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.
1,703 solutions
- startupShut down2008
Rebuttal to "A hacker's loneliness"
I too "wasted" most of my teens writing "pointless" programs - games in Basic that I never finished, assembly language programs optimized for old computers 20 years obsolete, and C++ programs with extensible architectures that no one else will ever extend. My father always warned me that one day I would wake up and realize I'd wasted my life sitting in front of a computer screen. Bullshit. When I was in college I ran into people I'd known in high school who told me some stories about what was really going on in the social circles I'd missed while I spent my days with a computer, and I was shocked. Most of my "normal" peers who had social lives drank heavily and got into drugs - some died or nearly died. Many of them became teen parents. I never even knew! My obsession with computers had kept me insulated from all of that. Now that I'm a working adult and married, I look back with wonder
Why it failed: I too "wasted" most of my teens writing "pointless" programs - games in Basic that I never finished, assembly language programs optimized for old computers 20 years obsolete, and C++ programs with extensible architectures that no one else will ever extend. My father always warned
phaedrus
- startupShut down2008
Shoestring Budget? Starting to feel growth issues on your back-end? Embrace unix and C
I'm one of the co-founders of Media Wombat ( flash search engine at http://mediawombat.com ) and we're a startup that's about 8 months old. We have no funding except what we can afford to do ourselves, no investors and very little spare hardware. Our site is a search engine - like google, but for flash content. We threw together the site in a weekend and have been slowly tweaking it over time but recently have run into some growth issues. If you have funding or investors and have growth issues, you can just throw more hardware at the problem and ta-da! You're fast again. However, for those of us who don't have money being thrown at us, we have to be a little more creative and start to look at optimization. I've got a couple of old machines and an 8-drive SCSI RAID in my basement that I'm using for our search engine to crawl the web and process the data that we index for our search engine
Why it failed: I'm one of the co-founders of Media Wombat ( flash search engine at http://mediawombat.com ) and we're a startup that's about 8 months old. We have no funding except what we can afford to do ourselves, no investors and very little spare hardware. Our site is a search engine - lik
scumola
- startupShut down2008
Trader Joe's Is Not Your Average Business (2002)
One day a few years ago, a guy at a Boston financial firm called up Trader Joe's headquarters and said he'd like to tour a store with a group of visiting Japanese investors. The brass at Trader Joe's was blunt: "You can't come." Not "We'd rather you didn't," or "Please don't." The visit was officially forbidden. This led to a predictable go-round about it being a free country and all, and Trader Joe's finally said okay, okay, you can come, but you don't get a tour. And as the investment company guy tells it, the tension in the air during the visit was thick enough to cut with a machete. Well, you probably can't blame the folk at Trader Joe's. They've got a phenomenal thing going, and don't want to give it all away. Some observers think that sales per square foot at Trader Joe's are hovering at about $1,000 -- twice the level of typical supermarkets. And with between about 70% to 85% of i
Why it failed: One day a few years ago, a guy at a Boston financial firm called up Trader Joe's headquarters and said he'd like to tour a store with a group of visiting Japanese investors. The brass at Trader Joe's was blunt: "You can't come." Not "We'd rather you didn't," or "Please don't." Th
daveambrose
- startupShut down2008
One (programming) language for the rest of your life. Which one?
If you had to pick one single computer language to use from now until the end of time, which one would you pick? What qualities are you looking for? What are your programming goals? If you like, you can specify a platform or libraries if they colored your choice of language.
Why it failed: If you had to pick one single computer language to use from now until the end of time, which one would you pick? What qualities are you looking for? What are your programming goals? If you like, you can specify a platform or libraries if they colored your choice of language.
watmough
- startupShut down2008
Ask YC: How to start becoming an entrepreneur while still being an employee
This short piece from the NYTimes (below) piqued my interest. It offers some advice on how to act like an entrepreneur as an employee. If you are not a burn-your-boat-on-the-shore type of person, how do you go about making the transition to full-time entrepreneur. Is it abrupt or gradual. I'm guessing gradual. As I make the transition, I'm working on building some web applications that I would find of use (language learning, memorization) How many of you look at creating your own startup as a hobby, rather than a business, or as both? What steps (most notably - to expand your comfort zone) do you recommend.? I've heard some crazy advice like lie down in a Starbucks for 10 seconds to desensitize yourself to what you think other people think. I'm thinking seriously of taking a break from my career to learn Spanish in a Latin American country. [http://tinyurl.com/2k2jdf] "First, act more li
Why it failed: This short piece from the NYTimes (below) piqued my interest. It offers some advice on how to act like an entrepreneur as an employee. If you are not a burn-your-boat-on-the-shore type of person, how do you go about making the transition to full-time entrepreneur. Is it abrupt or
wallflower
- startupShut down2008
My Startup: app turns music discovery into an online game - feedback?
