10 ms·

My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups

316 points by taylorwc 16y ago

botolo86 16y ago
This is very interesting. I think that the more failure you had in the past, the more likely you will have success in the future. I also had some previous side-projects experiences which did not work but I learnt so many things from these projects!
petervandijck 16y ago
Yep, pretty interesting. And although at first I didn't, I have to agree that a list of failed projects is not a bad indicator for success. At least it shows that you keep trying. As for mine: 1. Mefeedia.com Built it out for 2 years, then sold it because it wasn't going where I wanted it to go. 2. Poorbuthappy.com Lots of traffic for travel forums, but the community got out of hand so I had to close it. Those where the 2 main projects where there was an expectation of it possibly becoming something big-ish.
keeptrying 16y ago
I wonder how many were done while holding down a regular job? From his linked in profile, it looks like he's being doing startups for a while. Pretty cool.
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  Been doing startups right out of college. Only had a "regular job" for one year, Aug 2001-Aug 2002. From 2001-2005 I also did consulting to pay the bills, but would try hard to keep it to 4hr a day max. From 2005-2006 I was also in a graduate program, which I treated as secondary to my startup (but still did it)--sort of equivalent to the consulting.
  - keeptrying 16y ago
    Awesome. I've been trying to figure out exactly how I'm going to feel when trying to work on startup. Your post seems more realistic and kind of shows me exactly what I should be expecting. Thanks for this. One quick question: I'm not a uber geek. Ie I like the business side of the equation too. Is this a good thing or a bad thing ?
    - Ixiaus 16y ago
      Not a Bad Thing, per se. I will tell you this: I recently launched a company with my cofounder who has had prior success. She had to do both the technical and business aspects. The startup we are building ATM wouldn't be a success if it hadn't been for her business experience - but I will also echo my side: she didn't do any of the programming; it is clear my skill and knowledge are deeper. So, in short, this startup really wouldn't be much without either. However, it's easier to be technical and acquire the business knowledge than the other way around, IMHO. So, the better question is: what kind of startup are you building? If it's a technology startup, you will either need to commit to learning your technology space or finding a technical co-founder. Committing to learning the technology will teach you a lot about your interests, you will either love it or not - if you don't love it, you won't succeed technically (you might business wise, there are plenty of companies with shitty technology that make money). Just some thoughts from a non-business oriented intellectual and programmer.
thetrumanshow 16y ago
It would be very interesting to add information about when you were working with advisors/mentors and when you were purely working on your own. I haven't had nearly as many at-bats as you have, but enough to know that I personally can't get very far on my own without an experienced voice guiding me past a lot of dumb ideas.
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  At learnection I had a board of my uncle and another VC guy, who were helpful but I didn't use them at all to the degree I should have. Other than that, no real advisors/mentors. For Zoofoo, Email client, Yahoo store thing, Namesdatabase & Kangadoo I worked with the same partner. The "Wall" (never launched) was with a different partner. And nth Club was with another partner. The rest is/was solo.
duck 16y ago
Are there links for the two episodes of "Twenty Questions"?
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  Nope--not online any more.
edw519 16y ago
As a builder of digital things, the 3 things I have the most trouble communicating to non-builders are: - how hard it is - how much time it takes - how long it takes to become successful So instead of trying to explain it, I may just send them to this blog post, which shows all 3. Thank you, Gabriel! (Now if only you would remove that Mojo Badge business from blocking your great content.)
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  Thx--I may do that (remove it). I was alpha testing it for a friend. Update: removed.
- bobf 16y ago
  While those three things are certainly true and Gabriel's post does a great job of showing them, don't forget: anyone can do it.
klous 16y ago
"Ship often. Ship lousy stuff, but ship. Ship constantly." - Godin from http://the99percent.com/tips/6249/seth-godin-the-truth-about-shipping http://the99percent.com/tips/6249/seth-godin-the-truth-about...
notahacker 16y ago
Would be even more interesting to know the details of why Gabriel failed to stick with some of the ideas. A Posterous-type service in 2001 sounds like it could have been a bigger success than the Names Database. Nth clubs sounds like it could work with a bit of incentive for club pros to recommend it...
