

Ask HN: Are you embarrassed by your failed projects? - andrewtbham

Everyone goes on and on about there is no penalty for failure... However, over the years I have launched a few side projects, and I have eventually shut them all down.  They were met with disinterest or in some cases only casual interest... the worst part is the people that actually liked your product.  they are the ones that always bring it up.  has anyone else had similar experiences?  also, how do you deal with promoting your next project in light of all the past failures?
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terra_t
It depends on why they failed.

I was involved in a project that failed because of a moral mistake I made. You
could blame it on the culture (my whole team, my boss, my bosses boss, and the
director of the organization were all "fired" because of this incident) but I
was the one person who could have stopped it. And I didn't.

To be fair, I probably would have lost my job had I done the right thing. On
the other hand, I would have kept my integrity and, retrospectively, I know I
could have gotten a new job very easily at that time.

I was very embarrassed by that, and it screwed up my life for a while... Hell,
I gained 40 pounds as a result.

The big picture is that you have to ask yourself, "What is the cause of this
failure?" Sometimes you gamble, sometimes you get a "2-7" with nonmatching
suits and you go all in before the flop. People have won the WSOP playing like
this... People also lose big playing like this.

Myself, developing web sites on my own account, I've noticed that most web
developers (in the sense of a real estate developer) create something that
'maxes out' their potential) and they never make anything that cool again.
Personally, I'm trying to be more systematic and gradually make things that
are bigger and bigger.

~~~
sdrinf
Thanks for sharing that.

Out of pure curiosity, and for the betterment of all of us here, would you
mind sharing your mistake? I accept, that you've grown for the better of it,
and I'll promise not to be judgmental.

~~~
terra_t
Doing what I was told.

------
jacquesm
I'm embarrassed by those projects that failed where I failed to apply lessons
learned in the past, but for the most part those are incidents.

The majority of the 'public failures' failed for new or unexpected reasons and
I have absolutely no qualms about being open about it or analyzing them (in
private or in public).

I'm far more suspicious of people that have never failed or that feel that
don't want to talk about their failures. Pointing the finger of 'fail' at
yourself and taking responsibility for mistakes made is a great way to improve
your game and to increase the chances of eventual success.

As for dealing with this when promoting the 'next thing', I don't make any
links between projects and I try to keep my person 'out' of the day to day
running of any of the projects that I'm involved in, for the most part I'm the
invisible man. So whatever failures there were _if_ they might be problematic
it does not carry over. But I'm actually not aware of any of that. Most
projects, even the failed ones will leave you with the net positive goodwill
that results from trying and trying hard.

------
nuclear_eclipse
I'm more embarassed by my lack of attention span to see side projects through
to completion.

------
patio11
I'm not embarrassed that I'm no longer a salaryman or a technical translator
or a teacher or an order entry operator or a lab attendant or a toothbrush-
wielding oil pipe cleaner or a paperboy. If I'm not embarrassed about
switching entire careers, why would I worry about not continuing with all side
projects?

------
ashleyreddy
My first business idea was making scrolling LED displays. I tried this about
20 years ago. At the time I didn't realize that almost ALL electronics are
manufactured off shore and that it would be impossible to compete. We did make
a prototype but that as far as we went with the business. I learned that just
because I could make something doesnt mean that I can build a business around
it. There is a lot to learn before one becomes well versed in the field of
startups. The word failure is not appropriate for our field. I think not yet
succeeded is better.

------
gurraman
Sooner embarrassed by the fact that I've programmed for for over a decade and
haven't released anything of significance :)

I think I'm finally on the right path to finding ways of motivating myself to
finish/release stuff, but that's another topic.

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edw519
Never.

If the project was a success, I did it for the project.

If it wasn't, I did it to learn and grow.

Either way, nothing to be embarrassed about.

(Am I embarrassed by the code I wrote 3 years ago? Now that's another story.)

~~~
TamDenholm
I think if you're not embarrassed by the code you wrote ages ago then you're
not improving.

~~~
mikerg87
The code I wrote sucks. The code I am writing is cool. The code I am going to
write rocks!

------
uurayan
I've had many unsuccessful start up experiences, however it's hard for me to
call them failures. It takes a lot of effort to truly fail, most of these
times I just quit. I quit before I gave these ideas a real chance to grow.

Growing a real business is like growing a tree from a seed. If you stop
watering too soon, you never know how big the tree could have grown.

