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My main failure(s) have always been, and continue to be, not sticking with ANY idea long enough to see it through. What I consider good ideas (for myself) are f
by WesleyJohnson 17y ago
My main failure(s) have always been, and continue to be, not sticking with ANY idea long enough to see it through. What I consider good ideas (for myself) are few and far between, so when I have one I tend to over analyze it to the point that I add so much to the idea that it becomes too much to take on or I eventually convince myself it really wasn't that great of an idea and I move on. I also hesitate to get real feedback on my ideas from my peers, because of some silly fear that one time it will really be goldmine and someone will execute it faster and better, which is ironic considering that I eventually write the idea off anyway. Would be interested to hear if anyone else goes through something similar.
A more tangible failure, which was also a mild success, was a tracking/analytics site I did for Xanga, a not so well known blogging/social community site. They allowed you to inject JavaScript into your themes, which made it ripe for a wide array of scripting features/widgets/etc. I was one of many tracking sites that would show you who was visiting your blog, name, IP, etc. Xanga eventually took my domain name, "XangaSpy" through legal pressure. The change in name had a huge impact on my traffic and while struggling to rebuild, my host corrupted my database and its backup. That was all she wrote. Xanga eventually added similar features themselves.
At peak I had 15,000+ registered users and was making ~$200 a month from Adsense. The tech wasn't terribly advanced and I certainly wasn't making a living, but it was still a mild success for myself as it was long before I really understood web development and well before I took my first entry level job as a developer.
Lessons learned? Building an app that piggy-backs on someone else's service could find your work obsolete should the service implement similar functionality. Also, backup, backup, backup.