The graveyard of good ideas
Solutions that were tried, and what stopped them.
Patents that were rejected or abandoned, products that shut down, projects that went quiet. Borrow the idea, avoid the dead end.
1,095 solutions
- startupShut down2022
Google IoT Core will be discontinued on Aug. 16, 2023
Your current IoT Core Services will remain available through August 15, 2023. Start your migration to alternative solutions. Hello [NAME], We’re writing to let you know that Google Cloud’s IoT Core Service will be discontinued on August 16, 2023 at which point your access to the IoT Core Device Manager APIs will no longer be available. As of that date, devices will be unable to connect to the Google Cloud IoT Core MQTT and HTTP bridges and existing connections will be shut down. Your current IoT Core Services will remain available through August 15, 2023, unless you terminate your usage of IoT Core at an earlier date. What do I need to do? We recommend that you take action early to migrate from IoT Core to an alternative service. As an initial step, connect with your Google Cloud account manager if you have questions about your migration plans. Your account manager can also help you lear
Why it failed: Your current IoT Core Services will remain available through August 15, 2023. Start your migration to alternative solutions. Hello [NAME], We’re writing to let you know that Google Cloud’s IoT Core Service will be discontinued on August 16, 2023 at which point your access to the
borner791
- startupShut down2022
What happens to the hardware (MacBooks, Monitors, Chairs) of failed startups?
Yesterday I saw a group of people in SF walking out of a building looking sad and carrying monitors. Now I am wondering what happens to the hardware? Bootstrapped founders (myself) or schools could make good use of it.
Why it failed: Yesterday I saw a group of people in SF walking out of a building looking sad and carrying monitors. Now I am wondering what happens to the hardware? Bootstrapped founders (myself) or schools could make good use of it.
ck_one
- startupShut down2022
Ask HN: Getting up after repeated failures?
This post probably won't be well accepted in the Hacker News community since it's come out as more of a rant, but I don't really care anymore. So Hacker News, I'm 30. Not super old, but I've got a good decade in the software world under my belt to a large variety of all the garbage there is to see. My first job was at a medium sized corp, and after about 3 years, I left to escape the typical pain points of corporate life (slow / no projects, lazy / unmotivated coworkers obviously there only for the paycheck, too much red tape and processes, etc., etc., etc....) I then joined a small company, where we built what in my mind was a next gen e-commerce shop (real time product stock checks, multiple currency support, etc.) only to have the project (a 1.5 year project, mind you) not be payed for and then in the end scraped for a shittier one (MUCH shittier, th
Why it failed: This post probably won't be well accepted in the Hacker News community since it's come out as more of a rant, but I don't really care anymore. So Hacker News, I'm 30. Not super old, but I've got a good decade in the software world under my belt to a large
fullstackchris
- startupShut down2021
Launch HN: Chums (YC W21) – Shop online with friends
Hey HN, we’re Noah and Dick. We founded Chums ( https://www.chums.co ) to help you recommend products to your friends and have more fun shopping online. A lot of people ask their friends for advice when they're shopping. We think this can be more fun and we think your friends can help you find the right product, especially during COVID when we're stuck at home. Noah launched the first version of Chums in late 2019. Originally, the app was a platform for users to find and share referral codes. Users could create a profile page and add their favorite brands to it. Soon they started adding products and reviews to the brands on their profile, and it became clear that the social shopping opportunity had much more potential than sharing referral codes. Noah started digging into the world of ecommerce, social shopping, and affiliate marketing, and a mutual friend introduced
Why it failed: Hey HN, we’re Noah and Dick. We founded Chums ( https://www.chums.co ) to help you recommend products to your friends and have more fun shopping online. A lot of people ask their friends for advice when they're shopping. We think this can be more fun and we think y
dickfickling
- startupShut down2021
Show HN: Open-source, self-hosted data management app and internal tool builder
Hey HN, This is Adrian and David, and we're excited (and nervous) to show you basetool (https://basetool.io). Basetool helps companies view and manage all their data in one place. Companies have data in tons of places like BI tools, data warehouses, 3rd party services, and their databases. However, because the tools are not connected, it's a hassle to have visibility across the whole organization and even more difficult to safely share that data with the team or external collaborators. The vision is to give basetool access to your data source and get a tool that way above a database client. You get an app that's more than an admin panel but somewhere around an internal tool tailored to your needs. The app can be configured visually (no more engineering bottlenecks) and ready to be used by your end-users like teammates and external collaborators. You can easily cu