On the note of how to move forward from these experiences. It's important to
analyze each project and figure out the exact reason they weren't successful.
For me I had to realize I thought I knew more than I did and that my ego was
getting in the way. I had to realize I couldn't do everything on my own. I
learned that cash is king and there are almost always ways to get what you
need done on the cheap or free (exchange). I had to learn to delegate tasks
that I shouldn't be wasting my time on.

It sucks really bad to think of these past projects and it often took me
months or years to bring myself to think about them seriously without blowing
their lack of success to exterior conditions out of my control.

------
plnewman
I have one particular one that my wife teases me about semi-regularly. It
keeps me humble (not that I have anything to be un-humble about).

~~~
andrewtbham
what was the project?

~~~
plnewman
A book of short stories. And it was idiotic.

------
user24
Depends on what you metric you're using for 'failure'.

I normally define it as some mixture of revenue and traffic (I don't mind low
revenue if it's high traffic and vice versa).

But there are other important metrics too. People have already mentioned what
you learn from the project. If you learn something, it's not a complete
failure.

Another metric is the effect you have on people. One of my coolest ideas
(imho) was <http://thingsinbooks.com>. It gets about 10 visits per day, so by
that metric it's a failure. It never earned any revenue so it's a failure by
that metric. I didn't really learn anything from doing it either.

But despite the lack of traffic, people still link to it and even upload their
finds from time to time (126 finds so far!). So in that way it has some
elements of success, even though I've failed to capitalise on the interest and
turn it into a popular site.

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Atavor
I am usually too busy regretting the lost time to be embarrassed.

I always choose projects that, if they succeed, will become a launching point
for something(s) larger. They represent the beginning of an exponential growth
curve, where the x axis is the seconds I have to spend (before I cease to be)
and the y axis is the derivative of accomplishment. A failed project
represents a wasted fraction of those seconds, which pushes the exponential
growth curve to the right (and some portion of it is pushed beyond my allotted
lifespan, which is the right-hand limit of my integral). My integral is
irreparably reduced.

You can expand your accomplishment-integral bound beyond your lifespan. Still,
that axis is probably finite, and the integral will never catch up with where
it could have reached had I/you not failed in the first place.

------
madhouse
I consider myself reasonably fortunate, in that most of my side projects were
made to scratch my own itch, and they all served me well.

In that sense, none of them failed, since their primary purpose was to
statisfy one of my own needs, and so they did.

However, most of them never gained momentum, I stopped maintaining most of
them after about a year, and hardly anyone missed them.

There's one or two where I still get a few questions, whether it's still in
development, or "what happened to it?", even after years of stopping work on
them - one can either view that as a failure, since the projects were shut
down; or as success, since some still remember them fondly.

Being an optimist most of the time, I treat them as success.

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dlevine
Are you embarrassed because you feel like you could have put more into the
projects that failed, or just because they failed?

Failure is perfectly acceptable - if you ask any successful entrepreneur, they
likely had a string of failed projects.

However, it's important to make sure that the failures bring your forward
rather than setting you back. Make sure that you learn something from every
failure, and don't repeat past mistakes.

If your problem has been building a project and then discovering that people
aren't interested, do the customer development before you build the product.
Or build something that you desperately want to use.

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acconrad
I feel like this question was very recently asked, and the real question I
have for you is: why do you call it a failure?

To me, failure is an antiquated term you outgrow in school: F means failure,
which really means you can't advance on to the next term. After school, when
does that ever matter as an entrepreneur? Have you ever not learned something
valuable from a past entrepreneurial experience? Would you say you are better
or worse off from having done those things in the past? You're always
learning, always growing, and you are a man of free will who can do whatever
else he wants.

How is that, in any way, failure?

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rechtaht
This is going to sound a little trite, but it's only a failure if you didn't
learn from it.

Typically my list of failed projects informs my pitch about the next one. "My
next project is more interesting from my past projects because in my past
attempts I learned x"

People often understand taking knowledge from one experience and applying it
to the next one. And I would argue that's what you should be doing if you want
to better your chances of success.

Your path, your experiences, all tell a story and inform your future projects.
It's up to you to make that a positive story.

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castis
Looking back. I'm not so much embarrassed about the failed projects, so much
as knowing the things I might have done differently to change the outcome for
the better.

Thats neither here nor there seeing as how you just take it all with a grain
of salt, add and apply that knowledge to current projects and keep chugging
along trying not to second guess yourself.

However, the code written for some of those past projects; I hope it never
sees the light of day. Thats the only thing I'm embarrassed about. So if thats
the worst of my issues, I think im doing okay.

