
I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900 - danso
https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/comments/dkyq92/how_i_wasted_10_weeks_of_my_life_and_1900/
======
JohnBooty
This is hilarious. _Ten weeks._

Ten weeks?

To build a community?

To build a base of dedicated users and begin to reap the network effect that
keeps existing users on the site, and draws in new years?

In the early 2000s, I launched something like an early "social networking"
site for geek dating.

We built a strong community and actually were pretty profitable with direct
subscriber revenue, though it was never quite enough to quit my day job and I
eventually (reluctantly) moved on because of other things happening in my
life.

Anyway, we were open for THREE YEARS before I charged a dime.

That's how long it took me to build a community.

I focused on community building/management while I built out the site's
functionality. This was very active, hands-on community management on my part.
Now, three years is a long time. Maybe somebody could do it in less time.
Especially if you had a partner or a team.... I was a lone wolf who was also
working some consulting gigs to pay bills.

Maybe it doesn't need to be 3 years, but 10 weeks is beyond a joke.

~~~
herewego
Thank you for this. The only waste of time here was a result of this
individual’s lack of commitment (sorry, but it’s true) and misinformed
understanding of the efforts involved in the launch process of any business,
let alone his. I hope he sees this and realizes all hope is not lost if he
sticks with it, evolves it, and plans for the ramp period accordingly. Success
is never guaranteed, but you have to give it a chance.

~~~
teddyuk
Just to clarify, are you saying that if you build a copy of reddit I won't
become a millionaire overnight?

Bloody hell, I wasted 11 weeks and $2600 so far.

~~~
ineedasername
I wasted 1 day and $5 and failed to create and alternative to Google. Never
again!

------
alex_young
This post talks a lot about the chicken and egg problem, and the inventors of
Reddit faced the same problem - no one will come to your homepage for the
internet if it doesn't look like the homepage for the internet.

Do you know what they did? They didn't focus on one community - they faked it.
Thousands of fake posts with fake comments. All scripted.

Then one day they started seeing posts they didn't write and it took off.

Reddit was built on lies and you can too :)

~~~
tkifnn
Are there any archives to see what their fake content looked like?

~~~
mocha_nate
In Alexis ohanian’s book he says you can still find them if you go back far
enough on the site.

------
grenoire
Although a bit harsh in writing, JustStartNoob's comment [0] is honestly a
good analysis. The guy had an idea and tried to force it through as hastily as
possible with the sole goal of 'making it.' Unsurprisingly, it didn't work
out.

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/comments/dkyq92/how_i_was...](https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/comments/dkyq92/how_i_wasted_10_weeks_of_my_life_and_1900/f4kzgxv/)

~~~
anjc
> "I spent stupid money throwing shit at a non-stick wall, realized the wall
> was non-stick, so started spending money throwing shit at a different non-
> stick wall instead".

This is the worst possible interpretation of OP's venture, and must be written
by a 12 year old if $1900 is "stupid money"

Edit: I'm not saying that $1900 is not a significant amount of money to many
people in the world. But it is NOT a lot of money in the context of
developing/marketing a tech product in the first world.

~~~
agota
I'd like to point out that OP is from Russia. I wonder if he still lives in
Russia?

In 2018, the minimum wage in Russia was 11163 rubles per month, which is
$174.6 per month. So, it would take a person working for a minimum wage 10.8
months to earn $1900.

For comparison, the minimum wage in California is $11/hour, so assuming a 40
hour work week, in 10.8 months a minimum wage worker in California would make
$19,008. I'd guess that you would consider $19k to be a significant amount of
money to spend on a project like this?

My point is, while you are right that $1900 is not "stupid money", it might
still be a significant amount of money if the OP lives in Russia.

In fact, I'd think that a lot of people living in the United States would
think that $1900 is a significant amount of money, especially for a risky side
project.

~~~
adventured
You correctly point out the non-trivial nature of $1,900, including for many
millions of Americans, based on duration just to earn the $1,900 in terms of
income.

