
My Product Has Failed - rmason
http://www.ironconversions.com/blog/Post/My-product-failed
======
josh2600
I feel like I read things like this on HackerNews about once a month. All of
these posts can be summed up like this:

1) I built stuff without talking to people

2) I built custom work for a client and it wrecked me

3) I didn't listen to customer feedback

Yes, your business will fail if you don't talk to customers. We're all
terrified of showing off our children. What if the world thinks they're ugly?
What if the child actually is ugly? Well then, that child is still going to
have to make its way in the world, isn't it, or not?

Some of the best solutions to problems I've seen start out as ugly children,
but, in truth, over time they find their place in the world. The difference
between what makes an ugly child grow up strong, versus one dying, is the
development. If your friend tells you that your kid would look better if he
had a tail, and he's willing to pay you to put it on, you'd be doing a
disservice to your child to attach that tail. You have to do what's best for
your business; no silver bullets, no easy answers.

I think that writing these kinds of things can be cathartic, but, to be
honest, if you read enough of these they all start to look the same.

The one thing I know is that your time wasn't wasted. Learning lessons is what
life is all about; doing something with them is what success is all about.

TL;DR: Your product failed because you didn't talk to customers and no one is
surprised. I look forward to a follow-up post about your new product, driven
by customer feedback :).

~~~
dack
Like many of us, I've been reading hacker news and related sites for years,
but it was only after I attempted to actually apply all that knowledge I
_thought I had_ that I realized how unprepared I really was.

It's natural to read an article about a failure and feel like the points made
are obvious - but that's because we aren't imagining all the pitfalls that we
may have fallen into along the way that others would have avoided. Not only
that, but the rules have so many exceptions that it could have just as easily
gone the opposite way (I wish I _hadn 't_ listened to my customers) and we
would still say it was an obvious conclusion.

I agree, the conclusions raised are all pieces of advice I have heard before,
but I still enjoyed reading about his particular mental model of what he
thought was the right course of action, and then seeing how it got shattered
by the (lack of) results.

~~~
ChuckMcM
_I 've been reading hacker news and related sites for years, but it was only
after I attempted to actually apply all that knowledge I thought I had that I
realized how unprepared I really was._

This is the key bit. When my kids started getting "real" homework sometimes
they would say "But Dad, why do I need to do the homework? I completely
understood what the teacher was talking about!" And my response was, "Great,
since you already understand it, doing the homework will be no problem at
all." But the real message was there are two kinds of understanding, one where
you think you know what you know, and one where you know you know what you
know.

Only by applying the knowledge you think you understand to a new problem, can
you prove to yourself and others that you have actually got that knowledge. In
my case it actually feels like it moves into a different part of my brain
(weird I know but it's the simplest way to describe it). In Boy Scouts we got
a lot of training in various camping "skills" but it was the Jamborees where
you had to use those skills in competition where the knowledge went from
theoretical to practical.

------
Rakathos
(Blog post author here)

I wondered where the random burst of traffic came from.

For those who haven't read the more recent posts, I received a ton of great
feedback from HN and other entrepreneur friendly places. I've also been
gobbling up great advice from places like Rob Walling's "Startups for the rest
of us" podcast.

About a month ago I started a "challenge", inspired by Brennan Dunn, to
rebuild my "failed" product, and it's been going pretty well so far.

Most importantly, a few days ago I announced that I'm "pivoting" from just
inventory management to a full-blown ERP for printing companies. I chose
printing companies because I'm a full-time developer at a printing company,
and I know exactly what kinds of problems we face with our terrible ERP
system. Though I need to be super careful not to build a system that is so
focused only my own company can use it.

If there's one piece of advice I could give somebody else, it would be to
narrow your niche like I did with printing companies. This has helped me so
much it's downright ridiculous.