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  I wish I had a good reason for ditching the public inbox. I don't. The proximate cause IIRC was I moved my server and had a disk failure. But that really isn't an excuse because I'm sure I had backups. It actually got traffic too. I don't know what to say other than that it didn't feel like a startup at the time. nth Club isn't a bad idea -- it just requires sales work that I don't want to do. I thought my partner (who is into golf) would be doing it, but that just has turned out not to be the case.
subbu 16y ago
Looks like you were startupping since 2000. Except NamesDatabase there haven't been any other exits. So how did you feed yourself until then? I am guessing your later projects were taken care by that exit.
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  Real job for one year. Then consulting. Then exit. Also, my wife has a job.
  - subbu 16y ago
    Thanks
megamark16 16y ago
Wow, great list! My biggest take away was all of the times he says "perhaps I should have stuck with it". You never know where a project can go unless you stick with it. Back to hacking at my project...
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  Absolutely. That is one of my biggest lessons learned.
netaddict 16y ago
Why did Google blacklist all of your Tldscan sites? Was it just because your sites' content was updated automatically? Or was it because you did something wrong for SEO?
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  Here's my (completely unsubstantiated) theory. It happend literally the day after crossing $500 & 50K views in adsense. I'm guessing one of those was a trigger for manual review by some contractor, perhaps overseas. They looked at my sites for 3 sec, found them to be cookie-cutter and decided to blacklist the account. I get the impression they shoot first, ask questions later. I didn't feel like dealing with it all or starting over so I just moved on to other things.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    I wonder how many otherwise viable little businesses fall victim to this heavy handed approach. Is this one of the reasons DDG got started?
    - epi0Bauqu 16y ago
      Well, it did push me onto other things, though I wasn't (at least consciously) looking to get back at Google.
  - stakent 16y ago
    In my case some clicks worth over $2 (if I remember correctly) triggered manual review. They sent me canned email about tos etc. The funny part is that the domain in question was already expired when email arrived because I've decided to stop this venture.
  - asmithmd1 16y ago
    I talked to someone from Google at I/O who should know and he claimed they don't play "Whack a mole" with websites. They will tweak their ranking algorithm to punish the behavior they see in a web site they don't want to be ranked.
vaksel 16y ago
would be interesting to see what sort of traction you got with each service. i.e. did you quit when they only had 100 users, or was it more like 100,000
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  Really varied across the board, but nothing with anything close to 100K users. For the ones that didn't launch, obviously none :). I can't remember exact numbers for the old stuff, but pretty much everything got a decent amount of SEO traffic that I could play with (run tests on). Decent amount is several hundred to a few thousand uniques a day. More recent stuff more on the order of 100s of users.
run4yourlives 16y ago
Kangadoo: Why did this fail, really? This should be a runaway success. There are millions of people out there that can barely figure out their cameras, let alone understand the concept behind facebook or picasa or flickr or whatever could be considered "competition". Even with a founder departure, this is a valid idea... why didn't you continue to peruse it?
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  Yeah, I do think the idea is good, but I didn't want to do the sales work my parter was doing and I'm not nearly as passionate about it as DDG.
  - SwellJoe 16y ago
    This is another important lesson for entrepreneurs and hackers to learn. Sometimes, you have to cut loose even good ideas, in the service of the best of your ideas or the one you feel most passionately about. You'll have dozens, or hundreds, of ideas during your entrepreneurial development...but, any one of them will probably require absolute focus and dedication to make it really work.
djb_hackernews 16y ago
This makes me feel better. I've built and released 4 webapps with another in dev and they all seem to be perfect failures, which I've been thinking is perhaps a sign...
acangiano 16y ago
An overnight success, 15 years in the making. The lesson here is that you only really need to be successful once, so keep trying.
- jonpaul 16y ago
  Yup. One of Mark Cuban's finest lessons: http://blogmaverick.com/2005/05/30/success-and-motivation-you-only-have-to-be-right-once/ http://blogmaverick.com/2005/05/30/success-and-motivation-yo...
sdizdar 16y ago
Very very inspiring post. I've built and released only two web sites and just a couple of C++/C projects in storage area (of course nothing successful), so I have way to go... It be would interesting to know what did you learn of each these projects? Which project do you consider the most important from learning perspective?
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  It's all very incremental. I certainly learned a bit from each, but probably learned the most from my first "real" startup, learnection. It was first major failure (really ever) and I took it pretty hard at the time.
