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.
1,395 solutions
- startupShut down2007
How's your YC Winter 2008 application coming along?
We finished the first draft of the application questionnaire, and we implemented about half of the features we'd like to show in our demo. We are a team of two awesome cofounders, and our idea is not technically heavy. How's your application coming along?
Why it failed: We finished the first draft of the application questionnaire, and we implemented about half of the features we'd like to show in our demo. We are a team of two awesome cofounders, and our idea is not technically heavy. How's your application coming along?
wonjun
- startupShut down2007
Critique our startup: HeavyInk.com
Our team of 2.5 engineers (two real engineers, and one half business guy / half engineer) have spent the last three months coding up HeavyInk.com in Rails - it's a mashup of an Amazon.com style retailer for comic books (individual issues, graphic novels, subscriptions to issues, subscriptions to graphic novels - you name it), and Facebook style social networking (yeah, I know: "Oh, God, not ANOTHER social netowrking site..."), with some other goodies thrown in. The comic book retailer space is a bit crowded, but after doing a bunch of research (see details elsewhere at news.ycombinator: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75296 ), we concluded that the existing firms all failed in major ways. There are some cool technologies under the hood (Coco/R for Ruby to parse out details on authors and artists from free-form human-readable text descriptions), and a lot of cool code reuse (Sanskrit,
Why it failed: Our team of 2.5 engineers (two real engineers, and one half business guy / half engineer) have spent the last three months coding up HeavyInk.com in Rails - it's a mashup of an Amazon.com style retailer for comic books (individual issues, graphic novels, subscriptions to issues,
tjic
- startupShut down2007
Co-founder won't move to the valley if accepted by YC. What do I do?
Well, I had a kinda ugly conversation with my team yesterday. I'm starting on our YC application for the winter term, and of course the first question is "will you move to the valley Jan-Mar if accepted?". My answer is a resounding "hell yea!" but my co-founder, and our #3 guy both said no. This is not the first symptom of lack of dedication from my others on my team. I quit my job last November (wow, 10 months already) to work on the startup full time. I've done 85% of the code, server admin, graphics, everything. I'm pretty much running the operations by myself Co-founder is not a technical person, but does a good job with idea generation, responding to our alpha users, legal documents and creating bug tickets for me to fix ... but that's about it. He doesn't do much in the way of progressing the product to be ready for market (which is what we need most right now). I've urged him many
Why it failed: Well, I had a kinda ugly conversation with my team yesterday. I'm starting on our YC application for the winter term, and of course the first question is "will you move to the valley Jan-Mar if accepted?". My answer is a resounding "hell yea!" but my co-founder, and our #3 guy bo
wammin