
Ask HN: Stories of startup persistence - exampledotcom
I&#x27;ve recently closed the doors on my 6th bootstrapped startup in 15 years. This is in addition to many, many side projects that i wouldn&#x27;t​ consider calling a startup. I&#x27;ve never been able to find product&#x2F;market fit. I&#x27;m getting better, and thanks to ideas from lean startup, each attempt is taking less time and resources, but i cant help but wonder if I&#x27;m cut out for this. Are there any examples of founders who tried and failed multiple times before getting their big success?
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pedalpete
Can you give us some details of what your start-ups where? Where you think you
may have gone wrong?

I'll give you my details:

1) ZiFiMusic - First start-up was a pandora type music service - taught myself
to code, but never got traction and struggled to do a good job at music
recommendation. I shut it down after about 6 months.

2) HearWhere - Took the code from the music service and turned it into a
concert listing service. HearWhere was the largest database of concerts world-
wide and had 25k visits per day (if I recall correctly). Our widget was
embedded in Blender's homepage. Sadly, I was never able to make enough money
through the affiliate links and I shut it down after 3 years.

3) NextWeeQ - an online staff scheduling system. I spoke to potential
customers before building anything, got requirements and built a v1. Gave
access to 5 of the companies I had spoken to. Only 1 used it, and stopped
using it after a week. Following up, everybody asked for more features, but
the site as it was did more than their excel spreadsheet (the existing
technology) did, I provided a few of the requested features and continued to
wait for usage. They never stared using, always asking for more features. I
decided this wasn't a good business to be in.

4) Kitchon - ohhh...kitchon. An app that would sort out the messy timing of
figuring out how to cook multiple recipes and have all the food done at the
right time. The more I coded, the worse it got. Lots of interest, but I never
found a business model, and never got a product into the market (aside from a
few alpha tests)

5) Bucket52 - Challenge you to do one interesting/memorable thing every week.
Built in one day (Dec 30th) and launched on new years. A nice bit of interest,
good feedback and adoption. But, man it was hard for people to complete it!
Most users gave up around mid-Feb, which is standard for New Years resolutions
I guess. I shut it down at the end of the year.

Current - Doarama - lots of users, industry leading and just starting to
monetize.

~~~
subsidd
Awesome! Just a heads up, your ssl certificate shows invalid.

~~~
pedalpete
Do you mean on the Doarama domain? Chrome is showing valid for me, what
browser are you using?

~~~
subsidd
Yeah, doarama. I am using chrome as well.

~~~
hackalyst
For me, it shows mixed content warning rather than invalid cert on FF.

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ChicagoDave
Still waiting on the big success:

1\. Texfyre - Attempt to replace 4th-8th grade textbooks with interactive
stories with embedded testing. Was in talks with Gates Foundation, but they
pushed towards big publishers instead of start-ups. Bootstrapped then closed
in 2013 (6 years).

2\. Wizely (current) - Social network of contextual wisdom. API 90% complete,
working on security and iOS app. Bootstrapped. (4 years in development and
with good reasons for taking my time)

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mattbgates
As long as you keep having ideas, keep going. My advice to you: Design and
develop it for yourself first and foremost. If it is useful to you, it will be
useful to others.

If you design and develop for others, you will be much more disappointed. I
usually design things based on my own needs and share them with the world. If
no one is using it, I'm using it for myself, at least, so I'm my biggest fan.

I wouldn't say I've had too many failures, although I'm just getting started.
However, I've done some testing the past few years and put out some free
products out there and tweeted about them only. Then I waited and watched.

In 2015 I created a product called [https://mypost.io](https://mypost.io)
which allows anyone to have a web page up on the Internet in seconds. It is a
very simple blogging / web page creation platform that even lets people use
HTML and CSS to design their pages. The test was: Will people find it useful
and actually use it? I added OWA so I could see the location of where people
were using it from and I've seen people as far as Russia using it.

This let me know at least I was on the right track to creating something
useful. I'm sure if I had the funds to really market and advertise my
products, I'd be able to push them much further, but the hope for now is that
people share it if they find it useful.

While I wouldn't say that I'm monetarily successful at this moment, I did
build a popular website, and was able to gain and use that traffic to drive
attention towards things I'm doing.

