
What ideas have you implemented that have failed, and why? - nostrademons
In the "What ideas do you regret not implementing?" thread, Maurycy suggested turning it around and asking "What ideas have you implemented that have failed anyways?"  After all, most of us are more worried about the risk that we'll work our asses off building something cool and then find nobody likes it rather than the risk that we'll never get started at all.<p>I agree with maurycy that this is a far more interesting question, so I took the liberty of submitting this as a discussion topic.  Please be more specific than "Because there was no market for it" - that's obvious, <i>why</i> wasn't there a market for it (or turning it around, why'd you implement it if there was no market), and how does it differ from projects you've done that have succeeded.
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pg
Before Viaweb we had a startup to put art galleries online. But galleries
didn't (and mostly still don't) want to have their inventories online.
Galleries want you to come in in person so they can impress you with their
fancy space and make a big production out of bringing stuff out of their
mysterious back room.

Since we were too poor then to have bought any art from galleries, we didn't
realize this was how they worked. Lesson: don't build things for users so
unlike you that you don't understand what they want.

~~~
supahfly_remix
Don't tell me that meeting chicks was not a side goal of this endeavor!

~~~
pg
Believe it or not, it wasn't. It was the business part that was new, not the
art part. I'd just come from art school.

~~~
henning
I always wondered what made you want to go to art school.

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rzwitserloot
My previous (failed) startup had the following plan: Identify (university-
level) lectures given all across the world, for many different areas of study,
that doesn't change much over the years. Example: statistics.

Now build a live computer-based lecture with a software architecture to live-
test what you know with questions, including skipping ahead once you 'grok'
something, and working your way through more examples if you are struggling.
Get this right with a sizable budget. Don't just get academic experience on
board, but also didactic experience.

The amount of value created is staggering; lectures are very boring and
relatively ineffective, professors generally want to do research instead of
lecturing anyway, and they cost a bundle. Every year, how many professors
around the world are lecturing statistics? Thousands, easily.

The reason it failed: Video stuff is very expensive, and universities move at
glacial speeds. We just couldn't get the universities to commit actual money
to the project in time - and we all despised bureaucracy.

I'd like to return to this idea when there I have more money and more
experience some day.

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simpleenigma
I've been trying different things on the Internet since about 1995. Back then
I was trying to create online storage, which turned out to host more adult
files then anything else. Finally gave that one up due to bandwidth costs.

After that I tried my hand at web-based email which extended into a calendar,
time and billing and eventually forums that I hosted and other people could
use their own domain name with. Turned into a semi-successful business, but
the management of the system ended up eating up too much of my time and it
wasn't making enough to let me quit my day job.

I wrote an anti-spam service that was efficient and quite good at filtering
spam, but the resource required to take it to the next level were not around
and I couldn't generate interest in the product. This came down to a not
enough hardware to get the full working prototype finished problem.

Some of the largest problem I had were the 800 pound gorillas that seemed to
appear just before my product was ready and I wasn't agile enough at the time
to compete.

I don't regret implementing any of the project I did, even the map server that
I've tried to create about 6 times. For me half the fun is the creation and
until recently I haven't been dedicated to creating a large business out of
it.

Plus the experience and the amazing tools that have come out of the whole
journey are worth more then the the time I spent on all of this.

Another big lesson I've learned it that I can't do the whole thing alone. Just
like you need the right tool for the right job, the right person for each job
is important as well.

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rokhayakebe
1 The first was a mobile game distribution network. Developers upload their
games and tag them. Publishers get a widget they embed on their site and
displays games relevant to their website content. If their audience like a
game, then they simply input their phone number in the widget and hit SEND to
my phone. It didn't work because I kept changing my direction and I wanted to
wait until everything was perfect to launch. Big mistake. Several months of
development out the window.

2 An location based SMS coupons. User registers for offers they are interested
in and add zip code. Advertisers choose a radius to distribute their ad and
send it to all users within the perimeter. Too easy to copy and SMS business
is costly. Still got some interest from some VIP in the mobile field. The real
reason was I got bored with it.

3\. A RSS to SMS/IM content distribution. It failed because i just kept
changing direction. On top of that the idea was not unique at all.

PS> Now i am working on something truly unique. Well at least it hasn't worked
so far although a few carriers and handset manufacturers have tried it.If I do
not get a call from PG after launching this one, then I will be xtremly
surprised.

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henning
I have started and abandoned RSS aggregator projects 4 times in the last 4
years. The first was in C++ and MFC, then Python, another Python, then Scala.

Certain things about feed aggregation that you might think would be cool wind
up not really working out well in my opinion. It's not until you try to
aggregate together thousands of blogs that you realize that the best blogs are
very much cults of personality, and can't be easy clustered together like
mainstream media as in Google News.

You'd also be amazed at how poorly implemented simple markup specifications
like RSS 2.0 can be. I forget what law it is that says the easier it is to
implement something, the worse the prevailing implementations are because of
barriers to entry, but I think it's very much true.

Thirdly, I'm very throughly convinced that the browser is the best environment
for consuming hypertext, not special desktop applications. Therefore apps like
