Ask HN: How many startups have you tried and failed building? - bhootai
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sharmi
This might not qualify as startup for some, but they do for me. All of these
are single person efforts with regards to implementation. The ideas themselves
were the product of brainstorming between me and my spouse.

The first idea I started was travel related. I had a notebook full of ideas on
features I would do. :) I jotted down all our discussions, but we were biting
off more than we can chew. We felt we could beat an NP hard problem with some
heuristics. After an year, we had to concede it was not going to happen and
drop it.

The second one was more to scratch a personal itch. We wanted to build
something that had good infrastructure from the ground up. So, the actual
functionality received much less attention. A month or two in, I realized I
was going to burn out and put the project on back burner. We revisited it
again a few months later and this time, we did things that would not scale. We
worked only on the absolute essentials. I am happy to say, the product works
for our usecase.

The next project was to provide technical infrastructure for a close associate
for a business they were working on. Unfortunately the business side of it did
not work out. So did not see much out of it. Had quite a bit of learnings from
that one.

For the next project, I decided we are going to do work on features that are
not too ambitious. It was supposed to be a 2 month project, but it went on to
become a year and half project. Still this is the first project we followed to
completion. For the first time, I worked on the backend, frontend and
deployment of a project together. We also did some research prior to
development to make sure people needed it. The result is
[https://www.niftyword.com](https://www.niftyword.com) .

Now, I am on to the next idea :)

The most important learning? Reading a hundred posts on Dos and Don'ts still
does not prepare you for ground realities. Not that one should not read such
posts, only one should never assume "Thats so obvious. I will not make those
mistakes!" , cause when you are in the thick of things, your perspective
changes. The sunken cost fallacy is real.

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cdiamand
I've tried and failed a few times, depending on your definition of startup.

My first web based failure was an e-mail marketing startup. Think a cheaper
version of Mailchimp.

It didn't go well. It folded in under a year. We had a few hundred signups and
very few paying customers. Most of whom were spammers.

At the time, my software development skills were not up to the task and I was
leaning on a team of outsourced developers. Not great.

I didn't talk to my customers enough and I didn't market aggressively enough.
I got hung up on the technical problems.

I'm hoping my current projects -

[http://www.oppslist.com](http://www.oppslist.com)

[http://www.oppsdaily.com](http://www.oppsdaily.com)

fare a little better! :D

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twobyfour
Define "failed"?

~~~
e4jtropy
And obey the rules below ;)

'A definition MUST be written as a complete, grammatically correct English
sentence.', 'A definition MUST be an ìf and only if statement.', 'A definition
MUST have a clearly stated genus and a clearly stated species .', 'The
quantifiers in a good definition MUST be explicitly and clearly stated.', 'The
term being defined MUST be underlined.'

