Ask HN: What are your failed projects / ideas? - npguy
======
chrischen
Shopwisely.org. This was a site that donated affiliate link revenue to charity
when you shopped online. Absolutely zero people used this. This site made me
lust for anything that at least one person would use.

Like.fm, the original version. The MVP was an applescript that published your
iTunes play history to a web page. It got users by itself as soon as I put it
online. There weren't many users, but greater than the zero from my last
project. I took this, rather naively, as the sign of the next Facebook. My
ultimate goal became to create a marginally superior version of Last.fm. To my
surprise, I got accepted into YC with this idea, and from that high I ran with
it.

However over time I lost confidence in and motivation towards the idea as no
one saw it as novel enough (not necessarily users, but people I met in the
Valley), and everyone told me to stop doing something related to music because
it's too tough (personally I think all startups are tough). Because of all
this I never polished or completed Like.fm enough to be even on par with
Last.fm. I had slow to zero growth, and no clear exciting future for the site.
Probably at least these factors left me unable to raise an additional seed
round after Demo Day. Being a single founder didn't help with any of this
either.

After these failures I've stopped focusing on raising money or even making
money. My primary focus is on making something that people love to use that's
also novel and innovative, retains users, and successfully delivers long-term
value to peoples' lives.

I've never stopped experimenting on Like.fm after the failure though, and I've
been gearing up for the next big launch!

~~~
adrianwaj
Can you turn like.fm into a dating site? Last thing I want to do is share my
playback history with other humans.

~~~
chrischen
tastebuds.fm

~~~
adrianwaj
Pivot time.

~~~
chrischen
Actually they were a "dating" site in that they explicitly said that, but they
seem to have pivoted (slightly, at least) as they describe themselves as "find
people nearby" now.

I personally wouldn't make a dating site be explicit about that.

~~~
adrianwaj
Chris, I mentioned another idea to you about 6 months ago.

------
terhechte
I have many, but the one that I invested most time in was QuoteVault
<http://www.quotevault.org/> It's a website where you can save interesting
quotes from other sites or even pages / books. There's also a browser bookmark
that allows you to select text on a website and import it into quotevault
right away. Finally, there's a small public stream (much like your twitter
stream) where you can share interesting quotes.

Here's a public quote from my public stream:
<http://quotevault.appspot.com/public/terhechte/261221>

I've used the tool a lot, but I never really advertised it, in fear of failure
I guess, so there're very few other users except for me. I still have a huge
database of assorted business and entrepeneurship quotes in there though.

~~~
adrianwaj
this is a great idea, I had a similar idea.

I would have js bookmarklets and remove need for signups initially. Make it
into a sort of pastebin. Also, make it a summary tool too (for oneself and for
sharing.) Allow users to enter alternate headline, summary, quote/s, ranking,
judgement.

Check out quote.fm and drop me a line if you want to see my screenshots,
brainstorm or see my other research into this idea.

~~~
terhechte
Hey, thanks, that looks really nice. I mostly gave up on QuoteVault since I'm
busy with other projects now. However, one thing I still lack is a good
solution for reading texts offline and highlighting quotes in there. There's
instapaper, kippt, and many others, but they all just allow offline reading,
but no offline highlighting. There's one solution, which does kinda work, but
the offline support is wonky. I'm seriously considering building a small app
that reads read-later lists from different services and saves the quote data
somewhere else via an API. Would quote.fm allow something like that? I see
there's a read-api, but I haven't seen a way to add an article or add a quote
for an article. Or did I misunderstand something? You can also hit me by mail
for further discussions if you're interested. terhechte AT gmail com

------
greendestiny
I made a website where you put sunglasses on a photo - seemewith.com. After
face.com shut down its facial landmarking service I deleted it, but it was a
failure anyway. I spent a ridiculous amount of time implementing various
strategies for turning photos of sunglasses into 3d models (using bundle
adjustment, advanced appearance models, and some symmetry specific
photogrammetry) - in the end I did the simplest thing I could think of and it
worked better than any complex option. The results were still a bit poor
though.

Another side project was a flash based plugin to do teeth whitening on photos.
End up implementing a decision tree approach that worked ok, but it didn't
seem to really have legs as an idea.

What else... I spent an inordinate amount of time on the Netflix prize, that
really amounted to nothing - although it was fun to try a lot of different
approaches at a tricky scale.

Just released 'What animal?' on the App Store, that's pretty much doing
nothing download wise - <http://scottvallanceapps.com/app/what-animal-are-
you/>

~~~
Someone
I can understand that that app does not fly; recognizing faces and showing
matching animals outsode the original photo just does not look too enticing.

