

Ask HN: Decided to start a business and regret later. Share your story. - yatsyk

There is a lot of stories about employed professinals that quit stable job to start a business. Most of these stories are told by successful enterpreners so survivorship bias takes place. It would be nice to get more balanced view. Whould you share not so successful stories. Not about failed first idea or ideas but have got a lot of experience and don&#x27;t regret anything but rather &quot;decided to start a business lost a lot a lot of money&#x2F;health have got family problems and could not find decent job after that&quot;
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csixty4
Not a startup. No bankruptcy or anything. Wife & I liked this company Goth
Gift Baskets that used to advertise in Gothic Beauty magazine. One issue had
an ad saying they were selling the business. We bought the name, website,
inventory, and customer list for around $5000, with the intent of starting a
side business & maybe growing it into something larger. We expected higher-
quality merchandise, but ended up with boxes of plastic spiders and cheap
closeout Halloween jewelry. The boxes were piled up in our spare bedroom and
were soon joined by boxes of higher-end merchandise so our baskets were more
appealing.

We over-estimated the appeal of "goth" in the mid-2000s. There was still a
good turnout at goth events in Chicago, but it was mostly adults who liked to
dress up on the weekends for old-time's sake, but didn't identify as goths in
everyday life anymore. We paid for tables at concerts, hearse shows, and fan
conventions, and usually didn't make enough to cover the table. At least the
music was good. At one point we pulled up the Seattle Goth site hoping to do a
sponsorship deal with them, and their home page was just a picture of Fonzie
on waterskis.

There was still a decent-sized market of younger goths & "emos", but they
didn't have the money for a $25 gift basket of jewelry, incense, candles, and
such…and THEN shipping on top of that. We were told to offer something closer
to $10 shipped, but that barely covered the cost of an empty basket, shipping
materials, and postage with a tiny profit.

Twilight was pretty big, but our vampires didn't sparkle. We put together a
Browncoat basket with a complete set of Firefly action figures and assorted
other stuff…even had custom marketing materials made to distribute at fan
conventions for it. Didn't sell a single one.

Magazine advertising was expensive, and resulted in zero orders. Emailing our
customer list a 20% discount code every couple months resulted in 2 orders in
three years. We were flooded with emails from events & meetups wanting us to
donate baskets for raffle prizes, which we could at least write-off on our
taxes & get some publicity for. No sales ever came of these sponsorship deals,
but we did get some sweet thank-you letters.

The last year we were in business, we were hit with a $200 chargeback. We
asked Paypal if they could validate the address or something on that big of an
order, and they said there was nothing they could do. We took the risk, and
lost the money, merchandise, and shipping. That one incident cancelled out our
entire profit for the year.

We donated all the remaining merchandise to charity & took a write-off just so
we could get our spare bedroom back (it became my "man cave"/computer museum).
Our time is better spent volunteering if we're not going to make any money
anyway.

Again, no huge crisis, no health problems. But, a lot of extra stress, a
couple thousand bucks wasted on top of what we paid for the company, and an
entire room our our house tied up for 3 years and nothing to show for it.

Edit: Oh yeah, let's not forget the month I got a bill from my hosting company
for extra bandwidth because a picture of me from the site ranked high for
"goth" in Google Images and people were hot-linking it in forum posts all over
the place going "goths are so stupid. look at this guy he thinks he's spooky
ooooh".

~~~
Liongadev
You should have added some text point to your website in that hot linked
image. If they are hotlinking your stuff its ok to put some advertisment in
it. Probably would not have saved the business. Thanks for your honest story

~~~
csixty4
I actually did just that. Gave it a custom discount code for 20% off and got
zero orders. The kind of people who get their fun from making fun of other
people's pictures on a gaming forum aren't the kind of people with $25-40 to
spend on a gift basket for a friend or family member.

In fact, I think that was the biggest flaw in the business. "Goths" in general
had no problem spending $200 on a new black dress from the vendor next to us,
but balked at a $45 gift arrangement with etched goblets and candle holders.
Expensive gifts are their own niche, and really need to be more general-
purpose. $10-15 really was the sweet spot for a gift, but the quality would
have suffered.

Another issue was payment processing. Our margins were thinner than we were
comfortable with, so we didn't want the added expense of a proper merchant
account & something like authorize.net. There wasn't anything like Square yet,
so we used Paypal Checkout. Our analytics showed something like a quarter of
checkouts were abandoned at the point where we redirected to Paypal.

My goal was to grow this into the "CafePress of gifting" where people could
build their own gift arrangements from a selection of general & niche items:
balloons, teddy bears, whips & chains...a bunch of things to choose from. And
then they could sell their creations in their own branded store for a
percentage of the price. I should have accelerated that plan, but it might
have required outside funding which I wasn't ready for.

------
opendomain
Free.TV

I created the world's first DVR in 1998. I was so excited about it, I
convinced my friends to join my startup. It was basically Tivo plus the Free
PC and internet model.

I was able to raise some funds from friends and family, but we all agreed to
take less salary and have stock instead. We all worked hard, but the dot com
bomb came along and killed all advertising partnerships.

I was lucky enough that I was able to wind down gently - the company did not
go bankrupt. It took years, but I was able to pay back all my friends that
invested in Free.TV, but I personally lost hundereds of thousands of dollars.

I learned a lot, but this set me back 10 years in my career and retirement.
However, it did help me get the next level working for other companies. It was
very stressful and hurt my marriage, but my wife stood by me and I know she is
the one for me.

I still love startups for today but now that I am older, I wonder if I am now
in the famous "ageism" problem in SV. I still have great ideas and want to
change the world - just need another VC to take another chance in me.

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agibsonccc
Failed 3 times at some of your more traditional ideas (think social media B2B
or the like), relatively successful with freelancing. This was in the midwest,

That being said, I started the freelancing after dropping out of college in my
3rd year. After that, I metaphorically fell down some steps, through a
concrete floor, got back up and decided to do stuff with data.

3 years later I'm backpacking in the valley doing sales AND implementing crazy
deep learning data tech.

It seriously just takes persistence. Screw the naysayers. You SHOULD listen to
criticism and consider it objectively though. Making money is a good guiding
compass.

Most people just to expect VC to fall in to their lap. I don't understand the
mentality of these consumer startups that are hoping for these instagram
exits.

They'll spend years with no revenue, no freedom if they get funding, because
they realize that they have responsibilities now. Not to mention the engineers
they hire with the allure of a tennis table and beer on tap. What does that do
for you? Now I'm doing more by myself than many teams could dream of.

I'm hoping to find the right cofounder if one comes along, but really the only
thing that's missing to scale is a designer/hustler (yes both) .

~~~
ondiekijunior
getting a hustler designer is pretty difficult. but I think with the right
product bootstrapped you got a chance, problem is that you are hitting
saturated markets if I were to analyse your ventures. Data companies are
hitting, meaning you are doing nothing great. SV needs new stuff.

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kohanz
This is a great question and I'm grateful to see such honest answers. At the
same time, the other question that I'd love to see answer is the opposite:
"Decided NOT to start a business and regret later. Share your story". If
there's enough interest, perhaps it is worth a separate thread.