Why it failed: Hey HN, This is Adrian and David, and we're excited (and nervous) to show you basetool (https://basetool.io). Basetool helps companies view and manage all their data in one place. Companies have data in tons of places like BI tools, data warehouses, 3rd party servi
adrianthedev
- startupShut down2021
Launch HN: Curvenote (YC W21) – Collaborative writing tools for science
Hi HN! I’m Rowan and with my co-founder Steve we are building Curvenote ( https://curvenote.com ) — a technical writing tool for sharing data analysis and research from Jupyter with a wider audience. We are building Curvenote to get science communication out of PDFs and help researchers and data-scientists communicate interactive, reproducible results (graphs, figures, maps, etc.) that are linked to the actual data and computation. There are currently two parts to Curvenote: 1) a WYSIWYG collaborative writing environment for interactive, technical documents; and 2) a Jupyter integration that adds version control and commenting and can link interactive plots and outputs directly into Curvenote documents (including any new versions or comments on those outputs). Steve and I met in the open-source/science community and are coming at this from different angles: Steve has led d
Why it failed: Hi HN! I’m Rowan and with my co-founder Steve we are building Curvenote ( https://curvenote.com ) — a technical writing tool for sharing data analysis and research from Jupyter with a wider audience. We are building Curvenote to get science communication out of PDFs and
rowanc1
- startupShut down2021
Launch HN: Weekday (YC W21) – Hire engineers vouched for by other engineers
Hey HN. We are Amit, Chetan, Anubhav and Hari, the cofounders of Weekday ( https://www.weekday.works ). We are building a recruitment platform centered around recommendations. We help companies hire engineers who are vouched for by other engineers. Discovering top talent is challenging. It's easy to check for great credentials, but that's not the same thing as on-ground reality and achievement. It works the other way, too: someone with credentials may not be a great contributor, and screening for credentials eliminates many contributors who are. Our company is based on the insight that great contributors tend to know other great contributors and are in a position to recommend them. We believe that a network-driven approach can help to discover high-caliber candidates. We chanced upon this idea when we were doing our previous startup where we found it excruciatingly di
Why it failed: Hey HN. We are Amit, Chetan, Anubhav and Hari, the cofounders of Weekday ( https://www.weekday.works ). We are building a recruitment platform centered around recommendations. We help companies hire engineers who are vouched for by other engineers. Discovering top talen
amitsy
- startupShut down2021
Launch HN: MindsDB (YC W20) – Machine Learning Inside Your Database
Hi HN, Adam and Jorge here, and today we’re very excited to share MindsDB with you ( http://github.com/mindsdb/mindsdb ). MindsDB AutoML Server is an open-source platform designed to accelerate machine learning workflows for people with data inside databases by introducing virtual AI tables. We allow you to create and consume machine learning models as regular database tables. Jorge and I have been friends for many years, having first met at college. We have previously founded and failed at another startup, but we stuck together as a team to start MindsDB. Initially a passion project, MindsDB began as an idea to help those who could not afford to hire a team of data scientists, which at the time was (and still is) very expensive. It has since grown into a thriving open-source community with contributors and users all over the globe. With the plethora of data available
Why it failed: Hi HN, Adam and Jorge here, and today we’re very excited to share MindsDB with you ( http://github.com/mindsdb/mindsdb ). MindsDB AutoML Server is an open-source platform designed to accelerate machine learning workflows for people with data inside databases b
adam_carrigan
- startupShut down2021
Launch HN: Xix.ai (YC W17) – Securely authenticate in web apps by face
Hi HN, I’m Emil, here with our team at XIX.ai ( https://getxix.com/ ). We are building “Entry” - a biometric identity provider that enables secure authentication in web apps by face on desktops using web cameras. It supports SAML 2.0, OIDC Connect, and OAuth 2.0 standards and can be easily integrated into existing app or infrastructure. Users can securely authenticate in web apps by face, using regular web cameras without compromising privacy and security. Entry helps organizations prevent phishing, insider threats, and account takeovers by adding Entry as a biometric factor to their workforce SSO. Companies that employ many contractors or vendors to access sensitive information can prevent fraud by verifying biometric identity during authentication. Developers can use Entry to verify their customers (password resets), strong-authenticate users during high-value transactio
