

Ask HN: How many business failures before your first success? - liamk

HN is often full of success stories, but I'm curious as to how many business failures people have before their first success (defined as self supporting). I think the positive bias might skew people's ideas of how easy it is to make a successful business, hence the question.
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jacquesm
First startup was successful.

I wished I could say that about all of them though, first success is
definitely not a guarantee for a repeat performance, there are always new
mistakes to make and some of those have the power to kill you.

Anecdotally, so, not my own start-ups but friends that have tried to start
out, if they kept it simple (consultancy, contract work) they were mostly
successful, if they went for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow they
mostly failed.

Business-to-business 100% success rate, business to consumer 1 in 5 or worse.

~~~
liamk
_Anecdotally, so, not my own start-ups but friends that have tried to start
out, if they kept it simple (consultancy, contract work) they were mostly
successful, if they went for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow they
mostly failed._

Well hopefully that holds true for me, I was planning on taking the simple
route. The simple route seems to be a little more sustainable: if you can find
customers to do consultancy or contract work for, perhaps those can be your
initial customers for your start-up.

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patricia
the ideas i intended to go somewhere have. but i see business in general as
ideas and give myself a lot of time/flexibility to experiment with things.
sometimes i have public facing things i am tinkering with that i'll shelve,
reinvent, etc. i don't feel bad about it.

if you didn't lose anybody else's money, it's not a loss. experimenting is
always a win.

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ahoyhere
First startup almost there. The road hasn't even been that rocky. I agree with
jacquesm about keeping it simple & foregoing the pipe dream of huge growth and
an IPO.

To which I'd add: Solve a business problem. Charge businesses money for it.

The friends I've seen fail with 'startups' had no true value built in, and no
capturing that value (e.g. not charging for it).

Or they were trying to sell vague services to a vague audience, who they
didn't understand. (Namely: consumers, who pay for very little on the web,
without understanding & compensating for that fact with what they chose to
build.)

