7 ms·

Ask HN: Failed project you spent 15 hours/week for 5 years on?

• benibela 5y ago
  A book management software to track the books I have borrowed from the libraries in my city by automatically syncing with the library account via the online catalog of the library. It is the worst project ever I am hardly getting any users. The people who go to the library, do not know about my software. The people who randomly find my software, do not go the library in my German city. I tried to add other libraries in other cities, but I cannot really do that without traveling to that city to get a library card there. The librarians refuse to talk about it, because it also warns people about the due dates, and they want people to miss the due dates to raise more late fees. It took like 15h / week for 15 years. It takes a massive amount of time, because every time the library changes their webpage, I need to make an update to read the webpage. Especially since I can only see the change, when I have borrowed a book from them. When they are in other cities, I can spend entire weeks writing mails to the library to ask what they have changed, and not getting any answer But there are still some people using it, otherwise I could have abandoned the project ten years ago. Now I cannot get rid of it
• bobbydreamer 5y ago
  Stock analysis program. I scrape a stock site using Java and load the data to mySQL database in my computer. I have cloud functions to scape any new announcements and send mail to me. The site I had built is pretty much scalable meaning announcements are stored in Firebase and bootstrap 4 website logins are handled by Firebase as well and each user can track the stocks, get announcements related to their stocks and see all the financials and see the reports as well. The roadblocks been, the source site from I scrape they change their site design often due to which I loose data or had to rework which some times takes couple of months. Data is sometimes disconnected like if the stock is part of a index the main page is updated with main items like revenue and net profit but the details pages are not updated and they might be updated within next 5days. So scraping takes lots of time in my home computer amd insertion takes time as well. Initally I was generating around 50 reports, after site upgrades due to change in data presented data, currently have around 35 reports. Since I am not seeing that many reports currently I am going to drop more reports. Scraping part is the part I would like to move to cloud but currently I don't have enough time but 3yrs back I was working like a machine 9hrs office. 5-7hrs each day on this. Tech stack all of it I had to learn Scraping : Java, Python (introduced a year back); Analysis : Java & SQL queries . Currently trying to add pandas; Realtime scraping : NodeJs, Firebase in GCP; UI : initially generated reports using Java velocity, Js datagrids in bootstrap. Later developed a full fledged bootstrap 4 web application;. Spent RIDICULOUS amount of time on this. Worse thing is when I started there wasnt much of apps did what I tried to do in report perspective. Now there are apps which does almost 50% of analysis what I do. Now the thought process is do I want to proceed ? No. I am trying to continue the scraping part but sort of minimize all the UI stuff and when some analysis is required write a query to get the data and subscribe & pay the app which solves 50% of my work. Due to this I didn't focus on any other areas in life which right now is lot frustrating. Sacrifices I used to be a marathon runner, not anymore. Used to workout regularly 5days a week in gym, not anymore. Used to have social life, not anymore. Another interesting thing, it's a stock webapp which I was building, I was soo into the programming in bringing this up actually I didn't actually get time to review the reports. I did miss a lots of Market Ups....
• MarcelOlsz 5y ago
  I've spent the last decade doing this. Building up my savings, draining them on an idea. I put in 40+ per week for a couple years on my last startup in the real estate space. Poached some top level VP's from the biggest firm in our country, but we ran through our capital too quickly due to too many pivots and licensing costs, I could only do no salary for so long, tough when your rent is $2.5k/mo. Now I am back at my parents place far away from any city working on my own projects in the productivity space, a space I'm intimately familiar with. Theres a few tools I'm missing from my daily arsenal that I am building now. I was too greedy in my goals and while we got funded and it was fun, ultimately it turned into nothing. I was of the "first to market / build a unicorn" mindset which as someone who doesn't come from money or connections, is pretty much impossible. I am now trying to build a lifestyle company with a suite of tools in the productivity space, trying to hit $10k/mo MRR which doesn't scare me and I know is doable, as I've done it before (but unfortunately sold my stake to use that money on the venture I mentioned that failed). Bad move but hindsight is 20/20 I guess. I am focusing on building tools that solve my own problems. So I'm 28 now, have under $1k in total net worth, but I am not going to stop until I am free from working a salaried job. 2 of my projects made money (sold them, dumb move, too bright-eyed and greedy), 11 of them didn't see a dime. I have never been more depressed in my life but I refuse to believe I can't hit at least a couple grand a month as I've done before, which is all I need to live my life. If only I realized this sooner. The reason I will keep doing this even if I don't succeed is because the regret of having not tried as hard as I can will haunt me every second of every day if I concede and hop on a salary. I don't want to spend the rest of my life on "what if?", and a life of sitting behind a glass wall consuming fine things does nothing for me. I don't want to be at the orchestra, or a restaurant, or a show. I want to be on stage, or be the chef, or be the conductor and for that you need time and money. I know quite a few people with graveyard projects like this. Feel free to ask me anything, I'm an open book.
