
Ask HN : What's the meanest thing that has been said about your startup? - dan_sim
When you have a startup, you hear a lot of mean words about people who want you to fail. It's time to talk about it. Feel free to add a link.
======
ConradHex
Several years ago I co-founded a small game company. We busted our butt
working 80 hours a week for months on end to get stuff done. We had one game
that we shipped and were proud of; it was a budget game, but it was superior
to many other games at that price point ($20).

Anyway, one reviewer wrote: "I would prefer the soothing comfort of a spork
being gouged in my eye rather than playing a few more minutes of this game."
Still makes me laugh, actually.

~~~
mattmaroon
How did the game end up doing?

~~~
ConradHex
Badly. :|

It's hard to say if it was marketing or what, though. Plenty of budget games
did well (not sure any more), but people don't usually buy budget games based
on reviews. They buy it because they see it at Wal-mart for $20 and it looks
fun based on the box.

Someone ported it to an arcade platform, though, and I still see it at most
Chuck-e-cheese's, which is the coolest thing in the world. Way cooler than
seeing it on the shelf at the store.

------
raffi
I've put significant work over the past 6 years into an open source
programming language called Sleep. I have a small community and I love
programming in it and that is enough of a reward to me.

That said, I've attracted my critics too:

Subject: better name would be STOP

From: NothingPersonal (62.132.1.121)

Date: September 27, 2004 at 10:08:34

Please. Just STOP. stop stop stop. don't inflict yet another half-baked, il-
concieved abortion of a scripting language onto unsuspecting developers. Yes,
you had fun writing it, but the only niche it fills is the one in your head
that renders you incapable of mastering any of the other numerous scripting
options already available to you.

I know I'm supposed to be nice to you because hey who are you really
bothering, and selection of the fittest will surely see sleep sleep it's way
to a quiet and peaceful death. But while on it's way to it's inevitable
demise, sleep is bound to take with it some hapless developers, who will in
turn inflict it on numerous doomed projects, and all that spells misery for
all concerned.

While I'm at it, I also have to point out that the very last thing I want to
read when browsing a language reference is pathetic, self-important humour.

I'm urging you to do the honourable thing. stop sleeping, and wake the f __*
up. Take down your cargo-cult website (it even has a wiki! it's _bound_ to be
a success!) and spend (alot) more time researching your foundations before
embarking on such follies again.

~~~
motoko
Why do intensely personal attacks start with "Nothing Personal?"

~~~
lacker
Because _they_ don't really mean it personally, since they know nothing about
the person behind things. They are not thinking at all about the
founder/writer/developer. They are just thinking about how annoyed they were
for the past 2 seconds.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Which is to say: We'd all be better people if, whenever we typed the phrase
_nothing personal_ , Clippy popped up on the screen with a message: "I see
you're writing something that might be better left unsaid. Would you like to
get some sleep before continuing?"

------
okeumeni
I don’t think that mean criticism is all bad; I’m one of those people who
think you should not be creating companies if you don’t have a thick skin. I
found out some mean criticism actually push you back against the wall and give
you a different prospective on the whole thing. Human ambition feed on
challenges; some on the things I did in my life I did them because someone
told me I could not do.

A personal story: In middle school, I was a chubby kid and my sport teacher
made fun of me telling me I could not run a 5 miles contest because my heart
may stop beating. I told my dad, my best friend, begging him not to complain
at school. I saw the anger on his face and he told me one thing: prove him
wrong son! I started running every day and lost tons of weight.

At my last year of high school the teacher was still around. One day I
challenge him in front of a bunch of student and some teachers to run the five
miles against him. He was dumb to accept because he failed to realize that I
was no more the chubby kid, I was thinner and about 4 inches taller than him.
I ran the first 4 miles right behind him and past him at the last mile. I
remember the humiliation he put me in years back and called him names on the
last stretch in front of everyone. He was crushed; I had my revenge and still
feel good about it today.

~~~
racy_rick
That is actually pretty mean. You finally took your life in your own hands and
you blame your laziness, your sloth, your lack of motivation on someone that
wanted to help you (albeit while being very uncouth).

That is incredibly mean. You may not be fat anymore, but you are still an
asshole.