Failure is what eventually leads to success. The reason it keeps getting
better for you is because you are learning from your mistakes and constantly
changing for the better. If you didn't do that, than I might be more concerned
and might tell you its time to call it quits. But your perseverance, ambition,
and desire for success is going to work out greatly in your favor when the
time comes.

~~~
brianwawok
> Design and develop it for yourself first and foremost. If it is useful to
> you, it will be useful to others.

If everyone does this, we would have 6 million note apps, and no garbage truck
scheduling software. Meaning there is no money in note apps and tons of money
in garbage truck scheduling software.

Pick something where money is. The top reason apps die from bootstrappers is
no path to money. Get paid on day 1.

~~~
iisbum
If only it was as easy as that.

The reason that there would be no garbage truck software is that most
developers don't know or want to the understand the garbage business.

While it's important to pick an idea where their is money, it's equally
important that you pick an idea where you have a clue of what to build, or
have access to people that you can talk too about what they need, and can sign
as customers.

A large number of software projects start as consulting projects, where
someone sees a way to turn the project into something that might be wanted by
more than just the initial client. If you don't have any consulting like this,
you can always try browsing the job boards and see what people are hiring
people to build, and see if those idea's might be something you can turn into
a product.

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cl42
What is your definition of "success"?

I have to say, if you've been able to fund your lifestyle in a sustainable way
for 15 years, generate an income on your own, etc then you are doing pretty
well.

Of course, if your goal is to make a billion dollars then you're not
succeeding yet.

Ray Kroc strikes me as a good example of someone who failed many times before
finding an opportunity at 50+ years of age and scaling it to become immensely
wealthy.

Anyway, curious to hear how you're defining success and happy to share more
thoughts!

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jbpetersen
What were each of them in a nutshell?

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tpetry
Really good question the OP should answer. It mskes a great difference if the
ideas have been facebook for dogs or a smaller target audience therefore
marketing being very hard.

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Mz
Milton Hershey, founder of Hershey:

[https://www.hersheys.com/en_us/our-
story.html](https://www.hersheys.com/en_us/our-story.html)

 _Our founder, Milton Hershey believed in making happiness accessible to all.
That belief, along with tremendous passion, perseverance, and vision, helped
him grow the Hershey Company, so that millions could enjoy his delicious
chocolates._

My recollection is that he tried multiple sweets related businesses before he
got something that worked.

According to Wikipedia:

Early years[edit]

 _After an apprenticeship to a confectioner in 1873, Milton S. Hershey founded
a candy shop in Philadelphia. This candy shop was only open for six years,
after which Hershey apprenticed with another confectioner in Denver, where he
learned to make caramel.[7] After another failed business attempt in New York,
Hershey returned to Pennsylvania, where in 1886 he founded the Lancaster
Caramel Company. The use of fresh milk in caramels proved successful,[8] and
in 1900, after seeing chocolate-making machines for the first time at the 1893
World 's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Hershey sold his caramel company for
$1,000,000[8] (equal to $28,788,000 today), and began to concentrate on
chocolate manufacturing, stating to people who questioned him, "Caramels are
just a fad, but chocolate is a permanent thing."

In 1896, Milton built a milk-processing plant so he could create and refine a
recipe for milk chocolate candies. In 1899, he developed the Hershey process
which is less sensitive to milk quality than traditional methods, and in 1900,
he began manufacturing Hershey's Milk Chocolate Bars, also called Hershey's
Bars or Hershey Bars._

I also found JR Simplot's biography inspiring. He quit school at age 14 and
hunted wild horses to feed piglets that he got from farmers who were going to
kill them rather than feed them because of a glut on the market. He then sold
dehydrated onions. He later went into making French fries and became a
supplier for McDonald's.

[https://portal.clubrunner.ca/994/Stories/making-of-a-
french-...](https://portal.clubrunner.ca/994/Stories/making-of-a-french-fry-
empire)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._Simplot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._Simplot)

You might also enjoy reading up on the founder of KFC:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Sanders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Sanders)

~~~
cl42
Now that you mention it, Henry Ford also started two car companies (both
failures) before he started _the_ Ford company.