  • templarchamp 5y ago
    I would love to chat with you. Is there a way to contact you directly?
    • MarcelOlsz 5y ago
• rozenmd 5y ago
  I spend 10 hours per week (since about 2017) working on side projects while employed full-time, the longest time I spent on a "loser" was roughly a year. It wasn't a total failure though, as the learning I gained from each project compounded into a sort of "platform", and led me to build an MVP of https://OnlineOrNot.com https://OnlineOrNot.com in 7 days - profitable within the first couple of months, slowly but steadily growing MRR.
• amozoss 5y ago
  Mine is https://pushback.io/ https://pushback.io/. It wasn't for 5 years more like 3 and wasn't consistently 15+ hours/week but definitely got up there when the passion was burning bright. I've failed to implement a winning conversion plan (need to iterate my pricing, just never got around to it) and do marketing. I've since moved on to another side project, but my passion certainly calls me back to Pushback from time to time.
  • okwubodu 5y ago
    This is really cool! It would make a lot of my ideas easier to build.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • herbst 5y ago
    You are in my backlog of services to implement in my current project :)
    • amozoss 5y ago
      Let me know if you need any help :)
• rglover 5y ago
  Multiple times. The perspective I've adopted is to look at what you learned in the process of each failure and how that improved your ability to do a better job on the next venture. The truth is that many don't have the stomach for "sticking with it," doing whatever is necessary to keep going in the down phases (I highly recommend the poem "If" by Rudyard Kipling and see if it resonates). You only truly "fail" when you quit. If you can make the necessary sacrifices to struggle through the dark days, your chances of succeeding increase greatly. I'd argue "survivorship bias" is just an excuse made by people who give up (I know that will sting some of you, but really marinate on it).
  • rozenmd 5y ago
    > You only truly "fail" when you quit 100% this - my project is in a highly competitive space (think hundreds of SaaS alternatives). The only ones that "fail" are the ones that come in copying competitors, expecting overnight success, and get upset when the money doesn't come pouring in.
  • lhnz 5y ago
    > You only truly "fail" when you quit. If you can make the necessary sacrifices to struggle through the dark days, your chances of succeeding increase greatly. People give up when they realise that continuing a grind will require then to sacrifice more meaningful opportunities they have. It's not always good to keep going. Sometimes you're throwing your life away.
    • rglover 5y ago
      > It's not always good to keep going. Sometimes you're throwing your life away. That's a conditioned response. "Throwing your life away" is subjective. Edit: https://nav.al/kapil https://nav.al/kapil <-- Worth listening to.
      • lhnz 5y ago
        That's not a conditioned response! I also once believed the same as you, and I have friends that are endlessly bootstrapping and spending 60+ hours a week on their startups. They are renters, that don't have much money or a family or relationship, and they pump every freelancing job they do into their new ideas. There's no law that says this will pay off. They might end up in their mid forties with very little wealth or they might end up very rich. These aren't conditioned responses. Grit isn't enough here. You need to make the right choice for your self depending on your own dreams and the likelihood of attaining them. My point is, if you decide you want a family, you will need to stop pouring all of your money into your projects, as it will be difficult for everybody if you're in one bedroom of a shared house...
• recursivedoubts 5y ago
  I poured 40-60 hours a week for a decade into a programming language that we open source and then flopped: https://gosu-lang.github.io/ https://gosu-lang.github.io/ I was paid during that time, and the language is still heavily used internally, but it never got picked up by the outside world and Kotlin arriving on the scene killed any chance it had. Was fun though.
  • atemerev 5y ago
    Hmm, I have heard about it once or twice, as a minor “Java improvement” language like Ceylon. It is, however, next to impossible to popularize a new programming language without dedicated evangelists (e.g. hardcore fans who spend a lot of time on programmers forums and social networks, arguing for the language).