~~~
okeumeni
WTF ... what are you talking about?

------
paul7986
LoL - it was all said here on Hacker News, even when I did not ask for
feedback. I'd come here to read interesting things (no interest in talking up
our product) and see a brigade of people talking really HARSH & trashing us.

In the end I listened to all words and used the feedback to evolve our
product. Nowadays, we see more positive talk (not sure about here) about our
product(still evolving) then we did prior to the HN feedback.

Find the various HN posts here <http://searchyc.com/sleep.fm>

------
fallentimes
Since we launched on Techcrunch, we were barraged with criticism. Some of it
was constructive, some not so much. Honestly, none of it bothered me or my
cofounder (tdavis) as we laughed up the ugly and took the rest as free
consulting.

 _Except_ the comment about our passion - questioning how we could devote so
much time to "making [tickets] a bit cheaper". As PG pointed out, it's never
been about the tickets, it's about the event themselves. Think about the top
20 moments in your life, chances are one of them occurred at a sporting event,
concert or show. That's why I love what I do. Oh and because all that stuff is
now a tax write-off for me :).

Unfortunately, the link is to Hacker News:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=268339>

~~~
dan_sim
That one hurts! It's ok to attack ideas, functionalities, bad design, ugly UI
but the guts of the founders... that is really really mean.

~~~
tdavis
I don't think we've ever gotten a piece of "personal attack" criticism that I
took seriously. The way I figure it, I know myself way better than anybody
else and am more than capable of issuing personal criticism. I'd have felt a
lot worse if he would have criticized my code or something.

------
neoneye
One of worst thing I have ever experienced was this comment on my profile on
versiontracker:

This was the lamest thing I've ever tried. It starts by popping up disjointed
out of place overlapping windows then an alert box pops up telling me that I
don't have a 64MB video card just to make it appear to be an advanced piece of
software, sorry I only have a Radeon 7000 32MB and that my computer isn't good
enough for this piece of shit software. The UI is crap, it's way too buggy to
take seriously and it's down right ugly. I felt like I had a red headed step-
child with head lice on my computer. It does work great with AppZapper.

You are no PhotoShop, keep dreaming. I really hate when people spew things
that just aren't true.

------
pg
If you want to see mean, try writing essays.

~~~
kirubakaran
I never understood why people were doing that. Many Reddit comments about your
essays were extremely vicious.

~~~
pg
I think the fundamental problem is that writing essays seems presumptuous to a
lot of people. They're used to the old print media model in which the only
people who got to publish essays were credentialled experts in whatever they
were about. That restriction is now gone. Online anyone can publish whatever
they want. But I think it still seems to a lot of people that anyone using the
essay form is implicitly claiming some kind of authority.

The right approach, obviously, is to judge an essay by what it says instead of
who wrote it. I think things will tend to move in that direction. But not too
far, because it's more work.

~~~
kirubakaran
Yes, you mentioned that in <http://www.paulgraham.com/newthings.html>

That explains the dismissive comments. The angry and really mean ones can be
explained perhaps as people feeling threatened for whatever reason?

~~~
SwellJoe
When in doubt, Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad theory probably applies:
<http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/>

~~~
kirubakaran
I agree, but _why_ do they do that?

~~~
SwellJoe
I dunno. I figured I'd done my job in providing a link to a funny picture on
the Internet. If you ask me any more hard questions, you're gonna get a
picture of a cat fixing a computer. I don't think either of us really wants
that to happen.

------
webwright
Heh-- people have called RescueTime evil, especially in a work setting. Never
hurt our feelings much-- we try to not go tooo far down the evil path, but
we've always felt like a manager/biz owner has the right to say, "How are you
spending your time?" and get an honest (and CORRECT) answer. A lot of people
say, "Well, if I get my work done in 2 hours every day, I have a RIGHT to
screw off for the other 6"... While we think that folks deserve some "down-
time", I think there's such a thing as under-tasked and under-utilized team
members who just need to have more work thrown their way. For a knowledge
worker, it's trivially easy to hide when you don't have much work to do.

~~~
shiranaihito
> we try to not go tooo far down the evil path

So what have you done on the evil path so far?