------
rtp
I see it like this:

Success is relative, yet you can measure success. The more projects you've
done, the more successful they ought to become (although some variance on that
graph is perfectly normal, I presume). If you don't improve in pulling off
your projects, you are doing something wrong, and then you should revise on
what to improve upon in order to progress.

Having failed before is actually an indication that you're more likely to
succeed (relatively).

------
peteypao
It helps to know that the success for startups is very low to begin with. That
being said, once you graduated to a certain level of mastery, then that's when
you win.

I equate it to the days when I tried my hand at pickup. Sure, 99 out of 100
girls will reject you, but if 1 girl says yes, then it would definitely be
worth it. It all depends on whether you can keep on going, despite every
failure. The goal is not to be fazed by failure/rejection.

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p01nd3xt3r
No, because they were awesome learning experiences. The term "failure" is very
vague. Do you consider anything less than a profitable exit a failure? I have
had many startups that did not go as planned but because I learned a lot and
they (the startup) led me to other ideas I would not consider them failures.
The only time I would be embarrassed about a failure is if I had quit and the
company went on to succeeded with out me.

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thibaut_barrere
I (really) don't care about failing at all. I throwed ~10 sites to the bin and
kept 2 (<http://www.learnivore.com/> and <http://www.toutpourmonipad.com/>).

The one thing I notice is that the more I do these, the more I get ambitious
and confident :)

I focus mainly on learning (how to launch/promote).

------
yodha77
Yes. I am really embarrassed about them. I started about 4-8 side projects. I
have 0% success rate. My embarrassment comes in two forms: i) disappointing
other people who are "part" of the team ii) self-disappointment that I cannot
finish the full project myself. i) typically results in avoiding them for
life. Don't get me wrong. In my corporate world, I am more successful.

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cperciva
Embarrassed by my failed projects? Not really. I just pretend that they never
happened.

Not if someone directly asks, of course; but in my autobiography the failed
projects rather drift into the mists of time. The same goes for most creative
people: You hear about Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, but you never hear about
the books he started but never made any progress on.

------
cothinkit
Never embarrassed. I use failed projects as a way to learn and improve on the
process and next project.

Take what's worth saving and leave the rest: mistakes not to repeat, lessons
worth learning, and view failures as learning experiences not as dead luggage
following you.

------
mattblalock
I find it difficult to avoid a bit of embarrassment... yes, I did learn from
it... The goal isn't to learn, failure is failure.

I try to find comfort in the things that went right and aim to not let it
happen again, but it is nonetheless embarrassing.

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Mc_Big_G
The thing about failed projects is that they're not seen as failure by your
next employer, they're seen experience and potential. At the very least, you
learn from it and use this knowledge on your next project.

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cowmixtoo
No. Some of my 'worst' ideas have succeeded to my amazement. OTOH, some of my
best ideas failed despite how 'awesome' they were.

When I look back, everything succeeded or failed based on timing and
execution.

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usiegj00
Absolutely. At the time. But in retrospect I've learned to value them and even
embrace them. It's become my speaking gig: <http://vimeo.com/15455886>

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al_
I'm embarrassed by the ones I've been working on for a long time but never
released. Not by the ones that I did release but failed to gain any traction.

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kmak
A little, I started projects when I was 16 (some silly web game) that might
not be too PC, and the code is awful, and I've rewritten the code twice!

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RDDavies
Nope. No better way to learn what not to do.

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mrlyc
I'm a lot more embarrassed by the few times I didn't even try than the times I
did try and failed.

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noodle
embarassed? no. but i've done some projects that failed that i don't mention
to anyone anymore. the only thing left of them are the lessons learned in my
mind.

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chadgeidel
I'm only embarrassed by the projects I never started.

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projectileboy
No, I'm only embarrassed by my incomplete projects.

------
markkat
No way.

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chailatte
One of the major characteristic that an entrepreneur should have is 'total
disregard for others' opinion of you as a person'. It frees you from doing
things that would otherwise make you compromise your vision.

"I am homeless....people are looking down on me and my daughter...guess I
should stop writing this wizard school book"

"I'm a stay at home dad who's failed at tons of iterations as an inventor.
Guess I should stop messing with vacuum cleaners"

------
korch
Never.

 _There are defeats more triumphant than victories._

—Michel de Montaigne

 _I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work._

—Thomas Edison

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mobl
What kind of project failed? I can help you either restart them with funding
or offer advice on how to turn them around.

Like wise, if technology is good, I might be interested in buying some assets

Let me know

Have an awesome and very bright day!! jimmy@inodesoft.com

