

Ask HN: How Do You Know When It's Time to Give Up?  - zxlk21e

I really enjoy the building phase. Development and solving problems are my passion... but my projects tend to never take hold and sit stagnant with &lt;10 visits a day for months after the initial &#x27;i made this&#x27; plea to folks&#x2F;sites&#x2F;forums.<p>At what point do you call it quits on projects and hang them up, let the domains expire, etc?
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orky56
How educated is the market on the problem you are trying to solve? How tied
down is the market to their current solution? Does your product have
sufficient value to justify switching costs?

Assuming your product actually is better than what's already out there, it is
up to you to figure out how to reduce friction for your potential customers.
Have you reduced your signup flow to the least amount of pages and fields
required? Are you able to showcase the value of the product even before they
sign up? Are current customers able to easily share the product with others in
a way that's also valuable to them?

A lot of this stuff sounds simple but many products don't get it right since
some successful products get by without addressing it.

~~~
zxlk21e
Taking the marketplace project: a marketplace is probably only as good as it's
contents. Liquidity is the determining factor... and it's a chicken and egg
scenario. So maybe that venture would fail that test from the start. You can
be better with technology but the intrinsic value wasn't raised so maybe it's
a fail.

------
notduncansmith
I created [http://dogehold.com/](http://dogehold.com/) out of interest in
crypto and the lack of a good escrow system for Dogecoin. However, after the
first few transactions I realized I wasn't actually interested in maintaining
it as a business.

One seller had an issue due to a bug in DogeAPI, and given that my reaction
was "Ugh, I don't have time to deal with this nonsense", I realized I didn't
have the passion for it that I thought I would.

It was a really fun project, I had a blast building it and playing with Redis,
but I knew within the first week of its release that it wasn't something I
wanted to sustain.

------
kremdela
I struggle with the same issue. I've shifted my thinking quite a bit and now
think of it as just solving a different problem.

Say my goal is to write code 6 hours a day with headphones on. In order to do
that, I need people to pay me to use what I'm building.

So the problem to solve has become "how to get people to pay for my
service/product."

Projects die all of the time because of bad market fit. Less likely do they
die because they were built poorly.

~~~
jamielee
I am having a hard time following your logic. If you wanted people to pay you
6 hours a day to write code, then I am sure you could get great pay working as
a programmer.

I think the better question to ask is, "What problem am I solving for my
[potential] customers that is worth them paying for it?" (rather than "how do
I get them to pay?" The former is a more sustainable business philosophy)

And I am pretty sure market fit and quality of the product are not mutually
exclusive. They go hand in hand.

~~~
kremdela
I think we are in agreement. I am interpreting OPs problem as "I love
developing code but my projects don't go anywhere." My answer is to switch
from writing code to solving the trouble problem, which is "how to find
customers for my project."

Also, I've worked for many companies that had shitty code but lots of revenue.

~~~
zxlk21e
You are correct. That puts it succinctly - I like making things, but I suck at
choosing what to make (or selling what I make). Maybe they are the same thing.

------
dm2
How saturated are the markets you are trying to enter? You're not going to
invent a better search engine as a side project (without a ton of luck and an
amazing idea/staff/developer/perfect execution).

Do you receive feedback for these projects?

Do you listen to your feedback and pivot when necessary?

If the idea is good and the site is made, then it should be just marketing and
appealing to customers needs.

~~~
zxlk21e
The visits for one specific project were in the tens of thousands over the
course of a few months after 'launch'. Feedback was numbered in the tens at
most and mostly things like 'cool site!' 'cool idea!' or 'i cant find this
specific product'

The site looked promising but noone comes back to check things and of the
initial rush of users, a decent % signed up but did not participate in any
transactions.

~~~
dm2
My first question is asking about your competitors. If I want a company to
provide the service you offer, can I find an established one with a quick
search on Google? Do you rank well on search engines?

If I'm a customer then I'm going to look for the best product to provide the
service, some people will base it on cost depending on the service.

Keep in touch with your potential customers. Reach out and say that your site
is new and you'd like to know what they think and maybe even be as bold as to
ask why they did or didn't purchase from you and if they purchased from a
competitor.

~~~
zxlk21e
Those questions were asked and it came down to the fact that it was a
collectibles marketplace and the specific things they were looking for were
not available or not an attractive price. There is also the trust issue...
many seem to rather want to use ebay.

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JSeymourATL
So long as you're alive-- there's still hope. If you read the bios of great
inventors, tinkerers, and founders-- all of them faced failures, road-blocks,
and years of struggle. Areas to explore: Can you persist? Have you ever
achieved anything in your life that required years of disciplined effort to
complete?

------
jamielee
What kind of project(s) are you building? Do they really make people's lives
better, easier, etc.?

~~~
zxlk21e
The last couple have been collectibles marketplaces and quantified self
tracking platforms. I think that is my main thesis -- solving problems/making
things easier for people through technology, especially in markets where they
are not taking advantage of technology much.

~~~
andkon
Not to be a dick, but that's not really a thesis: there's nothing in need of
being proven or disproven. We all know that technology can make things easier
for people, and that some industries don't use it much.

Think a little bit more about your own personal reasons for doing something.
That's where you'll find a good reason to keep going or not.