I can think of various ways to, IMO, make this an interesting app:

\- put the heads in the photo, and tween a movie between the two (probably
fairly hard because you will have to reliably cut out the background)

\- use the camera to record video, animate the animal head in sync with what
the head does (ideally, adjust the voice sound; more bass for a bear, twitter
for a duck, etc) (probably not too hard to do)

\- make it a game: using the camera, "let's see who can make his face best
like this elephant", with solo games for practice and for fun ("can you beat
your record of ten faces in 30.34 seconds?) (technically simple, but it
probably will be a lot of work to get the game 'right', collect funny animal
photos that humans can learn to match, etc)

------
thibaut_barrere
<http://www.hackerbooks.com> is a direct financial failure.

The income does not cover the hosting as is! Early on I expected it would be a
small earner (maybe $50/mo) but we're not there even.

On the other hand, it had a fairly positive impact on the consulting/learning
side of things (ETL, data processing etc).

~~~
sandeepshetty
Based on your stats & the size of your dataset, I'm guessing you could easily
host this at AppFog on their free tier:
<http://appfog.com/products/appfog/pricing/>

~~~
thibaut_barrere
For now I'm happy to leave it where it is and keep my focus on
shipping/growing my SaaS product (<https://www.wisecashhq.com>).

But thanks for the note that said! I have that migration marked in my TODO
list :)

------
anovikov
An idea that seemed brilliant but fizzled spectacularly.

There are a lot of bookmakers around, like 60 decent ones and hundreds of
trashy. I wrote a lot of scrapers collecting prices from them, invented an
algorithm for automatic name matching (different bookies spell names of same
players differently, like R. Federer is same as Roger Federer, or even Russian
or Polish spelling of same name etc), so i can compare prices in different
books.

Idea was that: betting on the line of one bookie using inverse prices of
another bookie as a source of probabilities, run statistically over a long
period of time (i.e. virtually betting on all events where price in one booke
multiplied by inverse price from another one yields a profit, then recording
which bets 'lost' or 'won' and aggeregating profit/loss, doing so for each vs
each of the books), finding out as a result, which book 'knows' a particular
sport best and worst of all (if i bet in the best of them using a line of
worst for probabilities, i get maximum loss, and maximum profit vice versa).
Then i wrote a script that does the execution, placing the bets.

Surprisingly, i found an investor willing to back all this in half a day,
after pitching just a few of my former clients (i do custom development).

Estimates indicated a lot of profit, but it took just a week to know that
there is no such thing as a 'betting market'. All of my accounts have been
suspended: they seemingly track events which come into arbitrage with other
books, and show down people who bet on them, which i did (except i didn't bet
on both sides of the arbitrage, only one that was more likely to win).

I was quite disappointed and depressed for a month.

Fortunately, the investor didn't lose anything: he needs the resulting code
for a totally different thing (no execution of bets), and quite happy with
what he got, so it ended up being just one more custom development project -
very fun to do.

~~~
agilebyte
Yup betting is "for fun" unless you use A+ bookies like Pinnacle Sports. Also,
some bookies have to have a particular price not because of their knowledge of
the market, but because of the people that placed bets with them. In the end
what you describe is basically playing an arbitrage (for which there are
sites), but these kind of plays get you suspended, which they did. Nice fore
trying it out and writing all the parsers. I know how time consuming it is to
get all the synonyms, dates and times right to aggregate the information.

~~~
anovikov
Sorry for not clarifying, i used opening lines. Sites - whole point was not
arbitrage but picking only one side of arbitrage which is expected to be more
profitable. Also, it was a cloud solution which resulted in very low scraping
delays.

Anyways, it didn't work, and i learned it the hard way.

------
jmathai
In chronological order.

1\. Photagious (online photo sharing/management/slideshow site) 2004-2008.
Raised angel funding @ $500k

2\. Socialbib (peer to peer textbook exchange platform) 2008-2009. Side
project.