devmonk 16y ago
I'd like to see how much was made or lost on each of these, enough to do angel investing after all of that. I know the $500/day was mentioned, but just curious. Was the bulk of the money made that is now invested from these startups, or some other income?
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  Not counting my time here, I lost about 30K on learnection, 5-10K (not sure) on Twenty Questions, 10K on Kangadoo. Other than that, it didn't cost me anything to start the others. As for upside, made a few thousand on the ebook, 5-10K on nth Club, and not sure the total on Tldscan (the $500/day max) one. Nothing else made much besides selling NDB.
mthoms 16y ago
Gabriel, In Googling "namesdatabase" I've come across some old claims of allegedly dubious practices of the site that occurred while you were running it. I know your reputation is stellar here and that you contribute much to the community so I was more than a bit surprised. May I ask, have you addressed these allegations somewhere? I'd like to give you the benefit of the doubt, so I'm wondering where I can read your side of the story. Is there an HN thread or blog post you can point me towards? Many thanks.
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  Happy to answer questions. I think these address most things: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/bdlri/dont_want_google_to_know_about_your_anime_pillow/c0m8qp0 http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/bdlri/dont_want_... http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/cnce8/duckduckgos_new_privacy_policy_explains_why_you/c0tt1vo http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/cnce8/duckduckgo... http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/cncn2/a_search_engine_privacy_policy_not_written_by_the/c0tt1vl http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/cncn2/a_search_engin... http://ye.gg/mixergy http://ye.gg/mixergy I think a lot of it stems from either misunderstanding, edge cases (http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/02/one-in-a-million-happens-a-lot-when-your-site-is-big.html http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/02/one-in-a-million...), or just a fundamental problem with the idea of referring friends.
  - mthoms 16y ago
    Thanks for the links and your transparency. I will read up. Just to clarify - the reason I see this as relevant is because I'm a regular DDG user and put a lot of trust in your privacy claims (no logging of queries, etc).
    - epi0Bauqu 16y ago
      Yup, I understand. If you're ever in Philadelphia, feel free to stop by and I can show you no logging in real time. As for NDB, the biggest points from my perspective are that: --you could opt-out from emails or remove yourself from the database at any time. --you could see a detailed explanation of how every aspect of the site worked before signing up, on a page I spent countless hours writing and tweaking. --similarly, there was a vast support system that answered almost any faq. --you could see the whole database on our static site before signing up.
asb 16y ago
How did you decide when it was time to stop and try something else?
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  In the past, no particular process, which was part of the problem. Now, I'd do this: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/to-pivot-or-not-to-pivot.html http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/to-pivot-or-not-...
myth_drannon 16y ago
For those who missed , Andy Brice interviewed some startup/projects founders who failed : http://successfulsoftware.net/2010/05/27/learning-lessons-from-13-failed-software-products/ http://successfulsoftware.net/2010/05/27/learning-lessons-fr...
frederickcook 16y ago
Among my non-startup friends, there seems to be this pre-conception that people are working in some day-job and one day, have some crazy idea that nobody else has thought of and go and start a company and become successful. Good to see several people writing recently (from experience) about how this couldn't be farther from the truth. While it may happen from time to time, it's clear that most founders of successful (technology) startups have built a long-term lifestyle around working really hard, for a really long time, on a bunch of their own ideas and projects. Especially true given what we know about how much of a role luck and timing plays in the success of startups. Thanks for the post, Gabriel.
Andrew_Quentin 16y ago
I wonder if the lesson from this is perhaps narrow but deep rather than wide but shallow?
erikstarck 16y ago
And just imagine there are people, most people actually, that think they have This Great Idea and don't want to tell anyone about it without an NDA because they think you will steal it.
prawn 16y ago
I like hearing about these and would be interested in hearing more, but can't imagine everyone would want HN flooded with personal failure histories. Is it worth cataloguing them somewhere, with potential for HNers to comment on or takeover or try again? Call it something like 'Start Up Down'? What do people think? Obviously not really something that's going to become a lucrative venture but it wouldn't be tough to create either.

