

Ask HN: Did your YC (or other incubator) startup fail? What are you doing now? - andrewhillman

What year did it fail, how long after the program did things end and what are you doing these days?
======
pbiggar
Here's my (long long) story: [http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-
newstilt-down...](http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-
down/)

Am now doing [https://circleci.com](https://circleci.com), so it has a happy
ending.

~~~
zmitri
Hey Paul, I'm the founder of Beacon
[http://www.beaconreader.com](http://www.beaconreader.com) \- would be
interested to hear your thoughts (if you have any) on the space now. Can I
send you an email?

~~~
javert
Not the guy you're asking but I have something to tell you.

I've never heard of Beacon, so I went to your site. The site does not
immediately and clearly tell me what Beacon does. That sucks.

No, I don't want to watch a video to find out.

Only at this point do I know what it does:

"When you fund a writer on Beacon, you also get access to every story from
every other writer. New writers are added each month so your subscription
becomes more valuable over time."

Weird that I "also" get access, as you didn't actually tell me that you get
access to a particular writer if and only if you fund them.

It seems like your product is niche journalism. What you are apparently
currently triyng to sell is "Pay a journalist." That is not a product and it
is not a value to anyone except the journalist.

An alternative sales pitch would be: "We're building a grassroots journalism
network. For $5 a month, you can sponsor a writer whose work interests you to
get access to their work, and as a bonus, we'll give you access to the entire
network."

It's realize highly presumptious of me to say all this. I would expect that
you already know it. Plus, maybe your model for generating new subscribers
does not include "they go to the website never having heard of what it is
before." So, sorry if I'm wasting your time.

~~~
cmbaus
I hate the term "sucks" when applied to someone's serious work.

~~~
shawnreilly
I see where you're coming from, sometimes Honest Feedback can be a bit harsh.
But Honest Feedback is the Best Feedback. I've learned to turn negative
feedback into constructive criticism. You can't take it personally, these are
things that may potentially help your business (assuming you can identify and
solve whatever problem is raised). I'm an optimist at heart, but when it comes
to feedback, I always tend to focus more on the negative feedback. In terms of
fine tuning my product, I think there is more to learn from the negative
feedback (not to imply that positive feedback is not valuable). I don't
consider my job well done until there is no negative feedback (rare), or I do
everything I can to minimize the negative feedback. It has become an effective
strategy that allows me to learn from potential customers and fine tune the
product (customer feedback loop).

~~~
cmbaus
It is possible to give "Honest Feedback" with out saying something "sucks."

~~~
shawnreilly
I'm not going to disagree, but I think it's important to note that Honest
Feedback is unfiltered. So if they think it "sucks" then they should be able
to say that it "sucks" and this shouldn't reflect badly on them. If anything,
the person receiving the feedback should be thanking them for investing the
time to even provide feedback (instead of bouncing and moving along, never to
be seen again).

------
strictfp
Other incubator. 2004-2007. We had a good product, but didn't focus enough and
instead pivoted twice to arguably worse products. The company barely scraped
by until last year, when it was sold to a well-known market player. We
founders were so diluted by then that we only got a minor amount. Was a great
journey but won't be repeating it until I find a product I believe 100% in.
You have to be in it to win it. Working as a consultant now and one thing I
can say for sure is that running a startup gives you one hell of a headstart
competence-wise.

~~~
shubb
When you say consulting, what do you mean?

To me, consulting is 'providing outside expertise and advice, to teach a
client what to do and how'. For instance, you might have a sales consultant
teach you how to build a better sales pipeline. A software consultant would
show you how to commission outsource work, or design a service architecture,
but not actually implement them.

I get the feeling that on HN it means something else?

Often, people here transition very easily into consulting, and treat it as a
worst case fallback job, which is crazy because I figured the kind of
consulting mentioned above is engaging, well paid, really hard to get started
in, and a business in itself.

~~~
hellweaver666
I think a lot of people use it interchangeably with "contracting". i.e.
working as an expert temporary employee on a specific product/problem usually
at a higher wage than the "permanent" employees.

~~~
bermanoid
As an ex-consultant/contractor, you're exactly right - it's often confusing
because different companies call it different things. I've done both types
(consulting on the high level goals, and actually implementing things) and
I've rarely seen a company that draws much of a distinction, oftentimes the
first leads into the second anyways, usually at the same rate.

Terminology, meh...these days I just say I was a hired gun, because some
people think there's an actual distinction between consultant and contractor,
but I was never clear on what it was, even though I was doing it...

------
bradhe
Other incubator. It failed in early 2012, a little over a year after it was
founded and probably 6 months too late. I'm now working at one of the other
startups from my batch, and things are going great.

It was really tough to pull the plug, but it was really obvious it was time to
do so. We were out of money in the bank and weren't making enough revenue to
stay aloat

~~~
onedev
Looking back, what would you say were the problems?

Were they more about the product, or how you approached the process of
building a business?

Just curious about your experiences. It can possibly be both.