Edit: Also, when I originally posted the article some people were concerned
that I was just trying to build a "meta" product with Iron Conversions. I
admit I had planned to build a product with it, but I've put that on hold
indefinitely in favor of rebuilding Rakasheets. I don't know if I'll ever
return to it, so for now Iron Conversions is just the place I'm blogging about
my progress.

~~~
runako
Fascinating writeup. A couple of quick thoughts:

\- It sounds like one of the problems you ran into was massive
undercapitalization. While some businesses can grow without spending anything
on staff, promotions, marketing, etc., that's not the norm. Figure out how you
can inject more resources into your business. Cash/barter/debt are all viable
strategies (although debt is a potential time-bomb.)

\- <4 months part-time is't really enough time to spend on a business before
evaluating it as a failure. While pivoting may make sense, I'm pretty sure
that $300 + 120 days doesn't generate enough data to say anything conclusive.

\- SaaS products like Rakasheets are deceptively expensive for customers. This
is good for the SaaS provider. Your middle-priced plan is ~$700 annually;
factor in low turnover if you do a good job, and you're basically selling
software in the $1500+ range. Keep this in mind when figuring out how to
promote your product. The cheapest promotion channels may not be best for a
relatively high-priced (vs consumer-targeted) product.

\- If you're low on cash, try direct sales to start. That's you on the phone,
or sending email. Or getting in your car and driving, if your area warrants
it. If you're really offering something that will benefit your prospects'
business, they want to hear from you.

Good luck!

~~~
Rakathos
> _< 4 months part-time is't really enough time to spend on a business before
> evaluating it as a failure. Wile pivoting may make sense, I'm pretty sure
> that $300 + 120 days doesn't generate enough data to say anything
> conclusive._

There was a lot of hubbub before about calling the whole thing a "failure". I
should have made it more clear that I wasn't calling it a failure because I
spent 4 months and only got one customer. Instead I was calling it a failure
because I was no longer interested in what it did, and I had no intention of
working on it any longer.

> _SaaS products like Rakasheets are deceptively expensive for customers. This
> is good for the SaaS provider. Your middle-priced plan is ~$700 annually_

This is something that I hadn't even considered until an actual small business
owner sent me feedback saying the exactly that. Previously I thought people
were like me, and only considered monthly costs of products unless they were
buying an annual plan. It may be that I'm alone in that.

There's also the issue of how many inventory items I would let each plan
track. The smallest plan, which was $29/month, only let a user track 25
inventory items at a time. That's a laughably small amount of inventory. I
attribute this to not targeting a specific type of customer, but it could also
easily be attributed to not thinking it through.

> _If you 're low on cash, try direct sales to start. That's you on the phone,
> or sending email. Or getting in your car and driving, if your area warrants
> it. If you're really offering something that will benefit your prospects'
> business, they want to hear from you._

I live in a small town of less than 4000 people, and the nearest printing
company other than the one I work at is an hour's drive away. That makes it
hard to talk to them in person while still holding a 9-5 M-F job.

With that in mind, there's really no excuse for me to avoid cold calling
potential customers. If my own printing company is an indicator, sales won't
be made until numerous phone calls have been made.

------
kybernetyk
Hmm, has it really failed? Isn't it too early to decide on that after just 3
or 4 months of running it? Even more so that your adwords campaign seems
pretty sub-optimal if you can spend only $2 a day.

Have you tried optimizing the campaign, your landing pages and your sales
funnel? That's where I usually spend most of the time for a product. Building
is a walk in the park compared to the work I have to put into sales
optimization.

