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Shutting down a side project, my experience

26 点作者 bmle大约 12 年前

8 条评论

will_brown大约 12 年前
&#62;We were creating a solution for which there was no problem.<p>As a lawyer I have always had a similar idea in mind for a '"mint" for assets."<p>I know you tried to pivot and already made the always difficult decision to shut down, but your UI looks great and please consider the following:<p>Let me just sell you on the market first, there are about 40 million US citizens 65+, 2.5 million US citizens die every year, and 55% die intestate (without a will). I could not find any specific number, but as a practicing attorney I can tell you it is not uncommon for those that do have a will to have multiple versions and people (typically family) fight over assets, and it can be an expensive fight.<p>At this point you should know where I am going, a "mint" for assets would be an unbelievably useful tool for probate lawyers and estate planners. In terms of the business just quick ideas: 1. license the software to probate attorneys, 2. cut out lawyers and be your own non-legal entity providing these estate planning services (similar to legalzoom but you have a niche on estate planning).<p>Feel free to email me, I am non-technical, but this is a unique occasion on HN where I might have a little knowledge to offer.
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scorpioxy大约 12 年前
These articles are great. Sad, but great. They somehow feel more real than the "I made X in a weekend and sold it for a billion dollars" type of stories.<p>I can relate to this story and would combine points 1 and 3. We often do it to scratch an itch or to engineer a beautiful a solution to a non-technical problem.<p>In my last job in IT-healthcare, i learned not to rush to automate any process because the problem is probably a people problem and not a technical problem. And you can't fix a people problem with a computer.
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steven2012大约 12 年前
I used to work at a company that had an asset management product.<p>The problem with asset management is that the concept makes a lot of sense, and sounds very useful, but it requires a great deal of discipline. It's basically like Quicken for businesses. Quicken makes a lot of sense, but unless everything is automated, people get bored, and once you fall 1 month behind, people usually give up. Basically, it's the human element that fails.<p>It's the same case with asset management. It requires someone to do the boring task of keeping track of everything. The other thing is that GAAP allows for a certain tolerance of things like valuation of assets, depreciation, etc, so you don't need to be exactly right. This gives less incentive for people to maintain a tight inventory on all their belongings.<p>One of my relatives owns a store, and they track inventory very loosely, because they know that their things will get shoplifted, suppliers will ship them a different amount than they requested, etc. They build in a tolerance for errors, and it's a widely accepted practice. As long as this tolerance is good enough, then having an exact count plus the amount of time required to be exact, makes the entire concept not worth it.
johnnyg大约 12 年前
Do you have a version of akumulate.com floating around. We are a small business with an asset tracking problem. Just got burned by ManageEngine's AssetTracker and would like something more in depth than SpiceWorks offers. Perhaps I can tour and buy the code base for modest amount for internal use?
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snomad大约 12 年前
I like your observations, especially #1. May I recommend this book before you give it another shot? <a href="http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About/dp/0887307280/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-Abou...</a><p>Related to the pivot idea, I can's seem to find an asset manager that will work for my organization. They are either tied to business processes (e.g. selling products), don't allow custom attributes, etc. I work for a non-profit tied to govt/education and we have incredibly strict rules for managing inventory. Sadly, it is all being done by Excel and is a brutal mistake prone system.
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rajjalan大约 12 年前
This is a good problem to solve. Not sure what efforts did you put in to find the target audience, we have had good results so far in building a solution for similar problem focused on IT Infrastructure. Wish you luck in your future endeavors.
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icn2大约 12 年前
Great story. Thanks for sharing. I like the No3. "Working on a problem that people don’t have probably means that people won’t be willing to pay for that product."
taproot大约 12 年前
Almost crapped myself reading this, working on something very similar... I wonder if it will meet the same fate.
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