------
golergka
2010\. I went into a 2-day startup crashcourse with a rough idea that I didn't
even plan on telling anyone (so rough it was) and went out with a prototype
done by a google-employed engineer (I wasn't a programmer at the time) and a
couple of investors ready to back me up. In the following months, I (me
personally, not the situation neither anyone else is to blame) failed
miserably and went through a very rough psychologic breakdown.

~~~
reneherse
You might be interested to read about what is called the "upper limit
problem". There's a book called The Big Leap which discusses it in an
accessible and helpful way.

------
jbackus
My co-founder and I ran into a lot of logistical issues when building out a
Bitcoin remittance platform. One of the biggest blocking issues was dealing
with regulatory compliance and preventing people from committing fraud on the
service. Turns out that these headaches are extremely common across all
Bitcoin companies, so we 100% switched to
[http://blockscore.com/](http://blockscore.com/) which drastically simplifies
compliance and anti-fraud.

------
Udo
I failed in 2005 (wasn't an incubator, more like an angel thing). We started
in 2001 and had some moderate success, but in the end the business wasn't
scalable, and the concept was horribly flawed at a point in time where most of
our customers had financial difficulties. The business/myself was acqui-hired,
luckily, otherwise I'd just have gone under with all the personal debt I had
(unwisely) accrued.

Now I'm kicking around some ideas.

Actually, after nReduce failed I thought I might try a second take on the idea
of a community-based incubator.

Check it out:
[http://launchway.net/posts/blog](http://launchway.net/posts/blog)

~~~
nl
What happened to nReduce? It seemed to be a good idea, and had some traction
for a while.

~~~
Udo
That's what I thought, but then they shut down suddenly. To be fair hadn't
checked in on them for a while, apparently things haven't been great for some
time. But I still think this is a concept worth pursuing, so I'm trying to see
if I can iterate on the work they did in that space. We'll see!

Anyway, I'd appreciate any feedback from HNers on the project, it's very new
(went live as a rudimentary version last night).

~~~
nl
I signed up

~~~
Udo
Thanks :) Let me know if you run into difficulties. Today I'll be working on
site features, and after that I'll go and advertise as much as I can!

------
mufumbo
I got a cease and deasist letter :)

Now doing a new startup. Launched on November, so help us grow:
[http://www.allthecooks.com/download](http://www.allthecooks.com/download)

~~~
driverdan
A cease and desist letter is pretty meaningless in and of itself. Care to
expand on the story?

------
bbrunner
Yes it failed (other incubator). Maybe 7 or 8 months after. I started working
at a another startup where I knew one of the cofounders. It was definitely the
right choice.

Sometimes ideas just take a while to take off and will be ultimately
successful. Sometimes ideas are just bad, and you need to kill them and move
on. Sunk costs can be a bitch, but you're not getting that time back, so make
the most of the future.

------
onion2k
UsableHQ ... other accelerator 2011, failed 2013. Look back through my HN
comments for (parts of) things I learnt during the story.

Now doing Pitcher.io :)

~~~
tomekmarchi
I noticed pitcher.io uses hash fragments do you guys plan on going to
pushstate? Have you noticed any issues with google indexing the hash URLs?

~~~
onion2k
I'd love to go that way, but I've never managed to get backbone.js pushstate
to work. And yes, I have noticed that Google doesn't like hash URLs. It's
annoying.

But, that said, Google search traffic isn't a likely source of users, so I've
not spent much time figuring out a solution yet. There are much bigger
problems to solve before that. Like how to stop posting on HN when I should be
working. :)

~~~
AznHisoka
I've visited Pitcher.io. I think the messaging on the site is kind of complex,
maybe you should focus on one value proposition and communicate that?

------
colmvp
Kind of curious what happened with the team from Diaspora. I thought they
pivoted to a website where users posted pictures and could place text on them.

~~~
ronilan
From:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Zhitomirskiy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Zhitomirskiy)

 _On the evening of 12 November 2011, Zhitomirskiy was found dead in his San
Francisco home by police responding to calls about a suspected suicide._

 _Zhitomirskiy’s mother, Inna Zhitomirskiy, did not comment on reports of his
history of mental illness, but she did say on his participation in Diaspora,
"I strongly believe that if Ilya did not start this project and stayed in
school, he would be well and alive today."_

~~~
rjbwork
Darn, that's really sad. Diaspora is a really cool concept, though I'm kind of
soured on social networking after years of Facebook. Perhaps I'll give it a
shot soon since this guy literally gave his life for the project.

------
JRFuentes7
Other incubator. 2012-2013. Came in with B2B enterprise software (invalidated
that), and came out with a consumer subcom startup. Bootstrapped that to 6
figures in 12 months. Growth plateaued, but it's a going concern (~$7200 MRR).
I spend about 5 hrs a month on it now.

My main squeeze is [http://featurekicker.com](http://featurekicker.com) \--
software that helps teams “make something people want.”

With FeatureKicker, you can quickly add a button representing a new feature on
a website. When a user clicks on the experimental button, our tech opens a
modal window and gets user input on the new feature.

You can also get feedback on existing features of their website, so they can
improve their product.

Any and all feedback is welcome...

------
outpost
Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur. -Ron Conway

Most of the answer will be bounce backs from a failed startup to a
surviving/successful one.

~~~
rdl
Depending on one's financial situation, it's pretty reasonable to do
consulting or something in between, especially if the founders are older or
otherwise have higher income potential. (Going from $250/hr or $250k+/yr
consulting to $0-3k/mo startup wages kind of sucks if you don't get an
exit...)

------
Nimsical
We failed early 2013. I was the founding engineer, but ended up doing Product
Management at [http://frankandoak.com](http://frankandoak.com) after.

Engineering -> Business oriented role was the easiest thing I could think of.

------
yoongfook
We ended up helping retailers integrate iBeacon functionality into their
existing app and supply them with with BLE hardware at
[http://www.beaconmaker.com](http://www.beaconmaker.com)

------
tomekmarchi
[http://omnipapr.com](http://omnipapr.com) Not a startup yet just really a
side project. You can have a look at the interface with the test account.
user:test pass:win

------
ajaxguy
This seems to be going really good. Do we have any site or something that
lists sort of failed startups in one place?

------
SoCool
2011 , kept the product up and running at my own expense for the next year,
joined a big corp starting of 2013.

------
wuschel
Very interesting topic. I wish it would go on and not vanish in nothingness..

