

What it feels like to fail - augustflanagan
http://aflanagan.com/what-it-feels-like-to-fail/

======
jacquesm
I really don't think that you have a failure on your hands.

You should stop to think that way and start to think about how you are going
to monetize your users, one way would be to literally ask the community: "Hey
guys & girls, this is going great but I need a living, what should I do for
you to throw some money my way" might be a good start.

Most small scale bootstrapped start-ups would be trumpeting their success from
the rooftops if they got a dedicated userbase like that.

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orblivion
So... did you ever _try_ a revenue model? Make some sort of premium account?
I'm not speaking from any amount of experience, but you have 7000 users,
you're about to throw in the towel on the business end of things anyway, I
would think it's worth trying to come up with something.

~~~
augustflanagan
We tried a couple of different ideas, neither of which gained traction. The
most promising was offering a paid tool to Spanish and English professors, who
could sign up their classes and then monitor how their students were using the
site.

We actually had about 50 universities sign up for a free trial, although only
about 10 actually used the site actively last term. I think the biggest
problem with this idea was that most university students who are studying
Spanish don't really care about learning, and are just doing it for credit.

~~~
marcusbooster
I think you need to reaccess who your paying clients are. People that are so
desperate to learn they'll try anything - expats in a new country for a job
(or dragged along by a spouse), contractors dealing with workers and language
barrier, esl teachers, travelers who want to be prepared to communicate with
the locals, etc. Less fun, and more solution based advertising. I know I've
seen Rosetta Stone ads highlighting it's use with diplomats and the like.

~~~
stoney
Having moved to a new country myself recently, I would have loved the
opportunity to talk to the locals about life in general - where to live, where
to go out, etc (though in my case I moved between English speaking countries
so the language wasn't such a big deal). I could see the same working for
travellers.

Also the chance to make some contacts in the country before I arrived would
have been good - making friends in a new city is hard.

I would have paid for that kind of service.

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puredemo
1\. Your domain is, in my opinion, terrible. We spent three minutes trying to
pronounce it.

2\. "We have >7,000 users, and lots of them are still super active in the
community." That's actually great start! Why aren't you trying to expand?

~~~
augustflanagan
Yeah, I'm getting that a lot on here. I think it is a hard name for people who
only speak English, or speak English and other languages that aren't latin
based. (Our Spanish speaking members really like the name.)

~~~
thaumaturgy
So use multiple domain names.

~~~
Vivtek
This is your best bet. I really like "Lenguajero", but I lived in Puerto Rico
for a couple of years.

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Vivtek
This is not what it feels like to fail. You've got an active, committed
community of 7000 users - that is not even close to failure.

When I built Despammed.com in 1999, I peaked at around that. Donations were
plenty to keep the site running and even paid for the mortgage once or twice
when things were tight. You've got a much more committed community there, and
while you're not going to be the next YouTube (because learning a language is
_hard_ , while watching TV is _not_ ), you've built a useful service that can
run in perpetuity and that, my friend, is what _success_ feels like.

I think you need to move on to your next idea; let Lenguajero run for a few
years, try to think of a premium version of the service in some way, but
mostly just let it ferment and grow organically, and get yourself engaged in
something you'll find fun. Keep yourself moving.

~~~
orblivion
Since you mentioned donations, I figured I'd ask you this. I've got a site I'm
working on that I want to commit to full time, potentially without any other
source of income. When you say it was "enough to keep the site running", do
you mean enough to maintain servers, or enough to maintain your refridgerator
and roof as well?

Also, is it ok to have a donation based site if you eventually hope to profit
significantly from it? Or does that tend to imply that it's a "community" or
"non-profit" sort of thing they're putting money towards?

~~~
Vivtek
By "keep the site running" I mean it paid to keep the server hosted at a local
ISP. (Good Lord, what a blast from the past; it was the last server I ever
actually physically saw, a used SPARCstation running Solaris, and I carried it
to the ISP myself.) Occasionally, I had enough in the kitty to pay some
personal bills. That was just on PayPal donations from one link in the corner
of the home page.

But I wasn't even close to being committed to Despammed full time (although it
sometimes felt like it during my trial-by-fire sysadminning lessons when
things went wrong) - so I don't think there's much to generalize from. You
have the advantage of full attention - but I was the only free spam filter in
the world for a short time, and a few people were pretty virulently thankful
about it.

As to the morality of donations when you hope to profit later - absolutely.
You're not forcing people to donate, and if they like your site well enough to
give you money, they will not only cheer you on if you become profitable,
they'll even feel personal pride that they helped you on your way. The Knew-
Him-When effect. I think only a few people would feel you'd sold out. And you
can ignore them; they'll be looking for a way to feel superior no matter what,
so you might as well let them feel superior all the way to your bank.
Everybody's happy.

Now if you actually sell yourself as a community effort, then appropriate it
to yourself when it's time to make money, that will piss people off, and
rightly so. It's really all your attitude, though, that sets the tone. If
you're honest about your plans, that's all people want.

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augustflanagan
Just for the fun of it does anyone want to throw out some new names for the
site? Lenguajero is pretty bad in English. I think we fell into the trap of
speaking Spanish everyday and thinking that it just sounded cool (and a bit
witty). Ideas???

~~~
abstractbill
secondspeak.com is currently unregistered, and makes sense to me as a name for
a site for people learning a second language.