NetNewsWire get it wrong in my view.

These aren't instances of business failure, just reasons I abandoned things
and opinions I came to have by writing code and seeing what happened.

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davidw
I had better hopes for Apache Rivet. But it has had lots of upsides just the
same, and I've learned a tremendous amount from watching Tcl itself gurgle
down the drain, even if it still pisses me off.

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juwo
From one perspective, juwo my product, has failed. No investors, No
cofounders, No Users (apart from me). Yet - I plan to reimplement and
hopefully, turn things around.

juwo is not a failure until I give up.

I won't give up while my convictions about it remain.

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nostrademons
In this post, I'm defining success as "The number of people who find it useful
is roughly equal or greater than the number of people who I thought would use
it." I'm explicitly not defining it as financial success - most of the
projects I've worked on have been hobby or volunteer efforts, and the
commercial ones tend to flame out for implementation difficulties.

By this definition, I count 5 and a half successes (auto-uploader and new DB
system for FictionAlley, Scrutiny and roomdraw ticker at Amherst, "Write
yourself a Scheme in 48 hours", and a Netbeans plugin for my current employer
is the half), 3 and a half failures (inAsphere, RejectedByYC/Bootstrapacitor
and the current incarnation of Diffle), and 7 projects that failed because I
or my employer failed to finish implementing them (a MUD, a Gnutella API,
SchoolBrain, SecureTunnel, a Scheme-like programming language, collaborative
editing, a Ruby plugin for Netbeans, and a Haskell-like programming language).
The interesting part is the failures that were implemented fully, so I'm going
to skip the successes and the bad implementations.

inAsphere.com was a teen-content dot-com run exclusively by teenagers, founded
in 2000. Had the normal forums, link directories, articles, and polls. We
launched it after a month and a half, folded in cross-x.com and its userbase
(an earlier site founded by one of the founders), then found that rather than
_gaining_ new members, we were _losing_ the existing cross-x.com userbase. The
investors pulled out after 3 months and the project was canceled.

IMHO, it failed because: A.) we were pompous, elitist, and corporate - the
market statement was "A teen content site for _intelligent_ teens", thus
implying that anyone who didn't like use was stupid. B.) we really weren't all
that smart. C.) we had very little to differentiate us from every other dot-
com in 2000 D.) we talked down to users - while they had felt like they were
part of a community in cross-x, it just felt like they were part of a
corporate machine with inAsphere.

RejectedByYC/Bootstrapacitor was a side-project my startup did after YC
rejections came out. You can see the initial announcement threads at
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16234> and
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18233>, though the site itself is down
now. Aside from some of the obvious comments in the threads, I'd put its
failure down to: A.) unclear positioning - because of the name and manner of
announcement, many people thought it was intended to compete with YC, while it
was really intended to serve as an additional resource for those of us who
couldn't get into YC/TechCrunch/other programs. B.) Chicken-and-egg problem -
the site gains much of its value by having a community of dedicated & driven
entrepreneurs, but no dedicated & driven entrepreneur will sign up unless
others already have. C.) Poor understanding of requirements - honestly, I
don't think it actually "fit" its intended purpose all that well. As an
entrepreneur now, I wouldn't use it myself, which is a pretty damning
indictment. Ironically, my sister just told me today that she thought that
idea has more potential than what I'm currently working on, so perhaps there
really is something there, and we just weren't willing to spend enough time on
it.

I'm reluctant to include Diffle ( <http://www.diffle.com/> ) as one of the
failures, because it was never meant to succeed! The site as it exists now is
basically a bunch of functionality that we need for our real idea to avoid
losing out for lack of silly stuff (much like how Google Video lost out to
YouTube for a bunch of stupid and easily-correctable reasons). I could knock
off that functionality fairly easily while still employed at my day job, so I
figured I might as well put it up on the off chance that people like it. After
all, having _something_ up is better than having _nothing_ up, and we have a
completely different name and domain name ready in case we tarnish our brand.
It also gives us a bit of a psychological boost, knowing we have a site that
we can just plug our real engine into.

In retrospect, I don't think I would do it this way if I had to do it all over
again. If your real idea is any good, you'll have plenty of users begging for
you to add the features that you omitted. And you can find out much quicker if
your real idea is any good, and switch to a different one if necessary. Plus,
feedback on something that's _not_ your real product is basically useless,
because you draw a completely different audience. Friends and family that you
show it to assume you're doing something different than you actually are, and
they make all sorts of erroneous assumptions based on that.

Finally, I'm including the Netbeans plugin I wrote for work. This actually
does get used - my boss loves it, and gave me a nice bonus for it. However,
it's not being _sold_ , which is what I thought would happen with it. The
reason is kinda instructive:

When I started at my employer, I thought the company did something different
than what it _actually_ does. Like many bootstrapped startups, there's a split
between the founder's vision of what the company should be, and the
products/services that actually bring in the money to execute on the founder's
vision. I had built a product based on the founder's vision, but I thought
that the founder's vision _was_ bringing the profits in, and so was a little
disappointed when nobody except my boss uses my software.

Also, I think I should mention an observation about the 5 successes: in _every
single case_ , I was a member of the community that would eventually be using
the software, and I basically just built something I would use myself. I was
an author at FictionAlley before I was a programmer for FictionAlley. I was a
student at Amherst before I wrote its course-evaluation system. I was
interested in learning Haskell before writing a tutorial for it, and in fact
basically wrote the tutorial as a way of teaching myself Haskell.