~~~
webwright
Well, we've created a tool that a manager could put on an employees machine to
see how they spend their time at work. We strongly market/urge managers to
expose this data to their employees and allow them to see how they compare to
the average on their team, but they don't HAVE to do that.

The "spectrums" of evil that we deal with are:

Open vs. stealth: Right now RescueTime can't be stealthy, but there are
certainly settings (academic labs trying to understand utilization) where
stealth might be appropriate.

and

Exposure of worker data to managers (customers): How much detail do we expose
to the manager beyond the team averages/totals? Due to customer demand, we've
exposed some high level individual data to managers.

and

How much data we collect in a workplace. We're not budging here and are
sticking with time/attention data. There are services out there that literally
log keystrokes, take screenshots, and blindly cc managers on all emails sent
(including personal webmail). Yuck.

~~~
shiranaihito
With an app whose main feature is to track people in one way, it's not
surprising that it would end up tracking people in other ways too.

In any case, please try to turn back and head back up the evil path, or at the
very least, stop where you are :)

------
lbrandy
Probably the meanest thing you can say about someone's start-up is something
along the lines of "Wow, we are really stretching the definition of a start-up
here, huh?"

------
tlrobinson
_"it's ashley, this website ROCKS ! haha jk !"_

That "jk" was just devastating.

~~~
MoeDrippins
Don't take it so hard; the writer just meant "she" wasn't really "ashley".

------
blurry
I once had a startup which was basically an online database of professional
actor and model videos. My all time favorite put-down came when we first got
into model videos.

We did some test shoots for a couple established agencies (Elite, Q Models)
and were looking to get into more doors. My partner's girlfriend at the time
was a model so I asked her to get us a meeting with her bookers. Her [strong]
opinion was that for a variety of seemingly good reasons (too long to list
here) web video would never work in the modeling industry and we were pretty
much wasting our time.

Five minutes later, on a completely unrelated topic, she mentioned that her
best friend, also a model, was going on a video shoot that week. Turned out
her agency (Wilhelmina) thought this new online video thing was, ya know,
promising.

I am still scratching my head over that one. She wasn't your stereotypical
18-year old airhead and she was clearly sympathetic to our cause...

------
cosmo7
It's more _start_ than _up_.

------
axod
I Like this tweet a while back:

"MIBBIT SUCKS BIG TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

It's actually pretty cool to get criticism IMHO, It shows people care. Also
cool when your app is broken, and people scream at you... You have to look
past the anger, and see that they are lost without your app, and love it
dearly.

~~~
m0nty
"It's actually pretty cool to get criticism IMHO, It shows people care."

As Oscar Wilde said it: "There's only one thing worse than being talked about,
and that's _not_ being talked about."

------
okeumeni
This was not actually said about my startup but a good friend of mine’s
startup, before he even got a chance to finish introducing his startup to his
former class mates one of them said: ‘Wow that’s cute!’ They all replied ‘Yeah
that’s very nice!’

2 years later he had $20M in the bank and had employed 3 of those friends.

~~~
dan_sim
The worst part of that story is that his friends probably didn't mean it.
Probably the meanest thing is people that don't believe in what you're doing
but don't want to say it. They think it will discourage you. So, you go on
thinking "well, they liked it at least" when they didn't. That's bad.

~~~
kirubakaran
Trying to charge for your service is one way to quickly find out what people
thing.