Development is just a small part of running a software business. I'm not
saying you should ride a dead horse - I guess you have more reasons to believe
your product failed than you stated in the blog post - but keep for your next
project in mind that you shouldn't give up too quickly.

~~~
wrath
I agree with the others, 3 to 4 months is nothing. As a comparison, it took my
current company 2+ years to make enough money that I could live on and 5+ year
in order for me to call it a success. Many times during this 5 year period we
thought about closing our doors but we knew we had something, the problem was
that what we were selling wasn't exactly what our customers wanted. We pivoted
a few times and finally something hit. We haven't looked back ever since.

You are probably right that inventory systems are awful for small to medium
businesses, so you have a business somewhere. There are others in your space
so that always good validation
([http://tradegecko.com](http://tradegecko.com)).

This is what I would do:

1\. Learn everything you need to know about the inventory pipeline within
small businesses. How they order stock, warehouse it, receive orders, ship it,
etc..

2\. Blog the living hell out of what these small companies do and how you can
make their lives better. This will help your SEO which in my experience is
much better than AdWords.

3\. If you don't already have one, produce a roadmap for your product. You
won't always be able to stick to your roadmap but making one will do the
following:

\- Help you understand how different you are compared to your competitors.
What makes you (or will make you) so special? Why should I buy from you?

\- Help with conversations with potential customers that you are committed to
them in the long term by showing them a roadmap.

4\. Stop blogging about how you failed. I don't want to buy a product from a
company that may close tomorrow because they're going to fail!!! I want to buy
a product from a company that screams success. Your customers don't give a
shit about how bad you are at business, they care about solving their
problems.

5\. Keep your product simple, be great at solving one need. This doesn't mean
that you shouldn't add a contact manager if you're customers are asking for
one, but that the contact manager you add isn't at the same level as
salesforce has it!

6\. Get known in the inventory management community. You'd be surprised how
small and thigh nit these communities are. Sure IBM is huge, but they only
have a handful of individuals performing outreach.

7\. PR, PR, and more PR. Bug the living crap out of every tech blog, inventory
management blog (big enterprise types and small types) and every other blog
that fits. Don't pitch them "Have you heard about us!?",. Pitch them stories
that their users want to read, and by the way, you got your data from
Rakasheets.

8\. Slowly integrate with e-stores and shopping cart platforms such as
shopify.

9\. Last thing, be patient! A company isn't built in 3 to 4 months, it's built
with years of sweat and most importantly love for what you do. You built a
product, which is far more than the majority of the people hanging around here
have done. Be proud and "grind" on.

Good luck!

~~~
thentic
Generally excellent, but you have to believe in what you're doing too; doesn't
matter what industry you're in, you have to believe in what you're doing.

------
danso
Great post...one of the more detailed post-mortems I've read...this one point
stuck out to me:

> _Most importantly, I can 't relate to my target demographic at all_

> _I 'm not a small business owner. I don't have any employees, I don't have
> any physical inventory._

> _I think this was my biggest downfall. I had to pay for content because I
> didn 't know what business owners with a physical inventory wanted to read
> about inventory management._

How is this not painfully obvious to any independent entrepreneur? If you
don't have the resources to do customer surveys and advertisements, why don't
you stick to something you actually know? Because, assuming you are a
reasonable person, a problem you have is likely a problem that _others_ have.
The main advantage, in this case though, is that feature brainstorming and
iteration is much quicker...sometimes the time intervals are as short as it
takes for a thought to reach the other side of your brain. And even if you
don't have a market right away...or ever...you may have built something that
is useful enough to you to markedly improve your life. So, almost a win win.

I can't count the number of times when, while working at an incubator, I
overheard developers building the next awesome photo-world-traveling-sharing
app, and trying to come up with features they think photographers might
need...it was always painful to listen to.

~~~
dack
The flipside is that a lot of developers don't have enough hobbies to draw
from with which to start a business. One thing we can all build is a
developer-focused tool, but we are also some of the hardest customers to
please, since we would only pay for something that is sufficiently difficult
and useful that we wouldn't want to just build it ourselves or look for an
open source solution.

This is something I have had to tell myself - go out and have a life as if
you've already "made it", then when you find something you can fix that you
yourself would prefer over the alternatives, that's your startup.
Unfortunately, I think that means we have to be patient about ideas - you're
not going to notice the real problems in a given area after having tried it
once (unless your solution is a newbies guide or something).

~~~
Rakathos
> _The flipside is that a lot of developers don 't have enough hobbies to draw
> from with which to start a business._

This was (is?) definitely me. I have a grand total of three hobbies: Building
software (also my job), playing WoW and reading.

I couldn't think of any business idea that I could build off of WoW (and I'm
pretty sure Blizzard doesn't allow that), so I took a different route for
finding a problem to solve:

I surfed through small business forums and picked the problem that most people
were complaining about. That happened to be inventory management.

