting.

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nprateemover 3 years ago

Well done for persevering, but it sounds like you missed the obvious. If you want to start a business, study business (and marketing).Since you spent time marketing there are 2 conclusions: nobody cared, or you didn't manage to find people who would have. Learning marketing should have taught you both those things.The classic marketing line is: find a gap in the market or an undeserved niche, understand their needs better than the competition so you can solve their needs better. Then tell them and they should be delighted, becoming your customer. Then work hard to maintain their custom.Coders think they just need to spaff out products, but you need to build something people actually want if you want to start a business.It's not too late. Seriously, take some marketing courses at a university.

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bidiviaover 3 years ago

I know extremely successful people and all of them made huge mistakes in their lives. But I don't believe you are using a good strategy here and find your advice is bad:1. You should quit as soon as possible is you are getting nowhere. We don't need more miserable entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is probably not for you if you fail consistently. Don't waste your live doing something you are miserable at.2. Each failure can really hurt you, no different from making a mistake while skiing or driving. It can destroy your life: Your relationships, your wealth and health.3. You don't automatically improve as time passes. Specially if you learn on your own without good teachers. You will acquire "bad practices" or "vices" like if you try to learn to play tennis on your own: It will take you longer to "unlearn" your vices than if you learned from good teachers.The first thing I would recommend is that you make friends that are entrepreneurs so you learn from each other and support each other.I sense a very individualistic behavior from your writing but I see customers as friends and that helped me a lot. I give them way more value that what I extract to support my business, and that is the secret. People are not stupid, in the same way children "sense" who really loves them fast, customers could sense very fast the value you give them.You also develop over time a good intuition on the value you are creating if you know how to listen to your custommers. You don't need 12 years for that, 1 or 2 years is enough.I understand that "what does not kill you makes you stronger" but I have experienced what failure feels, and it really can kill you, emotionally, mentally, socially and finally physically.The way to success is making mistakes frequent and small, so small that it can't hurt you: Instead of risking a million dollars you risk a thousand and escalate.Instead of making mistakes you meet the people that have done what you want and you learn from THEIR mistakes, so you don't need to repeat them.They will help you and love to do so. Dozens of entrepreneurs have helped me when I just asked them and some of them are good friends now.

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moralestapiaover 3 years ago

I am very proud of you, of what've you've accomplished, and happy to see that your latest venture is getting some growth. There's nothing more powerful in this world than someone who is determined to do something. Slow and steady wins the race!Also glad to see many others sharing similar stories about not giving up. Since we are on a christmas mood already, big hug to all of you.Regarding me, I've been making and breaking stuff for about 15 years with moderate success. On 2017, I went to KAUST (flagship uni at Saudi Arabia) as it was offered to me as a place that was looking for talented people, to help them develop and thrive. I drank the kool-aid and gave it a try. It wasn't that great but not bad either, I was enjoying what I was doing so I decided to stay. Time goes by and on 2020, my daughter gets kidnapped by some of the staff there, after I refused to let my wife work for some guys who were doing some pretty questionable stuff. With (not so much) help from my embassy I was able to leave the country and put myself and my family safe again. Almost 4 years of work down the drain plus the psychological damage inflicted to us. That event truly, 100%, burned me out.But, ..., came back right before the pandemic started, and that turned out to be a blessing for me. The world stopped so I didn't have much to do anyway. I spent time on me, doing things I enjoy, connecting with old friends, taking care of my parents, resting, etc. Earlier this year, the urge to make stuff came back and I launched a climate-related startup that is doing quite well. I have people who work with me (that's a first!) and they keep me moving, focused and motivated. We are about to start working with a HUGE client next January and that is making us feel quite excited. Highly recommend this to everybody, it's common for hackers to tend to "solve everything by themselves", but try to get more people involved, whether they're associates, coworkers, mentors, you-name-it, there's people out there that can make your journey much more enjoyable.And, as other's have said, don't give up on your dreams, no matter what. If you have to start over, then start over, it won't matter, you will make it in the end!