~~~
kirubakaran
thing -> think

[ Sorry. Too late to correct the original comment. ]

------
patio11
_It's time to talk about it_

Living well is the best revenge... but selling ~$30k of the app that would
never have a single customer comes as a close second. :)

~~~
dan_sim
That's a classic though still very popular among mean people.

------
tim_negative
"Please disable my account."

Used to get hundreds of those requests when I had a prominently placed
"feedback" link. Each one made me sad....

Then I changed the link to "feature requests" and nearly all of those requests
when away:-) Then I made deactivating the account easier to find. The
deactivation rates actually went down when people realized that they could do
it themselves any time that they needed to.

"You're a cheep knockoff of [competitor]!" -- This one always got to me too.
Spent months not advertising a site and changing it just to be different in
fear of this one. I rarely ended up hearing this though.

------
robfitz
we got this one: "IF YOU TYPE TO ME ONE MORE TIME I’LL SUE YOUR BUTT OFF OF
THIS COUNTRY!!!"

~~~
dan_sim
Did you type to him one more time?

~~~
okeumeni
I swear I would have.

------
timcederman
We got pretty chewed out about our acquisition by Monster.

<http://www.cheezhead.com/2008/07/31/monster-acquires-trovix/>

My favourite two parts:

"(Sidenote: Trovix ownership has to be farting rainbows and burping unicorns
in complete bliss as I write this post.)"

and

"And as far as buzz goes - which does matter - Trovix is on no one’s hot list.
Ever heard a company brag about its experience using this service? Me neither.
They don’t exist. I don’t care how many company logos or Wall Street Journal
clips Trovix puts on their site."

~~~
jjs
"Dear Sir:

If you wanted to discourage us, you probably should have done so BEFORE we
became fabulously wealthy. Please remember this for next time.

Regards, ..."

------
lacker
Not my startup, but I always think back to the initial Slashdot editor
reaction to the iPod: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

[http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257...](http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257&tid=107)

------
rokhayakebe
"But they already created that". To which I respond "how many pizzeria are out
there, how many gas stations, how many shoe manufacturers, how many zoos,
should we all settle for The One?"

------
DanielBMarkham
I think this is the wrong question.

Fake praise does a lot more damage than mean-spirited criticism. Because fake
praise has nothing but well-meaning behind it, while mean-spirited criticism
can actually point out things that need fixing. In addition, fake praise can
mask a lot of flaws that should be fixed.

I'm of the mind that the more mean criticism you get the better off you
probably are -- people at least took time to rag on you. Apathy is what really
sucks.

~~~
pg
_Fake praise does a lot more damage than mean-spirited criticism._

I don't think that's true. Bogus praise is self-correcting in a way that bogus
criticism isn't. If bogus praise gives you an unduly high opinion of yourself,
you at least keep working, and the resistance of the medium may push your
opinion of yourself back down to where it should be. Whereas harsh critism can
discourage you from working, so you never get the successes that would have
corrected your opinion of yourself.

~~~
yan
Can't it be said that undue praise will make the author work less hard, having
achieved the dopamine high of accomplishment? Where as criticism can spur
harder work from people set out to "prove themselves." I'm not saying either
way is good or bad, I'm just saying both of our examples are anecdotal and
either can have the desire effect. All depends on the criticism and the
outlook and personality of the recipient.

------
unalone
The first web site I launched - I guess you could call it a start-up, though I
didn't seek funding and tried to profit off of ads - had a bunch of
criticisms, all of them true. Stuff like "This drop-down menu doesn't actually
drop down" and "Your background is the exact color of my puking macaroni and
cheese" and "I don't think 'error mySQL injection' counts as a web site."
People would write stories and blog posts starring themselves valiantly
killing me and freeing the users of the site. That was a fun project.

My current one hasn't publicly launched yet; the only complaint I've had is
that the font looks icky on Internet Explorer. (We use Times New Roman as our
base, tweaked to look nice; it actually looks quite good on everything other
than IE. We might inject CSS that changes the font to Verdana or Helvetica,
but most fonts in IE look pretty bad.) I did get a nice insult thread on
Hacker News from one guy who told me something like "You're wasting your youth
on a shitty idea that nobody likes" without knowing what my startup was.

~~~
allenbrunson
that would be from a guy who called himself "crabapple," an account which has
since been killed.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=382107>

------
wensing
Not so much about our startup per se, but this is definitely the worst
feedback we've ever received about the site:

"I will be bringing this [site] to the attention of my attorney who maintains
a list of abusive web practices."

------
tonystubblebine
"It looks like a thirteen year old cobbled it together while working his or
her way through a "Learning Ruby on Rails" book."

Then followed by a backhanded compliment:
<http://smoorg.blogspot.com/2007/12/crowdvinecom.html>

------
ivankirigin
Alexis from Reddit has a hilarious site where you can send atrocious feedback:
<http://feedbackfail.com/>