~~~
bootload
_"... secondspeak.com is currently unregistered ..."_

That also means you could try other languages. Something that should be
considered. Chinese/English for example could give you a lot bigger user base.

------
augustflanagan
Just to clarify. I'm not shutting down Lenguajero. It will keep on running (at
least I'll still use it to practice my Spanish :)), and maybe we'll come up
with an idea on how to monetize.

One of the challenges we faced in monetizing the site was monetizing our
international members. A really big chunk of our users are from Central and
South America. When it comes to advertising we don't make any money off these
users (say $0.05 per click versus ~$1.00 for someone in America). The majority
of these users also don't have credit cards or paypal so getting them to pay
for a premium version of the site would be difficult.

~~~
jacquesm
I'd kill for $1.00 / click on any traffic. $0.05 is still pretty good.

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jayliew
Startup failure != you as a failure.

It's 2 separate events. Associating startup failure as you as a failure is a
very slippery slope; because eventually you won't get out of bed because
everything you can possibly do when you get out of bed is going to result in
failure anyway, so why get out of bed. Remember - 2 separate things :)

And as others have mentioned, many other startups _wished_ they had 7K of
passionate users.

Keep tryin! :)

~~~
augustflanagan
Thanks jayliew. I don't actually think I'M a failure. I was just trying to
express the gamut of emotions that one feels when a startup doesn't work out.

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smwhreyebelong
I think it's a great idea. Are you sure you want to give up on it ? Why do you
call it a failure ? I wouldn't call having 7000 users a failure. You have
plenty of room to grow.

Let me know if you want feedback. One reason a lot of people trying to learn a
new language give up is because of lack of motivation after a while / not
finding people to converse/practice/learn with (and I talk from first-hand
experience)

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bazookaaa
I've been feeling the same way about my startup, which has almost 17,000 users
but only a small amount of them are paying customers (launched a paid plan a
few months ago). I keep wanting to ask myself how much longer I should give it
to see if it reaches profitability, or should I just shut it down? Anyway,
right now I'm creating a survey for the paying users to be able to tell what
they like/don't like about the paid plan. I also plan on doing a referral
program that benefits both parties (I did get both of those ideas from a
slideshow about a startup and their freemium model, forgot which). Keep those
ideas in mind if you ever plan on introducing any paid plans and good luck.

~~~
augustflanagan
Thanks. I really appreciate the feedback and advice (from everyone on HN). The
whole "wondering how much longer I should give it" phase lasted from about
February until early April.

One of the first things that made me realize it might be time to cut my losses
and focus my attention on other projects was when we launched this website in
mid Feb - <http://toeflnow.com>

We sell a TOEFL Tips and Strategies guide eBook, and while it certainly isn't
earning enough to pay all the bills it is making substantially more money than
Lenguajero. In fact, in its first week it made more money than Lenguajero did
the entire month of Feb.

That was a real turning point. It was like "Hmmm...hundreds of hours spent on
Lenguajero vs. ~40hrs spent on an ebook. Maybe I should be doing something
else right now..."

Good luck! I really hope it works out for you. What's the website if you don't
mind me asking?

~~~
bazookaaa
Thank you! That's amazing about your TOEFL vs. Lenguajero revenue. My site is
<http://soshiku.com> and my submission to HN is
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315281> (submitted ~19 months ago,
yikes).

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malnourish
As a member of a small group of friends, venturing into the possibility of our
first start-up, seeing the failures of others can be really eye opening.

I suppose I haven't thought too much about a revenue source, however the first
major thing we're going to do is an Android app... If you can call that major.

~~~
natgordon
Launching real products for real users it major :) Good luck.

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pwntifex
I'm coming off a very painful startup failure myself, but I am honestly very
thankful for the experience. There is an old cliche that says you learn more
from your failures than your successes. It's become a cliche for a reason,
it's usually true.

I reflect often on the entire experience and constantly go over all the
mistakes we made in hindsight. It's painful, really painful, but you learn
from the pain. The pain makes it real so you won't ever make the same mistakes
again.

I'm onto my next startup now and all that hard learning is paying off. I'm
working even hard but with much less stress since I know I'm doing the right
things this time around.

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xiaoma
I'm really surprised at all the negative comments on the domain name. I
thought it was great!

I've picked a poor domain myself, due to the influence of another language
(Mandarin), but this is Spanish! Not only is it the #2 language on the planet,
it's a language that I thought would instantly recognizable to both Europeans
and Americans.

Moral of the story: Make domain names out of English words and never ever
assume your users have exposure to other languages.

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tom_ilsinszki
"I thought I’d be the next YouTube"

As far as I know YouTube is far from being a financial success either...

~~~
natgordon
Yeah, but YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 BILLION at a time that they
had around 70 employees. So it was at least a financial success for the
founders.

------
qeorge
Keep going, even if this isn't the site. Like you said, you've come miles in
just one year, and you've achieved more than you're giving yourselves credit
for.

Turn off Mixergy and get to work. :)

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pclark
how to get over failing: move on.

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csmeder
Have you thought about putting a donate button for now? Might make a few bucks
a months?

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TotlolRon
Stop-loss on your time and effort is at times a smart business decision. There
is no point in sugar coating it. That being said, a failed business does not
make you a failure. Not at all.