3\. Textbook Revolt (peer to peer textbook rental platform) 2009-2011. Side
project, evolution of #2.

4\. Melts My Heart (mobile photo app for mothers) 2011. Side project

5\. OpenPhoto (open source photo service) 2011 - present. $25k on Kickstarter
+ funding from Shuttleworth Foundation. Success TBD.
<http://theopenphotoproject.org>

------
struppi
I have several ideas I never started working on. I guess they don't count.
Then I had some others that I never finished/validated.

<http://gclimbing.com> is not really a failed idea, more like a failed
project. Some years ago, I administered a shared climbing blog in Austria.
After some time, nobody was using it anymore (It was quite complicated to
use). I wrote a new software and put it online, which is gclimbing.com - but
it didn't really take off. Everybody was on facebook by that time.

Another idea I tried was <http://scribblingspree.com> \- A player would draw a
picture, the next would describe it, the next one draw something based on the
description. This started as a project to practice wicket and javascript. It
was just not that much fun to play after a couple of rounds. Note that I did
not know DrawSomething when I wrote it.

I leave both projects online so I can link to them from my CV, but otherwise
both are pretty much dead.

Edit: Oh, and I forgot: <http://davidtanzer.net/node/82>

~~~
zachsnow
I was pretty interested in scribblingspree.com, sounds fun! But got frustrated
by how hard it was to draw (especially if you accidentally release your click
off of the drawing space). In the short term you could listen for mouseup on
the whole body/document instead of just the canvas, I think that would help.

~~~
struppi
Thanks for trying it! Yes, it is pretty much unusable with a mouse, but it was
kind of fun on an iPad or with a Wacom Tablet. I remember that I had some
problems with the touch events on the iPad - I eventually solved them
(<http://davidtanzer.net/canvas_ipad>), but I'm not sure if I deployed the
fixed version...

As I said, the project is pretty much dead now. But your idea (listening for
mouse up on the document) would probably solve several problems, thanks!

------
suresk
Too many to remember/list, unfortunately - some of them before I even started,
many when I was halfway through building sort of an minimum product, and some
after I'd actually launched them.

The one that hurts the most is an advertising analytics service (one of the
first of its kind) I built over a decade ago - I was young and stupid, so
there were some technical things I did wrong, but I also failed spectacularly
at marketing. Looking back on it, I can see a huge amount of potential, and if
I'd just done a handful of things differently, it could have made me a bunch
of money.

I ended up selling it for a few thousand dollars, and the new owners didn't do
anything with it.

~~~
suresk
Perhaps somewhat more interesting - why my side projects have failed.

For the longest time, I didn't really mind - side projects were at least
partially a way for me to learn new techniques/languages/frameworks, and the
experience generally made the effort worthwhile, even if I didn't make any
money directly in the process. For the most part, I think this was fine for a
while - I'm in a decent spot career-wise, and I think part of it is due to all
the knowledge and experience I've gained from working on side projects.

That said, earlier this year I realized I needed to get more serious about
making money directly off of these things - one of my long-term goals is
having enough passive income to live semi-comfortably off of, and building
websites or software seems like the best way to do this for me. Part of
rectifying this situation has been identifying why I've failed so many times.
Here are some reasons I came up with:

1) Not thinking an idea all the way through

2) Getting hung up on petty things, like choosing a domain name

3) Getting hung up on the design (I'm unbelievably bad at design)

4) Getting hung up on the technology choice (I've built something in probably
just about every semi-common language/framework over the past few years)

5) Not being very good at marketing and not taking the time to learn or employ
the services of someone who is

6) Not committing to one idea/project at a time

So, my goal for the next little bit is to sift through my ideas and find one
that can hold my interest and has long-term profit potential, use technology
that I'm already comfortable with, set aside money to pay for things I'm not
good at (design and marketing, for example) and devote some time to building
it.

------
simonwatiau
As a student I built a website to manage rentals in GWT, My goal was basically
to make a leaving out of a product I built. Cost: 300€ Gain: 20€ (not so
great) State: open-sourced: <https://github.com/simon-watiau/simplelocation>

\- Later I built a Storify client on iPhone. By that time I had no iOS open-
sourced project and I was trying to stay in the valley and get hired by
Storify (failed). State: open-sourced: <https://github.com/simon-watiau/Story-
Browser> [http://simon-watiau.github.com/2011/09/08/side-project-
story...](http://simon-watiau.github.com/2011/09/08/side-project-story-
browser/)

Then I built a dating app based mostly for fun and to learn a bit of Android
development. I bet @adrienmagnus still remember this one :D State: open-
sourced: <https://github.com/simon-watiau/On-the-menu>

My latest project was an iPad app to help me clean my Gmail Inbox: state: free
on the App-Store [http://simon-watiau.github.com/2012/08/21/side-project-
inbox...](http://simon-watiau.github.com/2012/08/21/side-project-inbox/)

------
michaelbuckbee
1\. Before the craziness with Netflix I had created an iPhone app called
'Flickscan' which let you go into Target/BestBuy and scan the barcodes of
movies and have them automatically added to your queue.

2\. I used to run Fabjectory, which created 3d printed statuettes of figures
for SecondLife and Nintendo Wii characters, but shut it down with the demise
of people who considered themselves Secondlife consultants (who were the main
source of business).