(I'm happy to say I've since quit WoW, on account of the nonexistent IRL
returns).

------
btipling
A cool write up and good discussion but looking at the home page can maybe be
insightful too. The home page can probably be improved to see a minor tick in
conversions.

The "Online Inventory Management without the suck" is not a great intro. It
stresses an absence of something negative instead of stressing something
positive and uses the rather crude and unprofessional word "suck"

You also have no sign-up form visible on first page load and no call to action
(one has to scroll a little, at least on my mac).

The "not interested" inversion of "contact us" is also pretty weird and
announces that you expect people to not be interested.

The pricing link does not look like a link at all.

Then as you scroll it's just a wall of text all the way to the end.

~~~
Rakathos
My entire site design and copy have been a source of downright embarrassment.
In fact, this week's "challenge goal" is a brand new home page, landing page
and sales page design.

The copy itself is going to need to change to reflect the pivot from inventory
to ERP, so happily "Inventory management without the suck" is going away.

> _The "not interested" inversion of "contact us" is also pretty weird and
> announces that you expect people to not be interested._

Curiously, I thought this myself when I put it up. To this day, I can't fathom
why I thought that was a good choice of words (or why I never changed it).

> _Then as you scroll it 's just a wall of text all the way to the end._

I had been experimenting with the "hybrid copy"[1] sales page that Joanna
Wiebe of Copyhackers has been a proponent of. It's worked incredibly well for
my actual landing pages, where a user knows what the product is about when
they click whatever link or ad brought them there. However, I took it way too
far by doing "hybrid copy" on the home page.

The new design I'm working on is going to be the classic home page with a
brief overview of the product and a CTA linking to the "hybrid copy"
features/tour page.

Edit: I neglected to mention that the "hybrid page" experiment resulted in a
noticeable increase in new trials.

[1] [http://copyhackers.com/2013/04/long-
copy/](http://copyhackers.com/2013/04/long-copy/)

~~~
modarts
I hate to come off as a "life coach" type here, but you really need to stop
coming off as being so negative and ashamed of yourself and your efforts.

I'd prioritize that over any amount of A/B testing at this point, since self
confidence in yourself and your product will show through stronger than
anything else at this point.

~~~
Rakathos
I'm a very proud person, and I'm proud of what I've accomplished. That being
said, you're right about coming off as negative or ashamed. I don't actually
feel that way about myself or my efforts, but I realize that it may not look
that way over the internet.

In fact, I had intended the "downright embarrassment" bit as a joke. Still,
thanks for pointing it out!

~~~
yajoe
(I'm from Nebraska and you are from Iowa.)

I've noticed a slight difference in how we in the midwest talk compared to how
the west coast (Seattle and SFO) talk. In particular, I'm not perturbed by the
writing style and I see clearly a confident young man who is building
_experience_. In the midwest, often, modesty and humility are required for
most public conversations. One way to express that modesty is to be quiet
(think 'tough cowboy'). Another way to is be self-deprecating (sometimes it
comes across as false-modesty), which is what you do. And yet another is to
talk about the other person or make small talk. It's something we all do from
here. On the west coast, in contrast, there is a common desire to talk oneself
up either by referencing a pedigree, accomplishments, or trajectory. As a
simplifying stereotype these descriptions don't apply to all people or all the
time.

I would take away two lessons from this discussion.

1) The midwest modesty we both use is somewhat foreign to other cultures.
Don't feel like you have to change yourself, but, don't be surprised that
different people will understand you differently.

2) Focus on the product before fixing any analysis or blog or other meta-
startup thing!

------
ryanackley
It's strange because I have a very different takeaway than the author (or most
people here).

It took him 1 month to build his entire product! And people say he should have
talked to customers first. It takes some people 1 month to mock up their
product and build a slide deck and business plan, etc.

His biggest failure was he couldn't market his product effectively. If you
aren't funded by a big name VC and you're tackling a ho-hum problem. Chances
are, you won't be featured on TechCrunch or the HN front page.