Why it failed: Hi HN, I’m Emil, here with our team at XIX.ai ( https://getxix.com/ ). We are building “Entry” - a biometric identity provider that enables secure authentication in web apps by face on desktops using web cameras. It supports SAML 2.0, OIDC Connect, and OAuth 2.0 st
emilxix
- startupShut down2021
Launch HN: Finmark (YC S20) – Financial planning software for startups
Hi HN! I’m Rami, cofounder of Finmark ( https://finmark.com/ ). We make it simple for companies to manage their runway, hiring, and cash. Three years ago a bad financial model almost killed my last company. A miscalculation in our behemoth of a financial model led us to overestimate the amount of cash we had coming in, and in turn, to overspend. When we finally discovered the error after 5 months, we were forced to shift from aggressive hiring to aggressive cost cutting and had to lay off employees. We were able to course-correct and sold the company successfully in 2019, but I kept coming back to how difficult and time-consuming financial modeling is for founders. So after taking some time off to recharge post acquisition, I pulled my old team together to start Finmark. We built Finmark so all founders, not just finance pros, can easily create, update, and share custom fi
Why it failed: Hi HN! I’m Rami, cofounder of Finmark ( https://finmark.com/ ). We make it simple for companies to manage their runway, hiring, and cash. Three years ago a bad financial model almost killed my last company. A miscalculation in our behemoth of a financial model led
ramie
- startupShut down2021
Launch HN: Payflow (YC S21) – Allow workers to access their wages instantly
Hi HN, we are Benoît and Avi, co-founders at Payflow ( https://www.payflow.es/ ). We’re making a better app for workers to instantly access their earned wages. We launched a year ago in Spain (where we’re based!). Anyone in Spain can try our product. Otherwise, here’s a demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSDlGhoFNyM . 75% of employees in Spain and Latam live paycheck to paycheck and many have no savings. They often run out of cash before payday, especially if they have an unexpected expense. This is an issue for employers too, because high employee turnover amongst low-income employees is costly. Most employee perks (e.g. health insurance, flexible benefits, snacks in the office), which are so familiar to HN, are usually reserved to white-collar workers in Latam. Said employee perks are too expensive for blue-collar employers, and more importantly a
Why it failed: Hi HN, we are Benoît and Avi, co-founders at Payflow ( https://www.payflow.es/ ). We’re making a better app for workers to instantly access their earned wages. We launched a year ago in Spain (where we’re based!). Anyone in Spain can try our product. Otherwise, her
asukhwani
- startupShut down2021
Launch HN: Stipop (YC S21) – Improving user engagement with stickers
Hi HN, I'm Tony, and together with my friend Daniel, we created Stipop ( https://developers.stipop.io ). We help app developers add stickers on chat, comment section, profiles, and live streams by providing an easy-to-install SDK with 150K+ stickers and a fully customizable UI. Stickers are the big, animated emojis you can send in chat. This may sound silly and of course, it is, but a lot of people love them. They are sent 17x more than GIFs on Facebook Messenger—that's almost 400M times a day! Users, especially Gen Z and Millennials, love sending stickers to express themselves better and stay more connected online. But the thing is, having stickers in your app can cost up to a million dollars because you’ll need a good 4~5 engineers to build the infrastructure, UI, search engine and have a content team to sign contracts with hundreds of sticker artists, send payouts
Why it failed: Hi HN, I'm Tony, and together with my friend Daniel, we created Stipop ( https://developers.stipop.io ). We help app developers add stickers on chat, comment section, profiles, and live streams by providing an easy-to-install SDK with 150K+ stickers and a fully cus
tonyatkc
- startupShut down2021
Show HN: Termius (YC W19) – Share your terminal session like Google Docs
Hi everybody, I’m Roman from Termius (YC W19, HN launch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20118727 ). I want to share news about a new exciting feature that we wanted to build for a long time. It’s Terminal Sharing. Terminal Sharing enables engineers to get instant help from their colleagues by providing a link to their terminal output updated in real-time. There is also a mode where the viewer can enter commands from their end. When I was getting into programming, some of my biggest problems were: compilation errors or not being able to set up something on a Linux server. One of the ways to get help in such a case is to ask a friend or colleague who has done it before. One more thing, we all remember times (before the pandemic) when teammates could come to your table and check out where you got stuck and often it’s in a terminal window. Unfortunately,it’s often impossi