~~~
herval
The fabjectory idea still seems pretty interesting, imo... Was it too time
consuming/expensive to keep it up?

------
npguy
I'll start with one from my side: I started this project which was essentially
a social networking site, but focused on Indian parents. Signed up some 500
plus users, but then realized that I had to keep getting content up, to keep
the site interesting - I had some 5 users out of the 500 that contributed any
content whatsoever. which did not make a lot of sense. The site is now
offline.

------
dherken
My greatest failed project was <http://appsmerge.com>

The idea was that you could combine all your social media news streams (fb,
twitter usw..) into one stream (just like a rss reader). It never got above a
few users, and i did not have any ads or anything in place. Still use it
myself though...

~~~
yitchelle
If this project was to scratch your own itch, then I would say that this
project is a huge success if you are still using it.

~~~
dherken
You could look at it like that :-)

------
consultutah
My biggest failures have been:

1\. A sms polling site that I ended up selling flippa for less than I'd like
to admit.

2\. A component that made authorize.net easy for .net developers. Over the
years, I made quite a bit of money off of it, but stripe released, I decided
to sell the site and component off to someone for about one month's revenue.

~~~
brandoncapecci
Your two biggest failures were acquisitions? Must really suck to be you :)

~~~
consultutah
Very very small $ for the time I put in. Like a few hours of work at my std
rate.

------
bigriver
I was building a micro blogging platform similar to a reddit or HN for
singer/songwriters but the developer lost interest and the script broke so the
sites were never launched.

Was going to launch: <http://lyricpost.net> <http://haikufriday.com>

Users can could create editable drafts of their works, publish to the
lyricpost/haikufriday online communities and pre-schedule posts to post to
their facebook accounts. Bloggers could also visit the communities and
schedule lyrics/haiku they wanted to post to their facebook page. I still use
lyricpost as a tool to work on and save my lyrics/songs in progress but I
can't publish anything to the community. I thought starting with the lyrics
would be an interesting way to discover music.

------
robinwarren
The first version of <http://jobstractor.com> was meant to be an alternative
to advertising revenue for bloggers. I worked on it for about 3 or 4 months,
built a huge amount of functionality (which no one ever saw) then finally did
some market research. I discovered to similar offerings which had gone and
failed before me. Contacting the bloggers involved in those generally turned
up people who had not made any money from those efforts.

Ultimately I learned the value of doing the research before writing ALL the
code. My subsequent project on the same domain was thrown together in a few
weekends and evenings, was buggy as hell and put out with the intention of
killing it if people didn't like it.

------
tetha
A bunch of interpreters for various esoteric languages, together with a
framework for interpreter development. In fact, also a bunch of esoteric
languages from myself.

I mostly lost interest, because a surprising amount of esoteric languages just
doesn't do anything interesting. Uhh, so you are using a stack for values. Oh,
and your stack manipulation words a bit different from other stack
manipulation words. Big deal. Oh, you are just encoding your program pointer
in a weird fashion. Also a big deal.

Those which are actually different then just end up batshit insane, and
impossible to capture in one bag. Also this set of esoteric languages is
plagued by woeful underspecification, or ambiguous specifications, which make
an implementation even more impossible.