Some ideas are so innovative and awesome that they market themselves but my
guess is that inventory management doesn't land in that category.

~~~
dclowd9901
If VCs were validation, Medium would be a good idea, instead of a shameless
rehash of a content farm.

~~~
cmbaus
I wouldn't call continuing where the inventor of mainstream content publishing
(ev williams) left off with blogger, a rehash. After Blogger, Odeo, Twitter,
and now Medium, I think he knows what he is doing.

------
freework
For every person who says their company failed because they didn't listen to
customer feedback, there are the same amount of people who say their company
failed because they did nothing but follow the demands of every single
customer. Success lies somewhere in the middle. How do you know where that
middle is? That is the $100,000,000 question that you can only learn by a
process of trying and failing. This is why these unsolicited "advice" articles
are worthless.

~~~
Osmigo
"For every person who says their company failed because they didn't listen to
customer feedback, there are the same amount of people who say their company
failed because they did nothing but follow the demands of every single
customer."

Very, VERY important point. Some years back I had the experience of designing,
from scratch, several dozen web sites for some state government agencies. I
used to tell people, "designing a web site is like decorating a room for 50
people and trying to make them all happy." And for sure, if you jerk and
twitch from every customer comment, you'll crash and burn, like the proverbial
hound dog in a whistle factory.

The real question is not just whether or not you listen to customer feedback,
but how you process it.

------
kaa2102
I would not quit what you're doing just yet. You built a product and have a
paying customer. Congrats! You mentioned that you don't understand your the
needs of your customer. I think you can build on what you've already done. Get
out of the building, join your local Chamber of Commerce, and find out the
challenges that small businesses are facing. There may be adjacent markets
that you can enter by tweaking your product.

------
dev360
"I spent most of my time on the SmallBusiness forum on Reddit." ... I'm not
saying this is the cause for the failure, but imho, this is a terrible place
to look for validation because its a breeding ground for people that have tons
of opinions but don't really represent your end customer and at the ending of
the day, have zero desire to buy your product, they just want to login in and
have opinions. Its in a sense, similar to techcrunch.. a club for internal
admiration. I see so many people fall for this sort of thing.. I personally
just think its unfortunate.

------
shekyboy
Makes me think about the post I read from Nathan Kontny
[http://ninjasandrobots.com/what-people-really-
want](http://ninjasandrobots.com/what-people-really-want)

Its really hard to do this if you are not completely immersed in the problem
yourself. The legacy players who have this strong position have the years of
understanding the problem and that is why they command the market and at times
dont even have to innovate to protect their position.

If you yourself are not your customer, it is very hard to execute, prioritize
etc. For enterprise businesses this is extremely critical. Also when I say
Problem I just dont mean the actual product. It also includes decision makers,
sales cycles, budget cycles etc etc. The whole decision matrix around a
enterprise product needs to be understood.

Actually I dont think Rakasheets has failed. You just have an expensive
Prototype. If you want to continue, spend the next month in customer offices
selling this. Forget adwords or any other such mechanism. Your best customer
acquisition channel will be Word of Mouth. Small Business owners know many
other SMBs and they share such stuff. If you can crack a few they will share
that positive experience with their friends and colleagues.

Good luck!

------
jborden13
"They also need customer management, order tracking, accounting, lead
tracking, etc. All of the people that I could get to seriously look at
Rakasheets all said the same thing."

Before I got to this point in the post I kept thinking that inventory
management on an island doesn't sound like a robust enough of a solution to be
of much use (I admit this is an assumption and I'm biased). What would be
interesting, and something that we will be looking for shortly for our
platform, is an inventory management API. We've got most of the other stuff
the poster mentioned, but will most likely try to find a solution to buy for
inventory management instead of rolling our own, if we can.

Good post - love the poster's frankness and willingness to admit his/her