It's even more dramatic than that however. The person earning minimum wage in
Russia will never possess $1,900 in loose capital to spend on such a venture,
as they don't have enough buffer beyond expenses to accumulate it. At $174 per
month, saving 20% of that, it would take five years, and during those five
years something would inevitably happen to consume the savings base (stray
emergency need or other life event).

It's one aspect of the brutality of being poor, whether in Russia or the US or
wherever. You rarely have breathing room above basic life expenses to
accumulate anything. Opportunity almost always has a financial cost associated
with it, a get-through-the-door dollar cost (whether that's buying equipment,
renting commercial space, or just affording the free time to do a thing).

For the majority of the world $1,900 is more savings in terms of liquid cash
(eg in a bank account), than they will ever have at a given point during their
lifetimes. It's exceptionally hard for the majority of people to put that
together.

~~~
Kaiyou
Which isn't saying much. For the majority of the people in the world $100
would tick the same box.

------
ineedasername
Ten weeks to try and build 3 communities... So a little more than 3 weeks
each.

3 weeks. And they declared it a failure. Wow. I know "failing fast" can be a
virtue in letting you move on to the next thing, but this is too much.

Getting even nominal amounts of free traffic and engagement in that time
period is a "win". Give it 6 months of grass roots, a bit of time for network
effects to appear at all. Why would they have any sticky users when there is
practically no content yet? Let the slow free traffic gradually build some.
Then maybe get some paid traffic, who will have a reason to stay around.

Sure, they still might have failed then too, but then at least it would have
been a true failure, for the right reasons.

------
danilocesar
This reminds me that fateful question that we, software engineers, use to hear
from our moms/dads/family: "Why don't you start a facebook?"

~~~
mattigames
This amuses me to no end, I have never got that question, the closest thing
was "you do websites right? do you know how to hack someone's Facebook?"

~~~
genidoi
Or even "can you fix my printer?"

~~~
ratsimihah
Haha classic. For me that'd be: "I've got an app idea."

------
eastendguy
He had an idea and tested it. 3 month and $1900 sounds about right. I don't
think you can test product ideas with significantly less time and money
investment.

~~~
jobigoud
The trick is to make a list of all the ways it could fail and test these
first. Have two personas, one that assumes it will fail and one that is
enthusiast. Set the tasks priorities so the enthusiast one starts coding tasks
that disproves the failure hypotheses of the skeptical one. If you can't get
past one, don't switch to the "easier" stuff. Put the project in "hibernation"
mode and switch to another one until you get another insight, usually from
reading a totally unrelated thing, that will unblock you.

------
coldtea
> _Let me draw the bottom line. 10 weeks are spent to create and test 3
> different hypotheses._

10 weeks are a little more than two months. That's nothing, wouldn't even be
enough to build something good enough, much less to test it, and even less to
test it 3 times.

So let me rephrase: "Only 10 weeks are spent to create a minimal product, and
shallow barely-test 3 different hypotheses before giving up".

It can take years (plural) for such a service to pick up.

You can quickly test, of course, but don't expect this "10 whole weeks" of
testing to tell you anything insightful...

You just know that your service didn't hit the jackpot and became viral from
day one...

> _Everything began from the moment a severe Reddit addiction started to
> develop, it went so far that I fully stopped visiting Instagram and
> Facebook._

I also LOLed at this in the intro. The problem with the Reddit addiction was
that it prevented ...being as addicted to two other social platforms...

~~~
agota
I think there is a problem with the current thinking on MVPs where you quickly
hack together a product, launch it, and drop it if it doesn't gain traction
immediately.

