

Ask HN: Fail stories? Made a significant project but no one came? - zura

Anyone wants to share stories about how they spent a lot of time crafting interesting projects but eventually it failed? Aka postmortems.<p>Thanks!
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MalcolmDiggs
I'll bite:

It was 2008, I was a junior in college, I had been coding on-and-off for a few
years (for hire) but was anxious to do my own thing.

I decided my "killer idea" was to sell safe-sex supplies online (condoms,
lube, toys, etc). I built a site called "OrgasmSafely.com" and then opened 5
credit cards and bought about $15,000 worth of inventory.

I was renting a tiny room near campus, and my inventory filled it up. Boxes
and boxes of condoms, gallons and gallons of lube. I had to put my bed against
the wall. I slept in a ball in the corner.

I ordered dozens of T-shirts that said "OrgasmSafely" and handed them out on
campus. I printed up thousands of flyers and handed them out at nightclubs. I
setup an affiliate program. I ran google adwords campaigns. I setup an ebay
store. I wrote to the school newspaper for feature stories, etc etc etc.

Nobody came.

Within a few weeks the minimum payments of the credit cards overwhelmed me.
They were all maxed out. I was toast. I couldn't even afford to pay for
hosting. I shut it down and walked away, with destroyed credit.

Sigh...

Post-mortem lessons: Don't buy inventory up front. And don't start a business
you can't afford to keep running for awhile.

...Also don't sell condoms on the internet...

~~~
drrob
Wow. Even just this little summary had me hooked, you should write the whole
tale up in full, you'd get readers in droves.

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mkremer90
Hey zura,

I posted this article on my blog a while back about how I gave up too soon on
my SaaS:

[https://mattkremer.com/how-i-got-2200-pre-signups-for-my-
saa...](https://mattkremer.com/how-i-got-2200-pre-signups-for-my-saas-
in-2-weeks-then-failed-hard/)

Since failure, I've successfully relaunched the product and am getting a lot
more actual traction than the first time around :)

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drrob
I posted this on my site a few weeks ago, detailing my most recent failed
project. "Failure" might be a harsh description in my case, but "success"
hardly seems appropriate either.

How Not to Build Phone Apps: The Story of Twelve Gauge Software:
[http://drewrobey.com/articles/bydatepublished/2014-09-09](http://drewrobey.com/articles/bydatepublished/2014-09-09)

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zura
Hm, it seems not that many HN people fail or at least they are shy about this
:)

Anyway, thank you guys who replied, very interesting read!

As for me, I've been thinking to start "somethings" for a long time but I'm
afraid that it will fail... i.e. I do not risk to invest a time.

~~~
drrob
If we define a "failed project" as one that someone has worked on and then
shelved when it didn't gain traction, then I think that perhaps a more common
scenario is that of the Zombie Project; after spending so much work on
something you can't bear to shut it down, so you leave it ticking over, not
updating anything and not attracting any new users. Until you pronounce the
project officially "dead" it's not a failure...until then it'll just keep
limping along. I think recognising when a project has gone "zombie" and having
the balls to kill it off is massively important, both for time, sanity and
closure's sake.