mistakes. Successful entrepreneurship is often an iterative, effectual
undertaking. Don't expect to hit a home run, or even get a base hit your first
time up to bat. It takes a couple of times through the ringer before you
really get on track.

------
nadaviv
> (Sidenote: Judging by my AdWords clicks, Inventory Management is very
> popular in India)

The cost per click in different countries can be very different. India traffic
is usually considered lower-quality, and is usually much cheaper. My guess is
that he saw a lot of India users not because its popular, but because that's
what his budget allowed him to buy.

------
starrhorne
You are giving up too early. You can make money on this product, but you just
have to be willing to spend time learning to market it.

And by market I don't mean advertise. I mean, finding a group of people who
really need inventory management and then tailoring your app to their specific
needs.

For example, how many $1000s of dollars a year do restaurants lose from
inventory spoilage? How does that compare with the cost of paying someone to
enter all that data into your system?

Because, as a business owner, I _only_ care about how your app is going to
make or save me money.

One more thing. Not every type of business does well with a no-touch sales
process. I suspect that with something like inventory management, you'll want
to focus on an industry, go to trade shows, and really insert yourself into
that world. Bizdev is really underrated in this self-serve world.

------
Renaud
Beside the fact that it is certainly a bit early to call it quit, I'm having
problems with the product and the site itself. I have dealt with stock
inventory for years and it is one of these areas that looks deceptively easy
to implement but ends up being a lot more complex in real life.

The website makes many grand promises but there is very little information on
what it actually does. The target customer should be someone knowledgeable in
Stock Inventory, but there are not many specifics for them to even assess if
the product is for them or not.

* Who does this target? small businesses? retail? factories?

* What is a "sheet" really ? It is a Form? a data entry grid?

* Inventory data doesn't exist in a vacuum, it needs to be fed to accounting software, so at least a good import/export/reporting story is important here.

* similarly, can I connect to the database to produce my own reports and plug custom software (even Excel for instance through a datasource) to it?

* I can't find any information about cost management. Does the software only manage quantities or can it track cost as well?

* How does the software manage counting units? Can I manage cable lengths in metre or in whole roll? Can I sell some oil SKU by the litre and other by the bottle?

* What's the story for annual/continuous inventories (stock counts)? does it help me with that?

* Cant I easily make transfers from one warehouse to another?

* I can't find whether the software is able to manage FIFO, LIFO, batches, etc.

* What's the picking list story if there is one?

* Does the software manage part revisions? For instance factories may have different revisions of the same item (electronic or mechanical).

* Does the software manage stock locations so I can easily find where product with SKU F7786 is located?

* what's the story for receiving deliveries? Can I have a quarantine area where I receive my goods for inspection?

It reads everywhere that this is a one-man labour of love. Why should I risk
an important business activity to a one-man shop? What happens if the founder
is sick and there's a problem?

I don't want to be too negative, I'm only being harsh because I really like
the concept; the design and the amount of work put into this is a short time
is amazing. The tablet story is great too.

On the other hand, it feels like this was made by a programmer who doesn't
really know the business he's in and ends up with a products that seems to be
targeting libraries and bookstores (2 very different businesses) and
groceries, retailers, even factories maybe. It tries to be too much for too
many.

To save this, I would target specific markets and make appropriate versions of
the software for those markets, using their business terminology, highlighting
on the first page the pain points they are facing and how the software solves
them, etc.

Making a one product fits all is exactly the sort of problem small business
face when they buy a cheap general purpose ERP: it's often too complex and it
ends up not being what they need. The pricing is also fairly high: a 4-seat
version of Sage Line 100 (a complete ERP for SMB) costs less than US$900 per
year in license renewal. Yours cost about $700 for 3 users only for inventory
management. That's quite a lot.

