
My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups  - taylorwc
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/10/a-history-of-failed-projects.html
======
edw519
As a builder of digital things, the 3 things I have the most trouble
communicating to non-builders are:

\- how hard it is

\- how much time it takes

\- how long it takes to become successful

So instead of trying to explain it, I may just send them to this blog post,
which _shows_ all 3. Thank you, Gabriel!

(Now if only you would remove that Mojo Badge business from blocking your
great content.)

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Thx--I may do that (remove it). I was alpha testing it for a friend.

Update: removed.

------
frederickcook
Among my non-startup friends, there seems to be this pre-conception that
people are working in some day-job and one day, have some crazy idea that
nobody else has thought of and go and start a company and become successful.

Good to see several people writing recently (from experience) about how this
couldn't be farther from the truth. While it may happen from time to time,
it's clear that most founders of successful (technology) startups have built a
long-term lifestyle around working really hard, for a really long time, on a
bunch of their own ideas and projects. Especially true given what we know
about how much of a role luck and timing plays in the success of startups.

Thanks for the post, Gabriel.

------
klous
"Ship often. Ship lousy stuff, but ship. Ship constantly." - Godin from
[http://the99percent.com/tips/6249/seth-godin-the-truth-
about...](http://the99percent.com/tips/6249/seth-godin-the-truth-about-
shipping)

------
acangiano
An overnight success, 15 years in the making. The lesson here is that you only
really need to be successful once, so keep trying.

~~~
jonpaul
Yup. One of Mark Cuban's finest lessons:
[http://blogmaverick.com/2005/05/30/success-and-motivation-
yo...](http://blogmaverick.com/2005/05/30/success-and-motivation-you-only-
have-to-be-right-once/)

------
netaddict
Why did Google blacklist all of your Tldscan sites? Was it just because your
sites' content was updated automatically? Or was it because you did something
wrong for SEO?

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Here's my (completely unsubstantiated) theory. It happend literally the day
after crossing $500 & 50K views in adsense. I'm guessing one of those was a
trigger for manual review by some contractor, perhaps overseas. They looked at
my sites for 3 sec, found them to be cookie-cutter and decided to blacklist
the account. I get the impression they shoot first, ask questions later. I
didn't feel like dealing with it all or starting over so I just moved on to
other things.

~~~
asmithmd1
I talked to someone from Google at I/O who should know and he claimed they
don't play "Whack a mole" with websites. They will tweak their ranking
algorithm to punish the behavior they see in a web site they don't want to be
ranked.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
That was probably me. We have two sides to the webspam team at Google:
engineering and manual. We definitely prefer to write algorithms so that we
avoid dealing with individual websites--the idea is that you strive to fix the
root cause of an issue, not to tackle specific sites. However, if we see a
website that violates our guidelines and that gets past the algorithms, we are
willing to take manual action. Where possible, we use the output of the manual
team not only to reduce spam itself, but to train the next iteration of
algorithms.

For example, one of the big issues in blackhat spam this past year was
illegally hacked sites. Our algorithms weren't doing the best job on hacked
sites, so the manual team kept an eye out for hacked sites to remove them (and
often to alert the website owners that they'd been hacked). The data generated
by the manual team helped us build and deploy multiple new algorithms to
detect hacked sites, leading to a 90% reduction in the number of hacked sites
showing up in Google's search results in the past few months. That decrease in
hacked spam in turn frees up the manual team to tackle the next bleeding-edge
technique the spammers use.