This approach is probably especially damaging if the product is a social
platform that you are starting from scratch.

~~~
coldtea
Still, MVPs are not supposed to be "10 weeks total to build, and test 3
hypothesis" either...

An MVP could be a year long or more process -- it's just about not building
excess functionality not needed to test the waters.

------
ackbar03
In my mind social networks are probably one of the hardest things to crack.
People are only attracted to it if there are already lots of other people and
activity there. It's like a chicken and egg problem and your job is how to
make one of them appear out of thin air

~~~
sfoley
One of my favorite stories is how the founders of reddit would create all the
posts themselves, but submit them under fake users to give the appearance of
popularity.

[https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2012/06/reddi...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2012/06/reddit-founders-made-hundreds-of-fake-profiles-so-site-
looked-popular/)

------
theNJR
I built a forum around 2001 for people in the state of Maine who loved cars. I
seeded it with friends, I put fliers on interesting cars I found around the
state, hosted meet ups, etc. It took a ton of effort to get that fly wheel to
spin, but I made a few hundred dollars a month in ads from local business (car
dealers, mechanics). Tons of fun, met great people and set me on a course that
has served me to this day. I was a bit early for hyper niche communities
though :)

Creating a better Reddit has been a brain storm side project I’ve been working
on for years. The Internet needs it now more than ever. But after my $100k bet
on VR I’m now more deliberate.

Anyway, this kid spending ten weeks on his side project is pulled out of a
different era. Such experiments may have yielded fruit a decade or two ago.

~~~
bemmu
What was your $100k bet on VR?

~~~
theNJR
I co-founded, and bootstrapped, a VR company [1] back in 2016. We launched
three games, got some funding by HTC, but weren't able to raise venture. I
keep meaning to do one of those "10 things I learned" sort of posts.

[1][https://www.RLTYCHK.co](https://www.RLTYCHK.co)

------
throwaway93760
I respect anyone who is able to accept the sunk cost and walk away after doing
the correct analysis.

My startup is still preseed and I have a few angel investors. When I pitched I
had done some research but didn't truly understand the market. Basically the
industry I'm is massively fragmented, and each segment has very different
access requirements.

There's still money to be made, but not the sort of money that attracts VC and
no express rainbow to a pot of gold. I would have done things very differently
had I known what I know now, but a revenue generating business that could
break even in a couple years is a pretty hard sunk cost to swallow.

------
saagarjha
Honestly, they could have done much worse than waste 10 weeks and $1900, so
they may have been one of the lucky ones.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Six years and $18 billion.

~~~
ginko
That's other people's money though.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
The best kind!

But it’d make a way more dramatic headline.

------
new_here
So many founders have warped expectations of overnight success, myself
included. This probably comes from all the Techcrunch style articles we read
about viral product launches and massive raises. 10 weeks is not a lot of
time, especially if you are bootstrapping a social network. I've been doing it
for about two years and only now am I starting to see some traction and figure
out how it all works. I don't mind though because it's a labour of love that I
fund thorugh my day job.

One thing I've realised though is that the barrier to entry for creating a
social network has gone up significantly, because when users come to your
network they expect the same experience that they get from other networks like
Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Quora, Github, LinkedIn, Medium and so on. Things
like:

\- A highly relevant, non-repetitive newsfeed of fresh stimulating content.

\- Customizable and respectful notifications

\- Super tight privacy

\- Rich UIs for creating content and comments

\- Openness (RSS, ActivityPub etc.)

If you aren't able to deliver the same experience as venture funded social
networks as a bootstrapped 2 person team, users typically bail. This in turn
stops the network from growing and becoming more useful. Many companies like
Quora, LinkedIn and Medium also pay people full-time salaries to produce
content that brings people in.

------
djsumdog
> It is impossible to launch hundreds of communities all at once, that is why
> I started to choose the idea of the first community

This in itself is a good idea. It worked for Lobsters and HackerNews, and one
of the things that went wrong with Voat:

[https://battlepenguin.com/tech/voat-what-went-wrong/#too-
man...](https://battlepenguin.com/tech/voat-what-went-wrong/#too-many-
subverses)

------
danilocesar
$190 per week, for 10 weeks, looks like a very small loss considering the
experience and 'fun' of learning all this.

------
danilocesar
People are discussing the very short amount of time he spent, but what about
the money?

A service that he created (I assume direct cost zero) without a big community
(so server costs should be very low) and VK's advertisement with no engagement
rate.

Did he spend almost 1900 in advertisement? Jeez...