~~~
mgkimsal
"Today's inventory management software has a fundamental problem. They're
downright impossible to use. As much as engineers and accountants might love
their endless menus after endless menus, they only make for a frustrating
experience."

There's a reason there's 'endless menus after endless menus' \- all the points
you brought up (and then more). "Inventory management" as an open-ended
"solution" is... near impossible.

Now... if we saw 'raka for automotive dealers', 'raka for gardeners', etc., it
could be comprehensive enough for specific industries, but still able to be
focused and simple. And perhaps _all_ the flexibility could be there, but
stripped away to leave focused UIs for niche markets.

I hit all these issues and more with a project a couple years ago. They really
couldn't afford the 'industrial strength' inventory systems - simply too
costly for them as a company - but had too many variables like the one you
mentioned above. Just one small example - they'd record receiving various
chemicals by the gallon or liter, but would record the use by... (IIRC) how
many 'uses' (sprays, in this case). Without knowing how service person A had
mixed their chemicals, 'one spray' could not tell you how much of the liter
was actually being used. But they had to keep track of their chemical usage (I
think for local permitting if nothing else) - during a stock take, there was
no way to tell if people were using too much, or if some had been stolen, or
perhaps was never delivered properly. And that some of that stuff was pretty
expensive.

There's certainly a need for 'inventory management' for small business, but I
think raka and others have to dive further and market focused niche versions
to solve the needs of particular industries.

------
downandout
At the end of the day, the software business is exactly that - a business.
Great business people can turn mediocre ideas into successes, while bad
business people can turn great ideas into disaster. Very few independent
developers are good business people. Either enlist the help of a great
business person to roll out your projects, or drop the independent projects
and spend that time doing consulting or other things that will get you paid.
Creating independent projects without strong business talent behind them will
almost always be an incredibly disappointing experience.

------
coldtea
> _Four months ago (sometime in January, 2013) I started building my first
> real SaaS business. Rakasheets was a realtime, cloud based inventory
> management app that had a ton of great benefits. Or so I thought. At the
> time I was starry eyed, dreaming of a future of fat bank accounts.
> Rakasheets was my ticket to success! The tool that would make my dreams come
> true._

Or you kidding me? He wrote that "fourth months" after starting building his
first business? And it was a failure because it hadn't made him rich in 4
months? Talk about perserverance...

~~~
Rakathos
A few people were upset that I called it a failure after 4 months. You're
right, 4 months is nothing compared to most other startups or software
businesses.

Let me clarify that I'm calling it a failure not because I wasn't rich in 4
months. Instead, it's a failure to me because I lost interest in what it did
and who it was for, and I had no intention of ever working on it again.

------
nthitz
Bit of discussion on HN from when this article was originally written:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5782761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5782761)

------
akrymski
To me this lesson is simply a reminder of the fact that business is all about
sales. Just look at SalesForce. Best products don't always win. Business is
about finding an arbitrage opportunity - build something for $X and sell it
for $Y. Some businesses can get away with buying stuff for $X and selling it
for $Y. Building is the easy part.

------
teilo
Indeed. Big or small, ERP is where it's at. You can't have five or six systems
that can't talk to each other. Accounting here, Invoicing there, Inventory,
Point of Sale, Warehousing, etc. At that point you're almost no better than
managing your business on paper, because you are re-entering everything over
and over again.

------
ape4
How about another name? Raka means ""Moon in the Sky" ('Aakasher Chand') in
Bengali language." according to wiki. Ok, nice word but not easily accessible
to Americans. Maybe "Sheets" is an inventory thing. But it means nothing to
me. How about EasyInventory.

------
MagicWishMonkey
Your site looks nice. Have you considered letting people register and use it
for free (with up to 10 users, and 1000 inventory items or something
reasonable for small businesses)?

If enough people sign up it might be worthwhile to add additional features for
premium users in the future.

------
areeved
Did you do _any_ lead gen or direct sales? Pick up a phone!

It sounds like you have a reasonable product, but you've simply failed to
sell/market it.

------
epa
A nice advertisement hidden as an article.

------
ackfoo
Get a better name, dood.

Also, try writing something other than dogfood, meaning some elaboration of
software for an established, crowded market of which you have no specialized
knowledge or expertise. 'Course, that would require you to have some life
experience of something other than just software.

------
brador
What is a web engineer?

------
lukehorvat
Raka{sheets} <\-- that's how you failed.

------
lucidrains
Give it more time... 3-4 months is nothing

------
erroca
This is old, its been on HN already...

------
rokhayakebe
100% Wrong. Your marketing failed.