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TrackerFFover 3 years ago

I think the problem was that you mainly entered typically saturated (product) markets. All those ideas have been on the 101 "first product" lists to programmers, for as long as you've been trying.And the fact that you worked alone(?) just makes things even more difficult. You have entrepreneurs in SF with networks and capital to launch products in mere months - hell, their marketing budget the first months would be more than your revenue the first x years. Point is, it's incredibly hard to compete against players like that, and if you have some easy / low-hanging fruit idea, there's a good chance you'll be playing against those. Remember to do your market and product research!

start123over 3 years ago

OP here: Due to HN limit on the length of post, I had to cut down the details to about 4000 characters. I skipped tech used, a lot more details about the applications and the timeline.Now I am 36 year old and as stated in the post, I am giving yet another shot with <a href="https://blanq.io" rel="nofollow">https://blanq.io</a> with a hope of succeeding this time.

swimorsinkaover 3 years ago

I did this for a couple of years as well.I think the experience was invaluable, and I don't regret it, but I arrived at the conclusion that doing a startup is largely overrated.Why stress out for 60 hours a week for years on end watching your savings dwindle when you could have been making great money at a medium or a big company with great benefits that doesn't force you to work on the weekends and allows you to take paid time off? If you land at FAANG or similar, you'll make more money than most startup people ever do anyway.The startup community loves to talk trash about regular corporations, but for me the work/life/stress balance has been a great trade off.

pkrotichover 3 years ago

This is a classic B2C vs. B2B. Simply put B2C is tough without network effect or funding to build it.B2C - Customer/User has time, not money.B2B - Customer has money, not time.

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montblancover 3 years ago

I dont wanna sound negative but for some people giving up makes sense. Entrepreneurship could be extremely isolating and depressig, especially when its not working out, and not everyone wants a decade of failure after failure and missing out on other financial and social opportunities.

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ttulover 3 years ago

Be sure to pay homage regularly to the gods of chance. Randomness plays a huge role in success and failure in all fields, but especially in entrepreneurial ventures. If you live in a developed country, relax and enjoy the fact that failure rarely means actual death.

nanodanoover 3 years ago

A couple thoughts after reading this. They aren't meant to be criticisms, just a reflection on my own experiences as well because I have had plenty of failures myself.For one, failing is probable. Most small businesses fail. The chances that you get it right on your very first try is low. Sometimes it takes many failed business ventures before you learn all the lessons. A lot of the lessons can be learned from reading books though. The common and cliche things like "identify your target audience" and "researching competitors" and "see if there is an interest in the product" are mentioned in every book but still skipped by so many.There is a lot of talk about the things being built and the technology, but almost no discussion about the marketing side which is arguably more important. I wonder how much effort was put into that aspect.It sounds like there was not a lot of product/market research before building the thing. I'm guilty of this too, building a product nobody wanted because I didn't do homework first to see if anyone cared.Some of the ideas sound like they had no passion behind them. For example, the affiliate site for selling dresses. Was that something that was inspiring, or simply an easy-way-to-make-money thing? I think that can have a huge effect in quitting or sticking with it.And it also sounds like there was a lot of quitting too early because things weren't growing fast enough. The marketing aspect may have played a factor here, but from my experience...solo startups DO NOT grow fast. Having that expectation in the first place might have been the reason for such disappointment. Running a business is a long-term thing that could even span beyond your lifetime.

nartzover 3 years ago

Very few entrepreneurs understand that sure, market matters, and sure product fit matters, however the variable of time is an interesting one. Most startups growth looks super slow, then ramps up, and then quickly ramps up. This is very similar graph to investing $$ with e.g. a X% annual return. The key similarity is the concept of compounding. Individual features, marketing campaigns, blog articles, monetization channels probably won't have an immediate impact, but over time can compound. Similarly, entrepreneurs often think that developing a feature will immediately cause users to sign up. In reality, all you've done is "invest" your money, but you need time to work it's compounding magix.

cheriotover 3 years ago

I don't think this is a tale to emulate.Everything that failed has been built hundreds of times before. None of the "businesses" started with talking to customers.

dreyfanover 3 years ago

Stop building inferior versions of things which already exist. Build the things that don’t exist.

sawmuraiover 3 years ago

Haha, I did not expect that plot-twist, well done.Nassim Taleb says we should thank founders, successful or failed, for the risk they took, and I agree with him. So here it is, from the bottom of my heart: Thank you!

