

How My Startup Failed - inglorian
http://www.storylog.com/how-my-start-up-failed/#more-99

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nopassrecover
I could swear this has been on here before... In any case an interesting story
though perhaps not relevant so much to web startups

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mseebach
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=303780>

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nopassrecover
Good find :-)

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mseebach
Not really :)

<http://searchyc.com/condom>

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flooha
This would have been a perfect fit for "sell before you build". If he would
have secured a large order from a retailer and then put it in production, he
would have been successful. Not securing a large order would have told him it
just wasn't worth doing. I don't think the "sell before you build" method it
is a good fit for all businesses though.

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bemmu
Okay, let's think about how this could have been successful. My next
suggestion would be to let the people in that Thai factory do all the packing
etc. work such that a finished end product could have been shipped. I think a
factory worker's salary in Thailand is around $100 / month.

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flooha
Originally, the Thai company did do all the packing. The original shipment had
seepage of the lubrication, so he sent them back. The reason he had to do a
lot of hand work was because, after receiving the new shipment, he realized
that: "According to the Food and Drug Administration, I needed to include a
"how to use" guide with each key chain.". So, he was stuck doing this work
himself.

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edu

      There was no doubt about it: I had discovered The Next Big
      Thing. Like Edison and the lightbulb, like Gates and the 
      pc operating system
    

Ouch.

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eru
Discovered. Not invented.

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eru
To clarify: Bill Gates discovered operating systems, and made a lot of money
producing and selling them. He did not invent them.

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callmeed
_"Though I had a Stanford MBA and regularly consulted on multimillion-dollar
projects, I didn’t know the first thing about starting a business."_

That's a little scary.

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gord
Its always nice to read about how startups succeed, but maybe more can be
learned from these postmortems.

I was thinking you almost want a dedicated site for these... but could that be
achieved by just having tags and filtering by tag on HN ?

Tags would help with a range of scenarios, such as if I'm only interested in
Erlang posts by squid-farming bodybuilders, for example.

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rjurney
"I was about to become the first person in America to sell condom key chains."

Just in case you didn't rtfa yet, this is how it opens :)

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ktharavaad
He has an MBA

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run4yourlives
Irrelevant, really. Most startups, by definition, will fail.

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sown
You know? This was one hell of an education, the kind of thing I wish I could
read and learn more about.

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jjs
I adore that customs clerk!

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mixmax
Well I guess that shows which is easier: Investment banking or doing a
startup.

;-)