~~~
bootload
_"... I was a member of the community that would eventually be using the
software, and I basically just built something I would use myself ..."_

Do you think this is a variation of _"make what users want"_?

Initially being in a community gives you insight into what they want. But you
don't always have to be part of a community to do this. You could just as
easily extend this to _"making tools for yourself"_ solving those annoying
problems. In the process develop something that others _might_ find useful.

 _"... "Operacy" and the skills of doing. The notion that it is enough to
"know" is both absurd and dangerous. Research has shown that youngsters who
pursued hobbies did much better in life - because they has some experience of
operacy ..."_ ~ <http://www.edwdebono.com/debono/msg02r.htm>

Insight comes also from _operacy_ or doing. Rather than just knowing,
watching, reading. You gain more from doing.

~~~
nostrademons
"Do you think this is a variation of "make what users want"?"

Absolutely. "Make something users want" is really the fundamental principle of
just about all of business. Everything else is just details.

It's surprisingly difficult to know what users want, though, unless you're one
of them. It's usually the most mundane details that lead to success - things
like YouTube and Reddit enabling comments, or FaceBook keeping your
information private outside of the college, or FictionAlley hosting Cassandra
Claire's fanfics. A lot of consultants will tell you "Do market research! Make
sure people want what you're building", but the fact is, most people are
unable to verbalize what they want. They know it when they see it, and they
might be able to tell you if you sit next to them and walk through how they
use it, but a bunch of questions over the phone isn't going to get any useful
feedback.

~~~
Jd
I think all three of the above examples (Facebook, Reddit, Facebook) are
examples of first mover advantage, not any specific technical feature.

~~~
nostrademons
None of the examples above were actually first-movers, though. YouTube was
beaten to market by Google Video and a whole bunch of Web 1.0 video-sharing
sites that nobody's ever heard of. Reddit was beaten by Digg, del.icio.us, and
various others. FaceBook was beaten by Friendster, MySpace, Orkut, and lots of
other social-networking sites. FictionAlley was beaten to market by
Fanfiction.net and lots of boutique archives.

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amichail
How would you know why a startup failed? The main reason may simply be that
you are not living in a good place for startups.