wizwit999over 3 years ago

I'll thank OP for sharing, it always takes courage to admit failures.There was a thought provoking article (can't find the link) that made the rounds here recently about the "guy who'll never actually build his startup", describing someone who's always going through ideas and says he'll find the perfect idea one day. The article concluded with encouraging people to just build it.While that type of person exists and there is a harm to overanalyzing, this serves as the converse. Someone who just jumps into ideas without validating them.At the end of the day, a lot, actually most, ideas are bad, we shouldn't just pretend enough HardWork will overcome that. We should encourage people to brutally validate their ideas early, it'll save you a lot of time.

akrymskiover 3 years ago

Just because you've written a blog post or some code doesn't make you an "entrepreneur". Pretty sure AirBnB founders haven't written a line of code for example.Creating a business is largely about sales: selling your idea to investors, customers, and employees.

CyberRabbiover 3 years ago

So your new business just does link analytics? Who are your potential customers? I.e. how large is your addressable market?When I see something like this I think of mass emailers. They tend to require link analytics but otherwise I can’t think of another use case. Maybe Twitter or other social media publishing.Since publishing is an application where link analytics tends to be used I would focus there. I can imagine it would be much easier get customers for that more user-oriented product than for something that is lower in the stack and more abstract and will likely end up being used for that use case anyway.Just my 2 cents, trying to help.

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Jiger104over 3 years ago

No one ever cares about the amounts of times you've failed. You only have to succeed once. Congrats on your journey

thisisbriansover 3 years ago

Good on you for continuing to try! I am just now seeing ~very meaningful success for my startup I founded about 10 years ago. An important component of my endurance was that I truly care about the mission of the business beyond financial gain...I think this has to be true for runaway success.Shameless plug: we are using software to combat climate change (<a href="https://bractlet.com" rel="nofollow">https://bractlet.com</a>) and we're hiring (just like everyone else)! Feel free to email me directly (brian at bractlet dot com) if you are interested.

vhiremath4over 3 years ago

How have you been iterating on your ideas? Generally, this is what I tell other entrepreneurs. It's startling how few actually take a framework like this to heart (doesn't have to be exactly this):1. Build a hypothesis about how the world works2. Build things to test the hypothesis3. Figure out the world doesn't work that way4. Alter hypothesis5. Show progress as you repeat 1-4I also want to call out that spending 18 months to build a landing page and your web app is an extremely long iteration cycle. I don't have all the context about your life, but that seems to be an area where you can get much tighter based off this post at least.

toss1over 3 years ago

Yup, switched industries from software to advanced composites (like carbon fiber, kevlar, etc.) design & fabrication in 2003. Been up and down ever since, running both as a job shop and always working to design & build products.Persistence and flexibility, always looking at new opportunities and technologies with an eye to goals (other than what is fun).Every lap around the field gets a bit better, and now there's some real breakouts in sight.Have confidence in yourself, work hard, and think well. Seem to have heard something about: Seek and ye shall find...

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mindcrimeover 3 years ago

I've been failing for about the same length of time. Had some weird ups, some weird downs, learned a lot, etc. I should probably write a book, but I really can't be arsed to do it right now. The important thing, to my way of thinking, is that I'm still here, still failing. As far as I'm concerned, I haven't really "failed" per-se until I quit (or die). As long as I'm still moving forward, still learning, and still chasing my dreams, I'm "in the game".I'll go back to one of my all-time favorite pg essays:If you can just avoid dying, you get rich. That sounds like a joke, but it's actually a pretty good description of what happens in a typical startup. It certainly describes what happened in Viaweb. We avoided dying till we got rich.[1]And truth be told, I don't know how much I even care about the "getting rich" part anymore. I mean, sure, all things being equal, I'd rather be rich than not. But at this point, I'm just happy to be still growing, still learning, still exploring. Just being in the game is its own reward in many ways.[1]: <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html</a>