316 points by taylorwc 16y ago

This is very interesting. I think that the more failure you had in the past, the more likely you will have success in the future. I also had some previous side-projects experiences which did not work but I learnt so many things from these projects!

petervandijck 16y ago

Yep, pretty interesting. And although at first I didn't, I have to agree that a list of failed projects is not a bad indicator for success. At least it shows that you keep trying. As for mine: 1. Mefeedia.com Built it out for 2 years, then sold it because it wasn't going where I wanted it to go. 2. Poorbuthappy.com Lots of traffic for travel forums, but the community got out of hand so I had to close it. Those where the 2 main projects where there was an expectation of it possibly becoming something big-ish.

keeptrying 16y ago

I wonder how many were done while holding down a regular job? From his linked in profile, it looks like he's being doing startups for a while. Pretty cool.

epi0Bauqu 16y ago
Been doing startups right out of college. Only had a "regular job" for one year, Aug 2001-Aug 2002. From 2001-2005 I also did consulting to pay the bills, but would try hard to keep it to 4hr a day max. From 2005-2006 I was also in a graduate program, which I treated as secondary to my startup (but still did it)--sort of equivalent to the consulting.
- keeptrying 16y ago
  Awesome. I've been trying to figure out exactly how I'm going to feel when trying to work on startup. Your post seems more realistic and kind of shows me exactly what I should be expecting. Thanks for this. One quick question: I'm not a uber geek. Ie I like the business side of the equation too. Is this a good thing or a bad thing ?
  - Ixiaus 16y ago
    Not a Bad Thing, per se. I will tell you this: I recently launched a company with my cofounder who has had prior success. She had to do both the technical and business aspects. The startup we are building ATM wouldn't be a success if it hadn't been for her business experience - but I will also echo my side: she didn't do any of the programming; it is clear my skill and knowledge are deeper. So, in short, this startup really wouldn't be much without either. However, it's easier to be technical and acquire the business knowledge than the other way around, IMHO. So, the better question is: what kind of startup are you building? If it's a technology startup, you will either need to commit to learning your technology space or finding a technical co-founder. Committing to learning the technology will teach you a lot about your interests, you will either love it or not - if you don't love it, you won't succeed technically (you might business wise, there are plenty of companies with shitty technology that make money). Just some thoughts from a non-business oriented intellectual and programmer.

thetrumanshow 16y ago

It would be very interesting to add information about when you were working with advisors/mentors and when you were purely working on your own. I haven't had nearly as many at-bats as you have, but enough to know that I personally can't get very far on my own without an experienced voice guiding me past a lot of dumb ideas.

epi0Bauqu 16y ago
At learnection I had a board of my uncle and another VC guy, who were helpful but I didn't use them at all to the degree I should have. Other than that, no real advisors/mentors. For Zoofoo, Email client, Yahoo store thing, Namesdatabase & Kangadoo I worked with the same partner. The "Wall" (never launched) was with a different partner. And nth Club was with another partner. The rest is/was solo.

duck 16y ago

Are there links for the two episodes of "Twenty Questions"?

epi0Bauqu 16y ago
Nope--not online any more.

edw519 16y ago

As a builder of digital things, the 3 things I have the most trouble communicating to non-builders are: - how hard it is - how much time it takes - how long it takes to become successful So instead of trying to explain it, I may just send them to this blog post, which shows all 3. Thank you, Gabriel! (Now if only you would remove that Mojo Badge business from blocking your great content.)

epi0Bauqu 16y ago
Thx--I may do that (remove it). I was alpha testing it for a friend. Update: removed.
bobf 16y ago
While those three things are certainly true and Gabriel's post does a great job of showing them, don't forget: anyone can do it.

klous 16y ago

"Ship often. Ship lousy stuff, but ship. Ship constantly." - Godin from http://the99percent.com/tips/6249/seth-godin-the-truth-about-shipping http://the99percent.com/tips/6249/seth-godin-the-truth-about...

notahacker 16y ago

Would be even more interesting to know the details of why Gabriel failed to stick with some of the ideas. A Posterous-type service in 2001 sounds like it could have been a bigger success than the Names Database. Nth clubs sounds like it could work with a bit of incentive for club pros to recommend it...

epi0Bauqu 16y ago
I wish I had a good reason for ditching the public inbox. I don't. The proximate cause IIRC was I moved my server and had a disk failure. But that really isn't an excuse because I'm sure I had backups. It actually got traffic too. I don't know what to say other than that it didn't feel like a startup at the time. nth Club isn't a bad idea -- it just requires sales work that I don't want to do. I thought my partner (who is into golf) would be doing it, but that just has turned out not to be the case.