    • recursivedoubts 5y ago
      yep, we were naive about that on the other hand, it was early on in the JVM language boom and so things like JRuby and Clojure were growing in popularity, and we thought we might have a shot at least it was fun there were some interesting technical aspects to the language, such as the open type system[1], which lives on in spirit in Manifold[2]. [1] - https://guidewiredevelopment.wordpress.com/2010/11/18/gosus-secret-sauce-the-open-type-system/ https://guidewiredevelopment.wordpress.com/2010/11/18/gosus-... [2] - http://manifold.systems/ http://manifold.systems/
• HackerNewAddict 5y ago
  This is mine https://appointmenthelper.net https://appointmenthelper.net. My dream sauce (SaaS ;)) was this application which I consistently worked about 2 hours every day for one year and when everything was ready, the guy refused to use it. Though I still keep it hosted even though no one uses it :-)
  • dgeiser13 5y ago
    Is that your pricing? Or the guy you built it for?
    • HackerNewAddict 5y ago
      That was my pricing. The guy was a dentist. He wasn't a technical person. He was a relative of my friend, when their relationship got sour he turned it down.
• rbanffy 5y ago
  My most successful project, by far, is a font. As a software engineer, I find that slightly amusing. None of my software projects got anywhere near its traction. Except, maybe, an Emacs plugin made as a joke that adds IBM Selectric typewriter sounds to your text editor.
  • audiometry 5y ago
    What is the font and its story?
    • rbanffy 5y ago
      It’s https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font. It’s a terminal font based on 70’s IBM terminals. It’s been used in art projects and on the cover of a magazine, and it’s offered packaged in the Debian and Ubuntu repos.
• achillean 5y ago
  I worked nearly full-time for about 2 years using my personal savings on a project management software for labs ("Labengine"). The big hook was that it let you run common bioinformatics apps on your data and it would automatically convert the input file to the expected format (there were lots of competing bioinformatics file formats at the time). I had a few of my old professors use it and "love" it but nobody ended up paying. It was a good lesson for me to not work on a project in isolation too long; release early release often is the motto now. Edit: I stopped working on it after it bombed horrifically but kept burning through my savings and after a few other ideas ended up with a successful company (Shodan). I still learned a lot from failing with Labengine but I don't think working on it another few years would've made it successful.
  • xnyan 5y ago
    You could have made the best software in the world, but as someone who now works as an in-house developer for a medical research university, there's almost no way for individual researchers to have significant influence on IT budgets. Sure, there are always a few rock stars who pull in huge grants and thus have some control over institutional spend, but in general the operations side of academia has little influence on what software is bought/used. Because of this, I've found there's quite a bit of (understandable) apathy among researchers with regards to anything related to IT - you have no control over it, it's a miserable necessity for your real job.
  • clusterhacks 5y ago
    I work in the medical research space and we have LIMS (lab info management systems for people outside this niche) and am consistently amazed by the number of companies trying to get into our IT systems with lab management packages. It's a very tough space to break into it and my recent experience is that the big EMS/EMR vendors are increasingly trying to offer "modules" to do LIMS and bioinformatics analysis pipelines. Every now and again I start thinking about unsupervised learning projects in this space but look around and see just how little spend on analytics software there is for bioinformatics tools and settle down to focus on helping folks with our cluster and general reporting needs . . .
• giantg2 5y ago
  Not over five years, nor as much time. I created an app. It functioned fine, but never made any money. It was a lack of marketing. I spent time looking into marketing. I think I spent $10 on Facebook ads and went to a local college campus to put up posters with QR codes (I had quite a few hits for my one design, so I'm proud of that). My problem was targeting the wrong demographic and/or making the interface too bland. I should have targeted event planners instead of college kids. Even after releasing it for free it never really took off.
• JohnFen 5y ago
  Sure, I've had four projects that I spent years on and never went anywhere (at least in the way that was planned). But that was certainly not wasted time and effort. Not only did it improve my skillset, but large amounts of the code written could be repurposed for other projects, giving a head start on them.
• tluyben2 5y ago
  It is how I work usually for the past 30+ years: I spread my time between 3-4 projects always and most are my own. I work on them for 3-6 years per project until something hooks some success or does nothing at all. Most fail, I had a few successful ones that made enough to live a nice life with a family and a few turned into serious companies. I suspect I will keep doing this until the end of my life: it is a lot of fun, failed or not. But success is obviously a better feeling.
  • smackeyacky 5y ago
    Do you have a metric for when you give up on something? I'm 4 years into something that is a grind of epic proportions and wondering whether I should just shelve it and move on.