jimmickel0101over 3 years ago

First off thanks so much for your transparency. Great article and humility that will certainly help the many others in your same situation (like me).I share your frustrations, but I see things from a different perspective when doing side projects for a few reasons:1. I treat innovative ideas as potentially growing to something amazing and see them more as passion projects that help me to grow in many ways, including learning new technologies, learning other trades (e.g. marketing, sales).2. I use my skills learned in side projects as bolsters to my resume. I can testify that I've been approached by employers and been seen as a better candidate than others based on the side project experience I've done. Further, I've gotten other side-gigs that are paying as a result of the side-gig skills I've acquired. Adding these hard and soft skills to your resume makes you a better candidate overall and opens opportunities otherwise unavailable without.3. I still work a main gig that I (mostly) enjoy, which enables me financially to be able to spend my off-hours working on and funding my passion projects. This to me feels safer than going all in, although it could be argued things inevitably develop more slowly this way.4. My reward for hard work is similar to open source development in that I'm creating something for humanity that wasn't available before, which may or may not make money, but benefits me for the reasons stated above.Perspective helps here, and if it grows into something bigger then all the better. If it doesn't, then there are other benefits to doing it that help shape you and your skillset.

bullsheepover 3 years ago

I would like to chip in because I know exactly the feeling of the author. The failure is normal and what makes the difference is the ability to continue trying after one failed and having a believe in yourself, but let’s cut the support bullshit and point out the obvious. The author is a one man army at least from the story that I read. Meaning, the projects that you have done were done individually without much help or partnerships, and such projects for the most part will find failure. Why do people sell shit load of material about building in public, building an audience, connecting and being social? Because this matters for success. Those that teach this approach understood that success of tech startup is in people (and not only tech), inside the venture and outside (customers) and that is also why we are writing such articles, for recognition and visibility. Imagine the number of products that are out there without proper audience? Why do we spent hours and hours writing bullshit engagement posts in Twitter when in reality you could build a product instead? Because without that engagement and community, an internet project will have a hard time for recognition and success. Tech oriented founders usually have a block when it comes to social aspect of the business, we are introverts, the thought of writing pitty tweets and liking other’s comments makes as sick, and that is fine as if you have chosen a path of solo enterpreneur, you need to learn to upgrade other skills. I have failed in more that 20 startups in my life and only when I took a step and overcame my dislike of communication I’ve became successful. The key to big changes is your network, the world is this way and now that you made it to the first page of hacker news, you finally understood how to move your products. Good luck.

scandoxover 3 years ago

Manage your reputation very very carefully.I do tech for an email security service and we start blocking these very quickly once we see any anything we don't like.

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Graffurover 3 years ago

Isn't this a Show HN hidden in a story? Either way, congrats on finally sticking to something. I hope to achieve something similar in my life :)

vlucasover 3 years ago

I followed a very similar path for a long time. I am 37 now and have been in tech for over 20 years (I started very young). Over the years, I have worked many places, started my own consultancy, freelanced, and have tried starting many other businesses and online services over the years (invoicing, disposable email, some B2B services, project management, etc.).Most of my business ideas have failed. Some have had limited success (a few hundred per month at most), and only ONE (my latest one) has been pretty noticeably successful right off the bat.Just keep trying and pushing forward. It has taken almost 2 years since launch, but my Google Sheets add-on that imports bank transactions called BudgetSheet ( <a href="https://www.budgetsheet.net" rel="nofollow">https://www.budgetsheet.net</a> ) is only just now very close to $1k MRR and still growing. It's funny to me because my most successful ideas have never been ones that were new or novel. Just practical, useful, and really well understood things that save people time or make their lives easier.

Taylor_ODover 3 years ago

Nice. I'm glad something worked out. Honestly I did not expect the happy ending here. It sounded like the biggest issue each time was giving up way too early. It's easy to say that though and much harder to continue to grind at your own project/start up when it's been 6 months to a year without any real traction.

dctaflinover 3 years ago

I wish you all success. I'm intrigued by people who are determined to take primary control of their money-making, because I'm so different from that. I am so grateful that companies exist that can manage annoyances like medical insurance, taxes, payroll, etc. so that I can just show up, do stuff I'm good at and enjoy, and then go home in the evening and forget about it all until the next day. I have little skill or interest in finding exploitable markets, but in general I get along with people well and have no problem with other people deciding what large-scale projects to work on, as long as I have a bit of autonomy on actually implementing them. Thank God not everyone is like me, or nothing would get done! But I think without people like me, very little would get done as well. Good luck on finding your ideal niche.