Why it failed: Hi everybody, I’m Roman from Termius (YC W19, HN launch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20118727 ). I want to share news about a new exciting feature that we wanted to build for a long time. It’s Terminal Sharing. Terminal Sharing enables engineers to get inst
rkudiyarov
- startupShut down2021
Launch HN: Onfolk (YC S21) – Modern HR and Payroll in One Place (For the UK)
Hey, we’re Naz and Charlie! We're building Onfolk ( https://onfolk.com/ ). We’re a couple of engineers who discovered that payroll in the UK is pretty backward and that building good software can raise the bar. You can check out some pics on our Product Hunt post [1] or see a quick video [2]. To set the scene: we were software engineers at Monzo for 4 years. Joined at 400k customers, left at 5.5M. We took voluntary furlough in April 2020 ("furlough" is the UK government’s scheme for keeping workers paid for a bit so that companies don't have to lay them off). During that time, Monzo changed payroll provider. The old one sucked and had errors. The new one sucked and had errors. It took a consultant a year to implement the new one. We wondered how on earth a company with our funding, whose main asset was its people, couldn't find a good way to pay th
Why it failed: Hey, we’re Naz and Charlie! We're building Onfolk ( https://onfolk.com/ ). We’re a couple of engineers who discovered that payroll in the UK is pretty backward and that building good software can raise the bar. You can check out some pics on our Product Hunt p
4thstreet
- startupShut down2021
Launch HN: Spark Studio (YC S21) – Live online extracurricular courses for kids
Hi HN, we’re Spark Studio ( https://www.sparkstudio.co/ ) and we provide live, online extracurricular classes for children across the world, starting in India and the Middle East. Children can learn music, visual arts and communication skills through our live online classes in small groups with expert teachers. We’re based in India. All the attention here tends to go to academic learning and grades, but a large part of development (brain and personality) actually happens outside it. Parents have started to desire extracurricular and holistic learning for their children, but access, quality, and convenience remain big unsolved problems. Most people end up having to choose among neighbourhood options. There is no standard curriculum, and definitely none designed for kids, so these classes tend to end up just being a pastime and/or kids become disinterested. Kaustubh, Na
Why it failed: Hi HN, we’re Spark Studio ( https://www.sparkstudio.co/ ) and we provide live, online extracurricular classes for children across the world, starting in India and the Middle East. Children can learn music, visual arts and communication skills through our live onlin
anushreegoenka
- startupShut down2021
Launch HN: Tavus (YC S21) – AI-generated personalized videos for sales outreach
Hi HN - Hassaan, Quinn & Rishabh here and we're the founders of Tavus ( https://tavus.io/ ). We generate personalized videos that realistically imitate your gestures and voice. See a short demo at https://video.tavus.io/video?id=2302 and play with it at https://tavus.io/playground/ . Companies like Loom and Vidyard have proven the value of personalized videos for sales, onboarding, marketing, and more. The problem is the time it takes to create a video for each prospect. We make it scalable by generating thousands of personalized videos of you in the time it would take to record one. Our users get the benefits of personalized videos, like large increases in open and reply rates, without having to invest all that time. We struggled with LinkedIn outreach and email marketing at every company we all worked at. It took too many email
Why it failed: Hi HN - Hassaan, Quinn & Rishabh here and we're the founders of Tavus ( https://tavus.io/ ). We generate personalized videos that realistically imitate your gestures and voice. See a short demo at https://video.tavus.io/video?id=2302 and pla
rishabhdhar
- startupShut down2021
Show HN: Datree (YC W20): Prevent K8s misconfigurations from reaching production
Hi HN, this is Shimon and Eyar of Datree ( https://www.datree.io/ ). When I was an Engineering Manager of Infrastructure at ironSource (NASDAQ:IS) for 400 developers, a developer made a mistake, causing a misconfiguration to reach production, which caused major problems for the company's infrastructure. Mistakes happen all the time - you learn from them and hope to never make them again. But how can we prevent a production issue from recurring, or, how about a bigger challenge — how can you prevent the next one from the get-go? In our case, we tried sending emails to our devs, writing Wikis, and hosting meetups and live sessions to educate our developers, but I felt that it just wasn’t driving the message home. How can developers be expected to remember to configure a liveness probe or to put a memory limit in place for their Kubernetes workload when there are so many