------
latitude
Killed several months on CertTime - a digital time-stamping service for
graphic and logo designers. Got very enthusiastic support for the idea, but
then got _zero_ interest in actually using the service.

[1] <http://certtime.com>

------
armaanahluwalia
My failed chrome extension that acts as a hub for all news. Basically an rss
aggregator but included some video and social features as well. The USP and
reAson I created it was I didn't like the way google reader was later out and
being a designer thought everyone should be able to customize the layout of
their reader to their tastes. So I built MESH ( <http://www.digi-dil.com/MESH>
) which let you design it yourself..

Learned how to code JavaScript doing the project and also helped me a bit
landing my current job but nobody except my girlfriend and my mom have it
installed only one of which knows how to use it...

------
john2x
I was working on a book social site where users earn badges after reading
books. (Basically Foursquare for books. There would be badges for reading the
top 10 books of a genre/author, milestones, etc.)

Gave up on getting a good book database.

~~~
suresk
Sounds like an interesting idea - I love reading, and a lot of ideas I've had
have been book-related.

Just curious - why not utilize Amazon's book database, since that is likely
how you'd make your money anyway (via referral fees)?

~~~
john2x
Thanks. I was relying on book lovers' desire to "show-off" about how well read
they (we) are.

I started using Amazon, but when I started thinking about adding badges and it
would need the book database to be very specific about authors/genres/titles,
(which Amazon's wasn't) I realized it was way out of my league.

------
udit99
<http://4.everalone.com>

Built as a dating site for redditors...got off to a bad start because it
required reddit credentials..never bothered taking time to fix it. Maybe one
of these days..

------
pilgrim689
A site about ideas, where people share business ideas and discuss them. It
would allow you to find other people interested in their development. It would
also you to see if your idea has already been implemented (if it were like a
database of existing business ideas), and it would show you the progress of
the idea's implementation, who's building it, etc.

Didn't end up building this since it would be hard to make money off of it (as
far as i can tell)...and i already have other projects on my spare time ><. I
still think the concept is cool

~~~
npguy
Kickstarter?

~~~
pilgrim689
No. Kickstarter is to start a project. This is more like a database of ideas.
Multiple projects could be attempting to implement an idea.

------
ecesena
The slide machine [1] to make latex/beamer slides out of mind map. See also
[2].

The core is an xslt that we use almost daily, we did a quite old-style web
site which is still running with almost no users, but unfortunately we have
absolutely no time to redesign/maintain it.

If anyone wish to contribute, we'll be happy to release code and share ideas.

[1] <http://www.sli-m.com>

[2]
[http://security.polito.it/doc/public/torsec_didamatica2011_s...](http://security.polito.it/doc/public/torsec_didamatica2011_slide_machine.pdf)

------
miweiss
This weekend I implemented an idea inspired by the feeling that the articles
I'm reading are all coming from the same viewpoint: A reddit aggregate that
interleaves articles of different political opinions. It turns out reading
ideas from different political viewpoints without someone to put it in context
gives you a lot more misinformation and heresay than actual facts.

The site is here, although my webhost seems to be acting up at the moment.
<http://grainofsalt.info/>

------
markhall
Like most in the HN community, I've had my fair share of failed projects, each
of which I learned a lot from:

1\. Happy21stBirthday.com - I thought it would be a great gifting site for fun
& light-hearted gifts for 21st birthdays, but couldn't get enough traction. If
any1 has better ideas to utilize this domain, plz share.

2\. Rebutl.com - a video debate site (similar to ESPN's 'Around the Horn')
where users could debate about various subject matters and get prizes/rewards
after viewers voted for the winner.

------
sachingulaya
AppointmentReminder for doctors. The idea was to build an appointment reminder
system that was also an insurance eligibility checker(eligible API has
actually made me want to reboot the project). The end goal was to be a Yelp
for physicians.

It turns out selling to doctors is fucking hard. Their attitude towards
salespeople is to treat them like pharm reps and make them buy you lunch and
then wait 2+ hours. No thanks.