    • tluyben2 5y ago
      My usual metric is 3 years: only when I feel it has legs after that I continue a little bit. And by legs I mean that it has interested investors, breaks even or someone want to buy the company. I have a project now that I started over 3 years ago and was completely dead until 2.5 years in about. An investor contacted me and said this is perfect timing (yeah, well, it was not 3 years ago... but it is how things go) and now he wants to jump full in: he started sending money as a token of trust.
      • smackeyacky 5y ago
        Thanks dude. This sounds sensible to me.
• legohead 5y ago
  Maybe not 5+ years worth of development in many cases, but if you want examples, just open up Steam...
• ping_pong 5y ago
  I took a year off and for fun, I spent 40 hours a week for 9 months on a website that used OCR and other packages for some games. It generated around $15/month in ad revenue, just enough to pay for my EC2 instance at the time. I kept it around but at some point the ad revenue I made dropped like a rock by 90% so I shut it down. It was fun nonetheless and I learned a lot, but it was not successful by any measure.
• jabo 5y ago
  Context: I'm the other co-founder of Typesense, mentioned in the article you linked. Kishore and I have worked together on about 12 different side projects over the course of 13 years, and we've tried to adopt this mindset of consistency, persistence and long timeframes for each. A few of these projects got good traction, but most of them didn't do well (at least revenue-wise). But here's the thing: working on all these projects consistently over the years, has also helped us learn about things like how to pick a market, how to validate our hypotheses, how to choose technologies when building products, how to maintain codebases over a decade, how to stay nimble, etc. I would say that the sum total of our collective learnings through all these projects, have helped us significantly in our Typesense journey. So I would say, showing up everyday is not a magic bullet to making a project successful. Instead, it's a magic bullet to continuous learning and building up a wealth of experience, that might just come in handy when you're working on your next project, which then increases your odds of success.
  • shantnutiwari 5y ago
    great point about showing up and doing the work means you will succeed, just not at your 1st or Nth idea or favorite idea; but as long as you are moving, you are making progress, and the success compounds (Im a bit putting words in your mouth, but I hope it stays in the spirit of what you said :) )
  • high_byte 5y ago
    well said!
• armchairhacker 5y ago
  Not several years, but I have developed side-projects which burned out after a few months. The longest was 2 years. I put a lot of effort into these projects, and some of them I don't even really have demos. But, I learned a lot of skills from developing them. Skills which directly saved me time later on. For example, I learned a lot of concepts which were later covered in college classes, so I was able to study less and do homework faster. When I look back, I don't see anything I could've done in that time to help my future self more (except maybe a successful project? Or maybe investing in Bitcoin? ... but realistically, nothing else) I don't regret those "failed" projects at all: in fact, I wish I could motivate myself to do more of them.
• DrNuke 5y ago
  You can surely supplement your own quest at global level with business/tech consulting at local level? Wherever you live, draw a 50-100km radius circle and sell your tips, tricks, life experience to business people who are way less active than you? They buy them time, you monetise your “failures”?!
• simonblack 5y ago
  There is no law that says every project must succeed. Edison was supposed to have said something along the lines of "Keep on experimenting and do not hope for success" - keep doing/trying something but don't be disappointed if it doesn't work. Failure is also success. We've learned what doesn't work.
• alashley 5y ago
  Between learning Android and actually getting it built, I created a social fitness app that never really took off after an initial influx of users: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrelashley.gymmr&hl=en_CA&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrelashl... I'm getting a second wind and might re-build it soon, as something that is more similar to tiktok. I may also need to put much more effort into advertising/marketing this time.
• gyrcom 5y ago
  Hey, I've done this several times. In the 90's I spent over 10,000 hours on a 2d real time board game similar to Starcraft for the Amiga. In 96 I gave up on the possibility of an Amiga comeback and spent a couple of thousand to build a windows development system to post the game to. Well it turned out to be impossible as the M$ system is so defective. Once used to perfection it is difficult to program a turd. Linux was so young that I did not go there and built an ISP instead. In 2000 I spent a year producing a website in Rebol to analyze the nutritional qualities of foods, did not go anywhere. In 2014 I started the development of an events website so that anyone can post their events for free, got it working just in time for covid, 7 years, which oddly enough destroyed events. Have a look at GIDOUT.COM if you like it drop me a line.