subbu 16y ago

Looks like you were startupping since 2000. Except NamesDatabase there haven't been any other exits. So how did you feed yourself until then? I am guessing your later projects were taken care by that exit.

epi0Bauqu 16y ago
Real job for one year. Then consulting. Then exit. Also, my wife has a job.
- subbu 16y ago
  Thanks

megamark16 16y ago

Wow, great list! My biggest take away was all of the times he says "perhaps I should have stuck with it". You never know where a project can go unless you stick with it. Back to hacking at my project...

epi0Bauqu 16y ago
Absolutely. That is one of my biggest lessons learned.

netaddict 16y ago

Why did Google blacklist all of your Tldscan sites? Was it just because your sites' content was updated automatically? Or was it because you did something wrong for SEO?

epi0Bauqu 16y ago
Here's my (completely unsubstantiated) theory. It happend literally the day after crossing $500 & 50K views in adsense. I'm guessing one of those was a trigger for manual review by some contractor, perhaps overseas. They looked at my sites for 3 sec, found them to be cookie-cutter and decided to blacklist the account. I get the impression they shoot first, ask questions later. I didn't feel like dealing with it all or starting over so I just moved on to other things.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  I wonder how many otherwise viable little businesses fall victim to this heavy handed approach. Is this one of the reasons DDG got started?
  - epi0Bauqu 16y ago
    Well, it did push me onto other things, though I wasn't (at least consciously) looking to get back at Google.
- stakent 16y ago
  In my case some clicks worth over $2 (if I remember correctly) triggered manual review. They sent me canned email about tos etc. The funny part is that the domain in question was already expired when email arrived because I've decided to stop this venture.
- asmithmd1 16y ago
  I talked to someone from Google at I/O who should know and he claimed they don't play "Whack a mole" with websites. They will tweak their ranking algorithm to punish the behavior they see in a web site they don't want to be ranked.

vaksel 16y ago

would be interesting to see what sort of traction you got with each service. i.e. did you quit when they only had 100 users, or was it more like 100,000

epi0Bauqu 16y ago
Really varied across the board, but nothing with anything close to 100K users. For the ones that didn't launch, obviously none :). I can't remember exact numbers for the old stuff, but pretty much everything got a decent amount of SEO traffic that I could play with (run tests on). Decent amount is several hundred to a few thousand uniques a day. More recent stuff more on the order of 100s of users.

run4yourlives 16y ago

Kangadoo: Why did this fail, really? This should be a runaway success. There are millions of people out there that can barely figure out their cameras, let alone understand the concept behind facebook or picasa or flickr or whatever could be considered "competition". Even with a founder departure, this is a valid idea... why didn't you continue to peruse it?

epi0Bauqu 16y ago
Yeah, I do think the idea is good, but I didn't want to do the sales work my parter was doing and I'm not nearly as passionate about it as DDG.
- SwellJoe 16y ago
  This is another important lesson for entrepreneurs and hackers to learn. Sometimes, you have to cut loose even good ideas, in the service of the best of your ideas or the one you feel most passionately about. You'll have dozens, or hundreds, of ideas during your entrepreneurial development...but, any one of them will probably require absolute focus and dedication to make it really work.

djb_hackernews 16y ago

This makes me feel better. I've built and released 4 webapps with another in dev and they all seem to be perfect failures, which I've been thinking is perhaps a sign...

acangiano 16y ago

An overnight success, 15 years in the making. The lesson here is that you only really need to be successful once, so keep trying.

jonpaul 16y ago
Yup. One of Mark Cuban's finest lessons: http://blogmaverick.com/2005/05/30/success-and-motivation-you-only-have-to-be-right-once/ http://blogmaverick.com/2005/05/30/success-and-motivation-yo...

sdizdar 16y ago

Very very inspiring post. I've built and released only two web sites and just a couple of C++/C projects in storage area (of course nothing successful), so I have way to go... It be would interesting to know what did you learn of each these projects? Which project do you consider the most important from learning perspective?