~~~
DTrejo
This is a great site for a sad day. (Cheered me up already)

------
ph0rque
> Add a link to your startup please.

What, you want others to exceed the meanness level? ;-)

~~~
dan_sim
When people are mean to your startup, it usually mean that you are working on
something good. But you're right that someone may not want to link his
product. I'll change it.

~~~
markessien
I don't think you're right there. When a person with no vested interest is
mean to your startup, it usually means you are having a communication or
branding problem.

------
dshah
Michael Arrington just wrote on TechCrunch about my latest project at
<http://grader.com> and called it "beyond useless". Does that count?

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/19/facebook-grader-for-
the...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/19/facebook-grader-for-the-sad-sad-
people-out-there/)

------
frosty
I got a lot of scathing criticism when I shifted my marching band web game
away from competition and more toward a creative sandbox approach. People said
my reasons were insulting, that there was no reason to use the site anymore,
and that I was being utopian.

It was a rough period, but I stuck to it because it's something I believe in.
Thankfully, in the end, the community became more positive and supportive of
each other, the user-created content has improved a lot, and registrations
keep climbing.

I've thought about writing an essay or two about the effects of competition on
creativity and education in the arts. It will probably draw even more hate
from the die-hard competition crowd, but I think it's important, and I have a
pretty unique perspective on it.

------
dan_sim
Personally, the meanest thing that has been said about TimmyOnTime -
<http://www.timmyontime.com> \- (a project monitoring app that works with IM)
is that it has an old smell of an IRC bots written back in 1998.

------
jdrock
We had our firm get reviewed here on HN
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=347359>). Actually the comments here
were pretty good overall. I remember going to a tech meetup in town here...
describing what we did seem to personally offend some people. I had people
practically yelling at me that what we were doing was terrible and stupid. A
few months later, we are featured on GigaOm with a pretty positive article
([http://gigaom.com/2008/10/27/more-money-i-game-developers-
wi...](http://gigaom.com/2008/10/27/more-money-i-game-developers-with-grid-
computing/)) :)

------
PStamatiou
"What is it? I really have no idea."

------
brlewis
I'll take any feedback, mean or otherwise, for <http://ourdoings.com/>
especially for features I've implemented recently.

------
jmtame
i really don't take the mean comments too seriously, only the constructive
ones where people actually want to help you out. filter everything else out.

------
ejs
the other day someone sent this message over a feedback box I have:

"either this site is fake or nothing works WTF"

The annoying part was they didnt use an email address and I could not contact
them to see what the problem was. The bizarre part was that same user was the
most active for the next 2 days...? Still not sure what the problem was...

------
richcollins
pg said that our interface is bizarre :-P

<http://stylous.com/>

~~~
guruz
Btw, for me only on the third level (e.g.
<http://stylous.com/#/jewelry/charms_pendants> ) the cursor turns into a
pointing finger.

(Camino 1.6.6, OS X)

~~~
richcollins
We're using Cappuccino which requires you to manually set the finger cursor in
each place you want to use it. At first we were going to completely leave it
out (since almost everything in the interface is clickable), but users were
confused when it didn't appear. As such, we've decided to add it as we go.

We make money when someone clicks on a product and buys it, so product images
were our first priority.

------
moonpolysoft
A lot of people talked trash on Powerset, but the following comment from wired
was pretty awesome:

"i tried out the beta demo thing and this thing sucks. i would rather use a
manual card catalog in a library staffed by josef stalin. seriously, i hate
you people." --posted by jr