  • rapjr9 5y ago
    I spent two years building an animation system for the Commodore 64, lots of assembly language, a sprite editor, and then someone came out with a product very similar to what I was building so I gave up. Some time later I realized that was a mistake, I would have just been competing instead of being first. For my next project I wrote a ray tracer for the Amiga (C-Light). Same thing happened, another company came out with something better before I'd even finished (the competition could display more colors simultaneously using an assembly trick I didn't understand) but I kept going, got to version 1.0, and got a distributor in the UK. The distributor ripped me off and vanished, collection agencies couldn't find him. I wasn't happy spending so much time on stuff that wasn't programming and it was costing me money so I gave it away for free. I spent at least five years on that. Two things that have stopped me from starting new projects are patents and the fast evolution and demise of platforms. It is really difficult to know if any part of your idea is patented. You could put a lot of work into something only to have a troll take it all away. Platforms don't last any more (try running apps from your first iPhone on a current iPhone) and the continuous churn makes planning to work on something for years a very risky proposition. Everything changes, OS's, programming languages, API's, UI's, cloud vs local, networking, etc. If you're doing it all yourself it is not possible to keep up for very long. So I'd suggest carefully considering the longevity of what you plan to do. If it's going to take you 5 years to reach success you had better be sure your product is going to still be possible and relevant in 5 years. Otherwise I'd attempt shorter term projects. Supply chain attacks for example may be about to wipe out certain classes of software/service products if no one trusts them any more (though it's nice to have a scapegoat, maybe you could sell scapegoating as a service? :-)
• the_only_law 5y ago
  Yeah, my career.
• makeee 5y ago
  Spent a couple years working on a Patreon competitor that did some cool things with the Instagram and Twitter APIs to unlock premium content (you pay then auto-follow their secondary private account with premium content). API changes screwed me over. Should have bailed then, but I kept trying as an undifferentiated Patreon competitor for another year without much luck. Lesson: If you have a unique twist stop trying if that twist doesn't pan out. Also beware of social network APIs.
  • herbst 5y ago
    > Also beware of social network APIs. Can't repeat this enough. Burned me multiple times.
• herbst 5y ago
  Yes, when I was a total programming noob and had no idea about business I had these projects. Today I scale everything down so I can build it in a realistic time frame. A project I can't release after half a year is likely not going to be ever released. If it turns out to generate interest I instantly have 5 times the motivation to improve it, if it doesn't I at least haven't wasted to much time. If I start loosing interest before a release is near I just throw it away too, no point in forcing it Edit:// sure I learned a lot with the going nowhere projects too. And the most important thing to learn was my personal way to build any projects faster in future
• bacheson1293 5y ago
  I spent 10 years creating failure after failure...learning many things a long the way...at 27 my co-founder and I started a SaaS that is now worth $100M...we made $475 our first month which was roughly 10 years ago
• softwaredoug 5y ago
  What is failure? I personally am happy when I know I build something others treasure. It could be a handful of people, or many. Or it could be that I’m the only customer. I can’t feasibly imagine working on something that long that _nobody_ cares about using, including me. I suppose it happens, but it really boggles my imagination. Financially? A startup? Yes there’s absolutely survivorship bias. Supposedly 9/10 fail[1]. From mid stage startup I’ve seen/worked at there’s only the consistent theme of luck, access to capital, and persistence.. 1 - says this if cited article, which seems low TBH https://fortune.com/2014/09/25/why-startups-fail-according-to-their-founders/ https://fortune.com/2014/09/25/why-startups-fail-according-t...
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• cyberge99 5y ago
  dashpc.com Dashboard Linux Automotive. Basically, it was the first in-car touchscreen mp3, gps, fm radio, bluetooth(eventually), linux based caputer concept project. In 1999, it was a full computer retrofitted into the dashboard. By 2003, me and my team were doing conferences (Phreaknic), etc. It was slashdotted a few times and a few mags did writeups about it. Major auto manufacturers were regular visitors to the site (according to the logs). It was in a 2000 VW Jetta and it looked factory. It still lives on in archives, but I failed to turn it into a business or maintainable project. Open source collaboration was still “new” back then and it wasn’t easy to crowdsource capital or form business networks. I was often told to contact my local Small Business Administration for leads (went nowhere). I learned a lot, mostly what not to do, so value was created in some way.
• bencooper 5y ago
  dsf
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• jf22 5y ago
  I've spent 5-10 hours per week on https://onebag.travel/ https://onebag.travel/ So far I've made about $23.56. It's more of a passion project because I like backpacks and I think encouraging people to pack less is important.