Why it failed: Hi HN, this is Shimon and Eyar of Datree ( https://www.datree.io/ ). When I was an Engineering Manager of Infrastructure at ironSource (NASDAQ:IS) for 400 developers, a developer made a mistake, causing a misconfiguration to reach production, which caused major pro
shimont
- startupShut down2021
Launch HN: Great Question (YC W21) – Customer research tools for software teams
Hi HN! I’m Ned and along with my co-founder PJ (pjmurraynz) we’re building Great Question ( https://greatquestion.co ) to make it easy to do customer research as part of every sprint or product release. The maxim of Y Combinator is “talk to customers, build something people want” yet relatively few software teams regularly engage in customer research. This was definitely the case for us in our last startup, and even when we sold that business to a place with a well resourced research team we were largely on our own. Without any real tools or processes to do customer research we ended up muddling through, but it was always ad hoc - and often skipped so we could just get a release out the door. Bad news. By talking to lots of customers (meta!) we learned that one of the biggest challenges teams face is in the logistics of research: finding customers to talk to, scheduling calls &
Why it failed: Hi HN! I’m Ned and along with my co-founder PJ (pjmurraynz) we’re building Great Question ( https://greatquestion.co ) to make it easy to do customer research as part of every sprint or product release. The maxim of Y Combinator is “talk to customers, build something pe
nedwin
- startupShut down2021
Launch HN: Thryft (YC W21) – Shopify for Instagram Sellers
Hi HN! We're Capri and Sam — the co-founders of Thryft ( https://www.thryft.shop/ ). We're an easy way to sell things on Instagram. Sam and I met in college at UC Berkeley and Sam previously built an app with 150k+ registered users that allowed users to see which other users, celebrities, presidents, etc. they look like. We built and launched a few marketplace ideas throughout YC. We originally applied with a marketplace for shopping directly from brick-and-mortar thrift stores. While we were solving a clear problem with digitizing brick-and-mortar thrift stores, in the end we didn't see a clear path to scalability with that idea. After that, we pivoted to a curated marketplace for secondhand clothing and accessories, but that didn't work because we struggled to find a differentiator from existing secondhand marketplaces that would solve a real pain poi
Why it failed: Hi HN! We're Capri and Sam — the co-founders of Thryft ( https://www.thryft.shop/ ). We're an easy way to sell things on Instagram. Sam and I met in college at UC Berkeley and Sam previously built an app with 150k+ registered users that allowed users to s
caprilynn
- startupShut down2021
Launch HN: Enso (YC S21) – Visual programming and workflow automation tool
Hi HN, We are Wojciech and Sylwia, the co-founders of Enso ( https://enso.org ). On the tech side, Enso is a visual and textual programming language (you can switch from graph to code and back). On the business side, it's a workflow builder that makes it easy for analysts without a programming background to automate data-driven processes simply by connecting visual components together. Our GUI is like an IDE, but with a graph editor alongside the code. Currently, we’re focused on data analysis—data preparation, blending, and analytics (both in-memory and SQL). You can see a video of how it works here: https://youtu.be/fQvWMoOjmQk . We used to be called Luna and were lucky to have a few big threads on HN over the years [1][2][3][4][5]. Eventually we went into heads-down mode to make a production version based on customer and user feedback. Since then, we'
Why it failed: Hi HN, We are Wojciech and Sylwia, the co-founders of Enso ( https://enso.org ). On the tech side, Enso is a visual and textual programming language (you can switch from graph to code and back). On the business side, it's a workflow builder that makes it easy for a
wdanilo
- startupShut down2021
Launch HN: Gallery (YC S21) – On-demand environments on any cloud provider
Hi HN! We’re Jagath and Vignesh, co-founders of Gallery (usegallery.com). We provision on-demand pre-prod environments on your own cloud account so you can do manual QA, share feature previews with team members/clients, and parallelize automated testing & CI processes, all without bottlenecking on your staging environment. Engineers typically have a fixed number of cloud environments, including production, staging, and maybe some additional pre-production environments. They use these to preview features, share work with other team members, do manual QA/automated testing, and more. As the number of engineers grows, having a fixed number of cloud environments becomes a bottleneck. Teams end up queuing for access to staging and so on. Creating additional environments and keeping them in sync, though, is a major headache, especially when the environments are reasonably complex.