I suspect every major search engine uses similar approaches: try to stop the
majority of spam with algorithms, but be willing to take action in the mean
time while engineers work to improve the algorithms.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Great to know. Out of curiosity, in this particular case, did you save
supposed violations for each site, or did you blacklist all of them based on a
few?

~~~
Matt_Cutts
It varies for different cases depending on a lot of factors like severity,
impact on users, etc. In the particular case from above, to find out the
history of what might have happened, I just picked a domain at random and dug
into its history to find the autogenerated pages with tons of typos for each
domain.

I kinda thought one example would make the point. Does it help that much more
to give another example? I can look more up. For
<http://www.bigbadblogdirectory.com/> it looks like you were autogenerating
typos not just for websites, but for popular blogs. So
[http://www.bigbadblogdirectory.com/jeffmatthewsisnotmakingth...](http://www.bigbadblogdirectory.com/jeffmatthewsisnotmakingthisup.blogspot.com)
looks like it had

(I had to cut out the vast majority of the typos because the comment was too
long for HN.)

jeffmatthewsisnotmakingthisup.blogspoot.com,
jeffmatthewsisnotmakingthisup.bloyspot.com,
jegfmatthewsisnotmakingthisup.blogspot.com,
jeffmatthewsisnomakingthisup.blogspot.com,
jeffmatthwesisnotmakingthisup.blogspot.com,
jeffmatthewsisnotmakingthisup.nlogspot.com,
jeffmatthewsisnotmakingthisup.blogspot.ccom,
jeffmatthewsisnotmakingthisup.bligspot.com,
jeffmatthewsisnotakingthisup.blogspot.com,
jeffmatthewsisnotmakinghtisup.blogspot.com,
jeffmatthewsisnotmacingthisup.blogspot.com,
jdffmatthewsisnotmakingthisup.blogspot.com, jeffmatthewsisnot
akingthisup.blogspot.com, ieffmatthewsisnotmakingthisup.blogspot.com,
jeffmatthewsisnotmakingthisup/blogspot.com,
jeffmatthewsisnotmajingthisup.blogspot.com,
jeffmatthewsisnotmakingthishp.blogspot.com, jeff
atthewsisnotmakingthisup.blogspot.com,
jeffmatthewsisnotmakingthisup.blogspot/com,
jeffmatthewwisnotmakingthisup.blogspot.com."

I could post more examples from the other domains, but my point is that this
is the sort of thing that users dislike and complain about. If you were a
blogger and saw pages like this ranking for your name or your site's name, you
probably wouldn't be happy either. From looking at a few domains, I don't
think that we overgeneralized from a few pages in this case.

I know that you've moved on and the domains are shut down now. And I'm not
trying to be cantankerous. I'm just trying to say that from our point of view
there's good reasons to take action on sites like this so that users don't
complain to us.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
So, basically what you're saying is I went wrong with the typos? I got really
excited by my algo and was overzealous with adding it. I believe I did take it
off of the sites I issued re-inclusion requests for, but they never got re-
included and I never got any messages back (to my knowledge). Also, they were
not on every one of those domains.

Each site took a long time to make actually. They either involved generating a
data set from scratch or piecing together and parsing other large data sets.
This one in particular, I was crawling the Web for feed discovery and was
planning on adding stuff like grouping the best posts by category, etc.

Yeah, would love to know about some others, e.g.
japanese2englishdictionary.com, idnscan.com, serverslist.com. Also, did you
actually get any complaints about this or was it triggered by some other
threshold/thing? On a side note, I still get requests about exposing some of
this data, i.e. sites behind ip addresses or lists of domains matching some
criteria. In any case, thx for the info!

I can understand the need to take action. I just think it could have been
handled better. If typos were the problem, I would have removed them
immediately if someone told me, and that could have been automated. In
retrospect, it seems pretty obvious, but it wasn't at the time.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
The typos were definitely going overboard. I can understand the appeal of
"I've got this great tool--what can I do with it?" But we get a lot of
complaints about typo spam, so that's a sensitive issue. I definitely would
have done less of that.

There's also a class of folks we call navigation spammers who try to show up
for tons of domain name queries. I can give you some history to provide
context. In the old days, when you searched for [myspace.com] we'd show a
single result as if someone had done the query [info:myspace.com]. The problem
is that people would misspell it and do the query [mypsace.com], and then we'd
end up either show no result or (usually) a low-quality typo-squatting url. So
we made url queries be a string search, so [myspace.com] would return 10
results. That way if someone misspelled the query, they might get the exact-
match bad url at #1, but they'd probably get the right answer somewhere else
in the top 10. Overall, the change was a big win, because 10% of our queries
are misspelled. But if you're showing 10 results for url queries, now there's
an opportunity for spammers to SEO for url queries and get dregs of traffic
from the #2 to #10 positions. Now we're getting closer to present-day, so I'll
just say we've made algorithmic changes to reduce the impact of that.

But you were hitting a bunch of different factors: tons of typos, specifically
for misspelled url queries, autogenerated content, lots of different domain
names that looked to have a fair amount of overlap (expireddomainscan.com,
registereddomainscan.com, refundeddomainscan.com, etc.). If you were doing
this again, I'd recommend fewer domain names and putting more UI/value-add
work on the individual domains.

------
petervandijck
Yep, pretty interesting. And although at first I didn't, I have to agree that
a list of failed projects is not a bad indicator for success. At least it
shows that you keep trying.

As for mine:

1\. Mefeedia.com Built it out for 2 years, then sold it because it wasn't
going where I wanted it to go.

2\. Poorbuthappy.com Lots of traffic for travel forums, but the community got
out of hand so I had to close it.

Those where the 2 main projects where there was an expectation of it possibly
becoming something big-ish.

------
megamark16
Wow, great list! My biggest take away was all of the times he says "perhaps I
should have stuck with it". You never know where a project can go unless you
stick with it.

 _Back to hacking at my project..._

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Absolutely. That is one of my biggest lessons learned.

------
botolo86
This is very interesting. I think that the more failure you had in the past,
the more likely you will have success in the future. I also had some previous
side-projects experiences which did not work but I learnt so many things from
these projects!

------
run4yourlives
Kangadoo:

Why did this fail, really? This should be a runaway success. There are
millions of people out there that can barely figure out their cameras, let
alone understand the concept behind facebook or picasa or flickr or whatever
could be considered "competition".

Even with a founder departure, this is a valid idea... why didn't you continue
to peruse it?

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Yeah, I do think the idea is good, but I didn't want to do the sales work my
parter was doing and I'm not nearly as passionate about it as DDG.