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whoisjohnkidover 3 years ago

Are you doing this solo? I’ve found it’s good to have partner(s).Ideally with diverse backgrounds; e.g.<pre><code> - marketing - engineering - sales - finance </code></pre> This way the burden doesn’t fall on you for everything and you can lean on others to do their part.IMO a lot of tech entrepreneurs take the marketing/sales side for granted.

codazodaover 3 years ago

I’ve shared it here before, but here’s my own similar story. I haven’t figured it out yet.How to Lose Money with 25 Years of Failed Businesses<a href="https://joeldare.com/how-to-lose-money-with-25-years-of-failed-businesses" rel="nofollow">https://joeldare.com/how-to-lose-money-with-25-years-of-fail...</a>

kfkover 3 years ago

I had a corporate job for 9 years, did some freelancing on the side until I got a big client. Now I have a team of close to 20 people, a few good clients (referrals work wonders) and a MRR of 110k after 6 months. I have jumped into entreneurship making also a salary increase from a good corp job. I am saying this because for me consistency and incremental reputation and skills building has been extremely rewarding. There is a culture of leaving jobs fast over here and sometimes that is the right thing to do, but sometimes it is more rewarding to build a carrier over a few years before making the jump. Just consider your options and take the time, not everything needs to go super fast.

Glenchover 3 years ago

Nice perseverance!I'm not really a business expert, but when I hear about your failed projects it sounds like the marketing and distribution channels weren't really fully fleshed out. It's quite hard to get people to pay for things when you don't know exactly who they are, what they value, or where they hang out. This is a really common problem for developers creating product businesses apparently — you build something and nothing happens because nobody knows about it. I'm glad you feel like you have more momentum now though!When you reflect on what you were doing in the last 12 years what do you think was going on that you could have improved?

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coldteaover 3 years ago

Also, add value. A lot of those earlier attempts were derivative ("let's replicate a tech news site") or get-rich-quick-schemes ("let's mash together two services via a script and see if anybody buys it").

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binarysoloover 3 years ago

I'm trying to be constructive with my thoughts, so my initial thoughts are: I've had a pretty different experience than you, and don't think your recommendations are good for a lot of people. IMHO you're taking too much risk doing what you think is a market need, when you should be offloading risk and making what the market is actively wanting/needing. This sentiment is repeated by quite a few commenters in different words.Serial SMBer here, looking back at the dozen entities that worked in the past 20 years -- every one of my projects with 7+ figure outcomes had clear successes to validate the idea 3 months in, and I would often times MVP it off a contract with one client/vendor. (A few examples: niche used office furniture circa 2006, iOS app circa 2010, ML-based investing circa 2011, Amazon store in 2013 - so... all over the place.)Just adding a bit of anec-data since we have quite a few people sharing what worked (and what didn't), the top 3 learnings for me have been:1) Know people with deep pockets who want a problem solved - this means networking and establishing a niche for yourself as the go-to execution guy for problem X. I went to school near Sand Hill so that made it convenient. This simplifies your customer #1 problem as well as your revenue problem.2) Know people who are good at solving problems, esp ones you dislike or can't solve. This is how you scale from a 1-person weekend project to a 1M+/yr rev project. You want this because a) problems that need multiple people to solve are a natural barrier to entry for anybody else, which means your solution is more defensible and b) partnerships are fun and when built right promote accountability where the sum of work is greater than its parts.3) Entrepreneurship is hard work and should only be done as a last resort, if you know what you're getting yourself into, because you ABSOLUTELY WANT IT for whatever reason, whether because seeing something inefficient drives you nuts, that sorta thing. It's absolutely not for glory-chasers which I find kinda frustating, as a lot of (US) society glorifies it as such and sets peoples' expectations totally wrong and I see tons of miserable entrepreneurs burning out all the time in the startup orbit.

midnchanover 3 years ago

You don't have to monetize anything or have customers to be successful. If all the things you built brought you joy as you built them, then you've done amazing.We don't need web traffic or money streams to be happy. You've done more than anyone else really could on average. Most people are slogging away for a company, afraid to step out of line or build anything. When they are gone, the company will leave their name on nothing.You've built amazing tools that will always have your name on them. That legacy is one to be proud of.