epi0Bauqu 16y ago
It's all very incremental. I certainly learned a bit from each, but probably learned the most from my first "real" startup, learnection. It was first major failure (really ever) and I took it pretty hard at the time.

devmonk 16y ago

I'd like to see how much was made or lost on each of these, enough to do angel investing after all of that. I know the $500/day was mentioned, but just curious. Was the bulk of the money made that is now invested from these startups, or some other income?

epi0Bauqu 16y ago
Not counting my time here, I lost about 30K on learnection, 5-10K (not sure) on Twenty Questions, 10K on Kangadoo. Other than that, it didn't cost me anything to start the others. As for upside, made a few thousand on the ebook, 5-10K on nth Club, and not sure the total on Tldscan (the $500/day max) one. Nothing else made much besides selling NDB.

mthoms 16y ago

Gabriel, In Googling "namesdatabase" I've come across some old claims of allegedly dubious practices of the site that occurred while you were running it. I know your reputation is stellar here and that you contribute much to the community so I was more than a bit surprised. May I ask, have you addressed these allegations somewhere? I'd like to give you the benefit of the doubt, so I'm wondering where I can read your side of the story. Is there an HN thread or blog post you can point me towards? Many thanks.

epi0Bauqu 16y ago
Happy to answer questions. I think these address most things: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/bdlri/dont_want_google_to_know_about_your_anime_pillow/c0m8qp0 http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/bdlri/dont_want_... http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/cnce8/duckduckgos_new_privacy_policy_explains_why_you/c0tt1vo http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/cnce8/duckduckgo... http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/cncn2/a_search_engine_privacy_policy_not_written_by_the/c0tt1vl http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/cncn2/a_search_engin... http://ye.gg/mixergy http://ye.gg/mixergy I think a lot of it stems from either misunderstanding, edge cases (http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/02/one-in-a-million-happens-a-lot-when-your-site-is-big.html http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/02/one-in-a-million...), or just a fundamental problem with the idea of referring friends.
- mthoms 16y ago
  Thanks for the links and your transparency. I will read up. Just to clarify - the reason I see this as relevant is because I'm a regular DDG user and put a lot of trust in your privacy claims (no logging of queries, etc).
  - epi0Bauqu 16y ago
    Yup, I understand. If you're ever in Philadelphia, feel free to stop by and I can show you no logging in real time. As for NDB, the biggest points from my perspective are that: --you could opt-out from emails or remove yourself from the database at any time. --you could see a detailed explanation of how every aspect of the site worked before signing up, on a page I spent countless hours writing and tweaking. --similarly, there was a vast support system that answered almost any faq. --you could see the whole database on our static site before signing up.

asb 16y ago

How did you decide when it was time to stop and try something else?

epi0Bauqu 16y ago
In the past, no particular process, which was part of the problem. Now, I'd do this: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/to-pivot-or-not-to-pivot.html http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/to-pivot-or-not-...

myth_drannon 16y ago

For those who missed , Andy Brice interviewed some startup/projects founders who failed : http://successfulsoftware.net/2010/05/27/learning-lessons-from-13-failed-software-products/ http://successfulsoftware.net/2010/05/27/learning-lessons-fr...

frederickcook 16y ago

Among my non-startup friends, there seems to be this pre-conception that people are working in some day-job and one day, have some crazy idea that nobody else has thought of and go and start a company and become successful. Good to see several people writing recently (from experience) about how this couldn't be farther from the truth. While it may happen from time to time, it's clear that most founders of successful (technology) startups have built a long-term lifestyle around working really hard, for a really long time, on a bunch of their own ideas and projects. Especially true given what we know about how much of a role luck and timing plays in the success of startups. Thanks for the post, Gabriel.

Andrew_Quentin 16y ago

I wonder if the lesson from this is perhaps narrow but deep rather than wide but shallow?

erikstarck 16y ago

And just imagine there are people, most people actually, that think they have This Great Idea and don't want to tell anyone about it without an NDA because they think you will steal it.

prawn 16y ago

I like hearing about these and would be interested in hearing more, but can't imagine everyone would want HN flooded with personal failure histories. Is it worth cataloguing them somewhere, with potential for HNers to comment on or takeover or try again? Call it something like 'Start Up Down'? What do people think? Obviously not really something that's going to become a lucrative venture but it wouldn't be tough to create either.