~~~
SwellJoe
This is another important lesson for entrepreneurs and hackers to learn.
Sometimes, you have to cut loose even good ideas, in the service of the _best_
of your ideas or the one you feel most passionately about.

You'll have dozens, or hundreds, of ideas during your entrepreneurial
development...but, any one of them will probably require absolute focus and
dedication to make it really work.

------
keeptrying
I wonder how many were done while holding down a regular job? From his linked
in profile, it looks like he's being doing startups for a while.

Pretty cool.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Been doing startups right out of college. Only had a "regular job" for one
year, Aug 2001-Aug 2002. From 2001-2005 I also did consulting to pay the
bills, but would try hard to keep it to 4hr a day max. From 2005-2006 I was
also in a graduate program, which I treated as secondary to my startup (but
still did it)--sort of equivalent to the consulting.

~~~
keeptrying
Awesome. I've been trying to figure out exactly how I'm going to feel when
trying to work on startup. Your post seems more realistic and kind of shows me
exactly what I should be expecting.

Thanks for this.

One quick question: I'm not a uber geek. Ie I like the business side of the
equation too. Is this a good thing or a bad thing ?

~~~
Ixiaus
Not a Bad Thing, per se. I will tell you this: I recently launched a company
with my cofounder who has had prior success. She had to do both the technical
and business aspects. The startup we are building ATM wouldn't be a success if
it hadn't been for her business experience - but I will also echo my side: she
didn't do any of the programming; it is clear my skill and knowledge are
deeper. So, in short, this startup really wouldn't be much without either.
However, it's easier to be technical and acquire the business knowledge than
the other way around, IMHO.

So, the better question is: what kind of startup are you building? If it's a
technology startup, you will either need to commit to learning your technology
space or finding a technical co-founder. Committing to learning the technology
will teach you a lot about your interests, you will either love it or not - if
you don't love it, you won't succeed technically (you might business wise,
there are plenty of companies with shitty technology that make money).

Just some thoughts from a non-business oriented intellectual and programmer.

------
notahacker
Would be even more interesting to know the details of why Gabriel failed to
stick with some of the ideas. A Posterous-type service in 2001 sounds like it
could have been a bigger success than the Names Database.

Nth clubs sounds like it could work with a bit of incentive for club pros to
recommend it...

~~~
epi0Bauqu
I wish I had a good reason for ditching the public inbox. I don't. The
proximate cause IIRC was I moved my server and had a disk failure. But that
really isn't an excuse because I'm sure I had backups.

It actually got traffic too. I don't know what to say other than that it
didn't _feel_ like a startup at the time.

nth Club isn't a bad idea -- it just requires sales work that I don't want to
do. I thought my partner (who is into golf) would be doing it, but that just
has turned out not to be the case.

------
mthoms
Gabriel,

In Googling "namesdatabase" I've come across some old claims of allegedly
dubious practices of the site that occurred while you were running it. I know
your reputation is stellar here and that you contribute much to the community
so I was more than a bit surprised.

May I ask, have you addressed these allegations somewhere? I'd like to give
you the benefit of the doubt, so I'm wondering where I can read your side of
the story. Is there an HN thread or blog post you can point me towards? Many
thanks.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Happy to answer questions. I think these address most things:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/bdlri/dont_want_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/bdlri/dont_want_google_to_know_about_your_anime_pillow/c0m8qp0)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/cnce8/duckduckgo...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/cnce8/duckduckgos_new_privacy_policy_explains_why_you/c0tt1vo)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/cncn2/a_search_engin...](http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/cncn2/a_search_engine_privacy_policy_not_written_by_the/c0tt1vl)

<http://ye.gg/mixergy>

I think a lot of it stems from either misunderstanding, edge cases
([http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/02/one-in-a-
million...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/02/one-in-a-million-
happens-a-lot-when-your-site-is-big.html)), or just a fundamental problem with
the idea of referring friends.

~~~
mthoms
Thanks for the links and your transparency. I will read up. Just to clarify -
the reason I see this as relevant is because I'm a regular DDG user and put a
lot of trust in your privacy claims (no logging of queries, etc).

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Yup, I understand. If you're ever in Philadelphia, feel free to stop by and I
can show you no logging in real time. As for NDB, the biggest points from my
perspective are that:

\--you could opt-out from emails or remove yourself from the database at any
time.