I sell products now. I will never go back to selling anything that isn't a
product.

~~~
wlievens
What do you sell now?

------
BerislavLopac
Hmmm, let's see. Note: Most of these domains are now dead or squatted.

2005: Fo.gg: Calendar and scheduling tool with a focus on time-zone usability,
aimed at international travellers.

2009: Enjoble.com: SaaS for embedding job postings by topics to any site.

2010: Stellient.com: P2P real-time networking platform.

2011: Seenery.com: AirBnB for sightseeing tours.

Most of these failed because I couldn't build a good team, or the one I had
fell apart. I'm working on another project now with a great partner, hopefully
this will work out this time.

------
makethetick
<http://affililink.com> Started as a way to earn affiliate commission from a
forum I manage after spotting a lot of eBay links appearing, and didn't want
to spam the site with ads. Made a hosted version, didn't really gain traction,
so I decided to create a self hosted open source version and upload to github.
Haven't had much time to get the word out there, but I wouldn't consider it a
success just yet.

------
cup
I had an idea that never reached conception, maybe someone can take it and
succeed.

A while back I had to go into the city and didn't know how many coins I needed
for parking. I thought I took enough until I saw it was $4.5 an hour. I
considered creating a website/app package where users could see where they're
going and the parking details associated i.e. ticket parking, free until 8pm,
clearway zone etc.

I sadly lack the time and more importantly the technical know how to do it
though.

~~~
npguy
Parking is a clean opportunity space for such small, useful apps. I remember
the app that helps you get back to yor car in large parking areas, for
example.

~~~
bigmickey
What about an airbnb for parking spaces?

------
mapster
I created a way to make a cheat sheet of any how-to video, then print it. So I
created Vidinotes app in Flex. Some people used it for a while, and the paid
version ($1.99) per use did well for the amount of traffic. Site is down but a
user did a nice video review of it:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-7JCg5fGho>

------
gghootch
Only one project, my first: <http://releasification.frapp.it> Sends a weekly
digest of new albums by your most listened to artists on Last.FM.

It failed when it comes to user adaptation, conversion, monetization etc but
is definitely a success when you only look at churn. 1.75% unsubscribed over
the course of about six months.

------
poteto
StackOverflow for Fashion: <http://www.idthisitem.com>

Basically Q&A to find out where to buy stuff. It's coasting along without much
traction and I can't get enough people to answer without having to reward them
with coupons and such.

Seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I'm not so convinced this is a
big enough of a problem to solve.

~~~
npguy
what indicators did you have that there was a problem to be solved here? am
just trying to understand your thought process -

~~~
poteto
Twitter. We were monitoring certain things like "I wish I could *" and we
happened to type in something like "find this dress". You can see some
results: <https://twitter.com/#!/search/%22find%20this%20dress%22>

~~~
npguy
Thanks. Am thinking, this is one way Twitter could identify intents and make
money.

------
garindra
May be useful to add a secondary question to that about why you think the
projects/ideas failed.

------
andyjsong
<https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tapthat>

It's a head to head NFC game. Proof of concept. Had some initial interest, but
didn't take it to the next level.

------
dansingerman
<http://geosay.com>

Just a side project, that I thought some people would find useful.

Judging by the stats, no one finds it useful (or not enough to come back)

Still, it's served as a decent tech demo to demonstrate what I can do.

~~~
anil_mamede
Nice app. It's like iWitness.

------
dworrad
Probably www.tagmark.org A Chrome and Firefox extension for - Tagging (i.e
Bookmarks), Tasks, Notes. I still use it everyday but I never really followed
through with marketing or getting feedback on it. One day maybe.

------
toutouastro
It was a programming language called TSL built in python. It failed because I
didn't learn parsing and I just used simple string processing and then regex
but yet I couldn't write the right parser.

------
Minbot
I took a pitch video of a startup called Triple Point Robotics which had a
recent project that failed called Synchroboard.

See the video at: http//:www.heystartup.com

------
manuelflara
fiestastic.com

It's a site that I thought would be very useful to find things to do based on
the events your Facebook friends were attending. I still use it myself from
time to time, but I've moved on to businesses I can outright charge to
customers.

------
nicotoh
my dating site <http://www.likeapub.com>

didn't make much money as I would like it to be

------
ddd1600
If you answer to yourself "none of them", there are two possibilities. No,
three.

Third one first: you're young enough to not feel guilty about not taking
enough risk. First one: you're not taking enough risk. Second one: you know
who you are.

~~~
shousper
I can choose option 4? I don't have the time and/or financial support to even
give it a real shot.

Or is that the same as not taking enough risks?

