

Experiences in Failed Startups - SlyShy
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ad6bo/has_anyone_ever_worked_for_a_startup_company_that/

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dabent
I'll add mine here as I'm having a problem logging into Reddit.

Startup 1: a product for online shopping sites to use to help customers make
complex purchasing decisions. It was difficult to use (required user take a
questionnaire) and was one more cost for ecommerce sites to consider. I was
there only for a short, 70-hour-a-week stint as a contractor. The company and
people seemed nice enough, but I've never seen a market for what they made.

Startup 2: Took a job as a manager of "professional services" (before I
understood what that meant) for a business banking software startup. It had VC
cash and was burning through it faster than it was getting customers. They
sold, likely very cheaply, to a competitor eventually. I'd have stayed longer,
but the "professional services" essentially meant travel, contrary to what I
understood in the interview, so I left fairly quickly. The company just tried
growing staff and office space faster than their revenues. I don't really know
how or if the founders did on the sale, but it wasn't the huge success hoped
for.

Startup 3: Mine! A rental listing site. Partnered with a "business" guy who
couldn't really offer much. Went after a market just dripping with
competitors, including rent.com, apartments.com and some guy named Craig.
Faced chicken/egg problem in multiple ways. Hard to convince savvy landlords
to list if no one else has. Hard to convince savvy landlords to list if no
renters visit the site. Hard to convince renters to visit if no properties are
on the site. Hard to convince search engines to rank me for much if no
listings on my new site.

#3 wasn't all bad. I did get people to list and get organic traffic, but just
not enough to sustain the project. I worked the longest and learned the most
from the rental site. As a professional, coding a web app from CSS to the
database, managing customers and system administration stretched me and helped
me like nothing I'd done before.

And that's why I'm looking to make my future #4 a success. :-)

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rjurney
Before: Lame QA Automation Gigs

Startup 1: Lucision - process-flow based document organization for law firms.
<http://www.memestreams.net/users/jello/blogid315504> Saved money and moved to
India to build a prototype. Lawyer friend bailed.

End State: The Beach. The Himalayas. The Dalai Lama's birthday party.

Startup 2: Upon return to states, kept the company name, changed the tune -
<http://www.lucision.com> Web-based appliance for slot machine analytics.
Focused on tribal market. Raised seed money, lots of industry press, beta
install at one casino, integrated with leading casino management system.
Slugged it out for two years as salesman and developer, and doomed self to
failure with a front-heavy pricing model (coulda signed up many casinos for a
monthly fee), bizarre denial about the reality of a two year sales cycle,
gross underestimation of competition, FOSS stack in an MS centric market,
being a lone founder after the first three months, selling to the gaming
market from Atlanta (why!?) when I should have been in Vegas, too much time
spent very ineffectively trying to raise money, and figuring out what the hell
I was doing. Should have failed way, way sooner.

End State: "Hey, with my experience I can now get good jobs!"

Startup 3: <http://www.starcaller.com> Star Caller - went to beach to relax
after a couple years of intense international consulting, surfing buddy is a
film hustler... a startup happened. Didn't go full time on it, learned a lot
about producing multimedia and the film industry. Think we coulda made this
work if we were in LA - we had leads, just not a thick pipeline. Still get
calls from studios to pitch them campaigns - decline. Was always a sideline.

End State: "Hey, cool - I know about (prematurely) scaling things using AWS!"

Startup 4: Cloud Stenography <http://www.cloudstenography.com> \- prototyped a
web-based Apache Pig GUI. Early abort - after some good interest, decided I
had insufficient personal savings to even think about pursuing a company.

End State: "Hey, I know Hadoop - I can get a job in Silicon Valley in big
data!" Moved to Silicon Valley.

I've lost a lot of money tanking startups, but its worked out reasonably well
career wise. I can't sit in a classroom for more than 15 minutes without going
nuts, so I figure I got my street MBA and some technical skills. Did a lot of
consulting in between. Can't say I regret anything other than not moving to
Silicon Valley sooner.

My next company will be with talented people from my network, in silicon
valley, solving a data problem that cures someone's pain.

~~~
ivenkys
"a front-heavy pricing model (coulda signed up many casinos for a monthly
fee), bizarre denial about the reality of a two year sales cycle, gross
underestimation of competition, FOSS stack in an MS centric market, being a
lone founder after the first three months, selling to the gaming market from
Atlanta (why!?) when I should have been in Vegas, "

Are you talking about yourself there ? It almost looks like a third-person
narrative.

~~~
rjurney
Yeah, its like describing a dead body :)

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vaksel
not mine, but I just saw an interview between Andrew Warner and Andrew
Fashion...and holy shit.

Basically the guy was making $200K a month from a myspace layout site(was the
top result on Google), felt like he was on top of the world(bought a few BMWs
cash), then he decided to improve the user experience and completely
redesigned the site.

Well he forgot to do an htaccess redirect, and overnight he lost almost all of
his traffic, since Google kicked him down to page 8, since w/o htaccess they
felt he was a brand new site.

Then he spent $30K buying SEO, and only got up to page 5.

Then he tried to get some help by partnering up with some guy from Australia,
and the guy stole his site(had access to the server), and released it as a $20
script template, so overnight there were hundreds of clones.

So within a few months, he went down from making $200K a month to $5K a month.

Seriously once Andrew throws up the site on mixergy, you have to go watch it.

~~~
mattmaroon
Wait, he had a #1 result and he changed URLs or something? If so he deserves
the loss.

~~~
vaksel
he rewrote urls with mod rewrite, from the interview I got the idea that
basically the entire site was redesigned from scratch.

He was using php before, and his entire structure was the usual ?p=123

~~~
mattmaroon
Ah, yeah. I mean, call me nuts, but if I built something from scratch, owned
100% of it, got a #1 Google result, and was making $200k/mo, I'd be far too
busy drinking champagne to go mess up my URLs.

~~~
wlievens
Plus, never fix what aint broken.

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AndrewWarner
If anyone wants to share their failed startup story on Mixergy, email me.

There's a lot to learn from these stories, as you can see from vaksel's
comment here.

~~~
brandnewlow
Andrew, keep up the great work. You're killing it with these interviews. I
hope the ad revenue is making them worth your time.