Why it failed: Hi HN! We’re Jagath and Vignesh, co-founders of Gallery (usegallery.com). We provision on-demand pre-prod environments on your own cloud account so you can do manual QA, share feature previews with team members/clients, and parallelize automated testing & CI processes, a
jag729
- startupShut down2021
Launch HN: Pyroscope (YC W21) – Continuous profiling software
Hi HN! Dmitry and Ryan here. We're building Pyroscope ( https://pyroscope.io/ ) — an open source continuous profiling platform ( https://github.com/pyroscope-io/pyroscope ). We started working on it a few months ago. I did a lot of profiling at my last job and I always thought that profiling tools provide a ton of value in terms of reducing latency and cutting cloud costs, but are very hard to use. With most of them you have to profile your programs locally on your machine. If you can profile in production, you often have to be very lucky to catch the issues happening live, you can't just go back in time with these tools. So I thought, why not just run some profiler 24/7 in production environment? I talked about this to my friend Ryan and we started working. One of the big concerns we heard from people early on was that profilers typicall
Why it failed: Hi HN! Dmitry and Ryan here. We're building Pyroscope ( https://pyroscope.io/ ) — an open source continuous profiling platform ( https://github.com/pyroscope-io/pyroscope ). We started working on it a few months ago. I did a lot of profilin
petethepig
- startupShut down2021
Launch HN: SST (YC W21) – A live development environment for AWS Lambda
Hi HN, we are Jay and Frank and we are working on SST ( https://github.com/serverless-stack/serverless-stack ). SST is a framework for building serverless apps on AWS. It includes a local development environment that allows you to make changes and test your Lambda functions live. It does this by opening a WebSocket connection to your AWS account, streaming any Lambda function invocations, running them locally, and passing back the results. This allows you to work on your functions, without mocking any AWS resources, or having to redeploy them every time, to test your changes. Here's a 30s video of it in action — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnTSTm5n11g For some background, serverless is an execution model where you send a cloud provider (AWS in this case), a piece of code (called a Lambda function). The cloud provider is responsible for executin
Why it failed: Hi HN, we are Jay and Frank and we are working on SST ( https://github.com/serverless-stack/serverless-stack ). SST is a framework for building serverless apps on AWS. It includes a local development environment that allows you to make changes and test your La
jayair
- startupShut down2021
Show HN: Hupreter – Create apps by describing them in English
Hi HN! Fernando here. A few months ago [1], I shared Hupreter ( https://hupreter.com ) with you all and now I am finally opening it up so that everyone can try it for free. The goal is to let users create apps and process data effortlessly, by just describing what the computer should do, in spoken English. We have made a lot of progress since the first post, and even though it is far from perfect, I really want to see how people use it and get feedback. In terms of creating apps, it supports persisting data (you can store/retrieve values), if statements, while loops, etc. For data processing, we currently support uploading tables, calculating the median/variance/etc., plotting, and more. And we will be improving all of those in the coming days. For example, you can tell Hupreter: Given the table nba_players, calculate the average value in the column "points&
Why it failed: Hi HN! Fernando here. A few months ago [1], I shared Hupreter ( https://hupreter.com ) with you all and now I am finally opening it up so that everyone can try it for free. The goal is to let users create apps and process data effortlessly, by just describing what the c
fersarr