~~~
ineedasername
And in the begining the advertising was pointless. No one was going to stick
around when there was no content yet. They should have been grateful for the
minimum amount of free traffic and engagement, covered server costs for 6
month or a year while it gradually built. Only then pay for advertising, when
that traffic will find at least a minimal community to engage with. Yeah it's
still hard and might fail, but you don't get a social community over night, or
in the 3-4 weeks they spent on each attempt.

------
sheinsheish
Don’t give up after the first try. I understand it costed you money and time.
Money is what you need to survive. Do you have second thoughts? Dilemma? Like
going back to it and trying again, this time slow and during your free time
(=when not working) ??

~~~
NicoJuicy
I agree, he said 10 weeks and 3 tries.

That's hardly 1 normal attempt.

~~~
tluyben2
But 10 weeks for 3 ideas is not enough... 10 weeks for 1 idea, maybe... If
it's something that sells something, like SaaS. These ideas did not even have
real monetising strategies behind them from the looks of it.

------
ilammy
> Everything began from the moment a severe Reddit addiction started to
> develop, it went so far that I fully stopped visiting Instagram and
> Facebook.

I like this quote. Like another Russian proverb meaning "fight fire with
fire".

------
raverbashing
Well, 10 weeks is nothing. On top of that, you're trying to start with
niche/limited communities. A student community focused on studying?

People want to communicate about what's fun, not about what's a hassle.

I don't remember how Reddit started but I remember one of the first r/s that
got big was Aww.

There was a very nice example a couple of weeks ago on how before the network
effects kick in you need to give people a reason to go to your site and use
your service. Nothing like that happened here.

------
anjc
> I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900

There are people spending more to learn less. Seems like good value to me.
Best of luck with your next venture, if you're reading.

------
viach
For many people today Internet = Facebook. Probably it would have more sense
to start with a FB group instead of rolling out own reddit clone.

~~~
agota
That's a good idea, if you want to build a social network, it probably makes
sense to build an audience first.

------
zerr
So facebook for kittens didn't work out? :)

~~~
firecall
... but yet Fartbook was too successful

#letterkenny

------
sacado2
In ten weeks even a fricking blog cannot get above a dozen of visitors each
week. So an online community that needs momentum and a ton of visitors from
the get go?

Did that guy really think you can go from scratch to success and fame in 2
months? Especially with such a small investment?

------
beyondcompute
“Good news! Congratulations! You’ve got 10 weeks of learning and the amount of
money lost is not so large! You’ve got subjected to a stressor and survived.
Therefore, becoming stronger. Courage, experience, growth!”

------
miranda_rights
I feel like the author had the right idea to try to form smaller
subcommunities first, but there's something predatory about targeting people
battling cancer.

------
genidoi
The part that struck out to me was when OP said "Too many failures and
destructive thoughts."

No amount of market research/planning/mvp asap will address that.

------
t0mislav
I don't think anything is wasted here.

Something is learned, on next fail something else could be learned, but third
or fourth time big things can happen.

------
trpc
It isn't 2006 anymore obviously. If you want to create a viral social website
in 2019 you will have to bribe Facebook, Twitter and Google with hundreds of
thousands worth of ads within those 10 weeks and you will still never get the
same reach you could get for free in 2009. The internet, since around 2014,
has stagnated into a few protectionist tech world powers that pretend to be
everything else.

~~~
quxbar
There's still some cool stuff going on, if you go out of your way to find
it... [https://github.com/nehbit/aether](https://github.com/nehbit/aether)

~~~
kaybe
What does it do? It's not very clear from the readme.