ruffreyover 3 years ago

I’ve found limited success and failure. Here is what I’ve learned.Business is hard and important. Marketing, sales and strategy are necessary, there’s no “build it and they will come.”Working at small early successful startup has been huge for learning.Learning from local startups and building relationships with other entrepreneurs is huge.Startup accelerators and hackathons help tech people learn business savvy and connect with non-tech cofounders.For the vast majority, software dev is an arcane art and dev chops can be highly appreciated by a businessey entrepreneur.

spfzeroover 3 years ago

I wonder if you considered leaving the previous project(s) running while adding new ones? Of course if you realized there was a reason they would never succeed, then terminate, but if you were unsure why they were not succeeding, maybe let them continue. An unused app is not a lot of work to keep running, right?You might collect a few users and one of those might give you a great idea. Customers can make great design partners, and the feedback on one app can lead to an improvement on another.

welanesover 3 years ago

Congrats on the persistence! The lesson: things take time.Took me about a decade. I also tried a note-taking app (every new developer's rite of passage it seems), an event guide, digital magazine, and an assortment of other projects whose domain names no longer resolve.Suck as it may, each failure is a lesson in what not to do. If you find yourself back at square one and still have the drive to keep trying then it's only a matter of time before you create enough value to open wallets.

mrkentutbabiover 3 years ago

That's amazing. I am an engineer myself and my problems are that I am not that creative to find problems to solve like you do. Much less the persistence that you have that keep trying and trying again. Kudos to you! I hope one day I will be able to do so.

Paul_Sover 3 years ago

How do you guys support yourself for 12, 16 or however many years it takes to get to net profit?

okabatover 3 years ago

If you stick with it, I would recommend you spend a lot more time talking to customers, thinking about distribution channels, and getting creative with narrowing your target audience. And build after, not before, you do those things

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wyclifover 3 years ago

Just a nitpick (I notice everything, especially when it comes to spelling and grammar), but on your landing page you mention Let's Encrypt but you didn't capitalize it properly.

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Winterflow3rover 3 years ago

Wow that's some perseverance I am soon in the fourth year of working on my project and finally starting to see some revenue but I am constantly asking myself if it's worth it.

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dorianmariefrover 3 years ago

I would recommend startup school by y combinator

jcadamover 3 years ago

My greatest success so far was a product that earned enough to cover its own hosting fees but not much beyond that :)

redleggedfrogover 3 years ago

In that same time period I made over 1 million in take home pay from my developer job which i turned around into residential and commercial rentals which now bring in waaaaay more than my salary. I have the advantage of being on the west coast with rising property values, but still, sometimes there are better ways than just chasing the latest startup fad.

sonofaragornover 3 years ago

Thank you for sharing. Out of curiosity, how have you supported yourself all this time?

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4b11b4over 3 years ago

Yes, all of those ideas are bad.

giantg2over 3 years ago

I'm failing as a regular dev, and I'm too burnt out to care.

m00xover 3 years ago

Do you work on this full time now, or are you still at your day job?

vfulco2over 3 years ago

Thank you! Needed this 12 months into a new MVP build.

69Representeover 3 years ago

I dig your tenacity and courage to continue. good luck!

make_it_sureover 3 years ago

10 years of failure here, finally reached $1.3 mil ARR

xyzzy21over 3 years ago

12 years of learning. Not of failing!

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newusertodayover 3 years ago

thanks for sharing your story, it is inspiring. What is your tech stack? python?

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GDC7over 3 years ago

Honestly this seems like hell.I'd rather work remotely for a US company and move my ass somwhere like Brazil or Nigeria or Philippines or Thailand.You'd maybe feel the boredom and the lack of power in the decision making and the shame of having to report and reply "yessir" .But once you clock out you can then be the boss of the hood and recoup all frustration accumulated during worktime, throw the weight of the mighty USD around, which is even more exacerbated by the tech salary as well as the possibility to invest every excess in the S&P500 so that you can keep on keeping on.The west has essentially very few people (and diminishing by the day) and each and everyone of them have a telegraph pole up their you know what. It should only be used as the money making app

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