\--you could see a detailed explanation of how every aspect of the site worked
before signing up, on a page I spent countless hours writing and tweaking.

\--similarly, there was a vast support system that answered almost any faq.

\--you could see the whole database on our static site before signing up.

~~~
follower
I'm intrigued by the issues raised by selling a company which has personal
data like in the case of NDB.

When you sold NDB did you have any concerns about how the new owners would
treat members and their data? Knowing what has happened since (which--for some
people at least--seems to be controversial) the sale would you do anything
differently if you could?

A few years ago I had a company approach me to sell a small site I was running
but I was never quite convinced they weren't just spammers/scammers wanting a
customer list and felt like I owed my users more than that.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Definitely. The buyers were a public company who had recently bought
classmates.com, were changing out the management, and had wanted to make it
into a better site so-to-speak. I haven't substantiated any of the post
claims, so I can't really speak to what happened. However, I would say that I
think it really makes a difference if the team is going to stay or not.

------
sdizdar
Very very inspiring post. I've built and released only two web sites and just
a couple of C++/C projects in storage area (of course nothing successful), so
I have way to go...

It be would interesting to know what did you learn of each these projects?
Which project do you consider the most important from learning perspective?

~~~
epi0Bauqu
It's all very incremental. I certainly learned a bit from each, but probably
learned the most from my first "real" startup, learnection. It was first major
failure (really ever) and I took it pretty hard at the time.

------
Andrew_Quentin
I wonder if the lesson from this is perhaps narrow but deep rather than wide
but shallow?

------
erikstarck
And just imagine there are people, most people actually, that think they have
This Great Idea and don't want to tell anyone about it without an NDA because
they think you will steal it.

------
prawn
I like hearing about these and would be interested in hearing more, but can't
imagine everyone would want HN flooded with personal failure histories. Is it
worth cataloguing them somewhere, with potential for HNers to comment on or
takeover or try again?

Call it something like 'Start Up Down'?

What do people think? Obviously not really something that's going to become a
lucrative venture but it wouldn't be tough to create either.

------
thetrumanshow
It would be very interesting to add information about when you were working
with advisors/mentors and when you were purely working on your own.

I haven't had nearly as many at-bats as you have, but enough to know that I
personally can't get very far on my own without an experienced voice guiding
me past a lot of dumb ideas.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
At learnection I had a board of my uncle and another VC guy, who were helpful
but I didn't use them at all to the degree I should have. Other than that, no
real advisors/mentors.

For Zoofoo, Email client, Yahoo store thing, Namesdatabase & Kangadoo I worked
with the same partner. The "Wall" (never launched) was with a different
partner. And nth Club was with another partner. The rest is/was solo.

------
myth_drannon
For those who missed , Andy Brice interviewed some startup/projects founders
who failed :

[http://successfulsoftware.net/2010/05/27/learning-lessons-
fr...](http://successfulsoftware.net/2010/05/27/learning-lessons-
from-13-failed-software-products/)

------
devmonk
I'd like to see how much was made or lost on each of these, enough to do angel
investing after all of that. I know the $500/day was mentioned, but just
curious. Was the bulk of the money made that is now invested from these
startups, or some other income?

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Not counting my time here, I lost about 30K on learnection, 5-10K (not sure)
on Twenty Questions, 10K on Kangadoo. Other than that, it didn't cost me
anything to start the others. As for upside, made a few thousand on the ebook,
5-10K on nth Club, and not sure the total on Tldscan (the $500/day max) one.
Nothing else made much besides selling NDB.

------
subbu
Looks like you were startupping since 2000. Except NamesDatabase there haven't
been any other exits. So how did you feed yourself until then? I am guessing
your later projects were taken care by that exit.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Real job for one year. Then consulting. Then exit. Also, my wife has a job.

~~~
subbu
Thanks

------
djb_hackernews
This makes me feel better. I've built and released 4 webapps with another in
dev and they all seem to be perfect failures, which I've been thinking is
perhaps a sign...

------
asb
How did you decide when it was time to stop and try something else?

~~~
epi0Bauqu
In the past, no particular process, which was part of the problem. Now, I'd do
this: [http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/to-pivot-or-
not-...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/to-pivot-or-not-to-
pivot.html)

------
duck
Are there links for the two episodes of "Twenty Questions"?

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Nope--not online any more.

------
vaksel
would be interesting to see what sort of traction you got with each service.
i.e. did you quit when they only had 100 users, or was it more like 100,000

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Really varied across the board, but nothing with anything close to 100K users.
For the ones that didn't launch, obviously none :). I can't remember exact
numbers for the old stuff, but pretty much everything got a decent amount of
SEO traffic that I could play with (run tests on). Decent amount is several
hundred to a few thousand uniques a day. More recent stuff more on the order
of 100s of users.