www.thesixtyone.com what? thesixtyone, a web game that makes listening to new music a fun, adventurous experience. It's like a music scout role-playing game. how? Listeners are allocated virtual currency that they can spend promoting songs and are rewarded when their picks perform well. Top songs reach the homepage and are sorted into a radio playlist where listeners are a click away from discovering new sounds. status We're 3 months into our public beta, and, aside from balancing several "gameplay" mechanics, we've since introduced a couple of new features, including a more sophisticated genre system, show listings, artist photo reels, play history, and embeddable listener badges that syndicate your personal radio station across the web. about thesixtyone is myself and Sam Hsiung. I used to be a game developer (EA/Atari/Activision), but declined an offer to work on Xbox Live (my dream j
Why it failed: www.thesixtyone.com what? thesixtyone, a web game that makes listening to new music a fun, adventurous experience. It's like a music scout role-playing game. how? Listeners are allocated virtual currency that they can spend promoting songs and are rewarded when their picks perfor
JMiao
- startupShut down2008
Anywhere.FM acquired by imeem
We are very excited to announce that Anywhere.FM has been acquired by imeem (http://www.imeem.com), the leading social media network. Since our launch last August, Anywhere.FM has been dedicated to making it easy to upload, play, and share your music wherever you go. We have listened to our users and worked hard to provide them with the best music playback experience available on the Internet. The millions of tracks that our users have uploaded to Anywhere.FM over the last 6 months prove to us that we have been successful in achieving this goal. Today's announcement broadens the scope of Anywhere.FM's ambitions, bringing us together with imeem, a social networking site with a media-centric approach to connecting consumers. With imeem, users can enjoy, recommend and discover not only music, but film, video, TV programming and art, and connect with people who share similar tastes. Anywhere
Why it failed: We are very excited to announce that Anywhere.FM has been acquired by imeem (http://www.imeem.com), the leading social media network. Since our launch last August, Anywhere.FM has been dedicated to making it easy to upload, play, and share your music wherever you go. We have list
iamwil
- startupShut down2008
Ask HN: What are some important "failure" lessons learned while doing your startup?
The benefits of failure are often overlooked and we sometimes forget that "failure" is part of moving you toward success. Please feel free to share any lessons learned from any ambitious undertaking.
Why it failed: The benefits of failure are often overlooked and we sometimes forget that "failure" is part of moving you toward success. Please feel free to share any lessons learned from any ambitious undertaking.
fiaz
- startupShut down2008
Ask YC: Story for Forbes - What really happens when your startup fails?
The last few inquiries I did on HN for Forbes stories had great results. Would love to hear from you guys on this one... I'm writing a story for Forbes about what really happens when your startup company fails. I need to hear from entrepreneurs who have had failing startup companies with an honest explanation of how they were affected financially and emotionally. The story looks to explore the difference between what potential entrepreneurs expect to go wrong and what really happens. This isn't a postmortem on why your startup failed - it's a short summary of what was lost in the process and how you dealt with that loss. Some basic questions - - How did you expect the first few years of your startup company to go? - What did you risk to launch your startup? - What do you felt you lost when your startup company failed? - How did you recoup from this loss? - What advice would you give aspi
Why it failed: The last few inquiries I did on HN for Forbes stories had great results. Would love to hear from you guys on this one... I'm writing a story for Forbes about what really happens when your startup company fails. I need to hear from entrepreneurs who have had failing startup compan
wschroter
- startupShut down2008
Prolonged Partial Sleep Deprivation for a Job (The worst year of my life [so far])
Sorry that this is so long, but, I need advice. I've included a TL;DR version at the bottom. I'm 25 and I have delayed sleep phase syndrome. Depending on the individual it manifests differently, in my case it presents as a natural tendency to go to sleep each night about two hours later than the night before (8:00 PM -> 10:00 PM -> 12:00 PM) sleeping for 8.5-9 hours. I've been this way since infancy. In high school it was difficult, in college it was manageable, while working it was unbearable. Five months ago I left my first job of out college. I had interned for the previous two summers and was essentially told by HR that I was obligated to comeback full-time. More than that, I wanted to comeback. Up until that point I had an extremely flexible schedule. As an intern I had a loose schedule, typically working more than 40 hours each week, and they were happy enough with me to of
Why it failed: Sorry that this is so long, but, I need advice. I've included a TL;DR version at the bottom. I'm 25 and I have delayed sleep phase syndrome. Depending on the individual it manifests differently, in my case it presents as a natural tendency to go to sleep each night about two hour
sleepy
- startupShut down2008
Lessons learned from a failed idea at Startup Weekend
The team is more important than the idea. Leadership and clearly defined roles are a must. Strategy and value proposition should be decided and communicated.
Why it failed: The team is more important than the idea. Leadership and clearly defined roles are a must. Strategy and value proposition should be decided and communicated.
blakeperdue
- startupShut down2008
Ask HN: Stormpulse valuation
We are looking to place a value on our startup as we seek a round of funding. The startup was seeded on sweat and roughly 50k, and we expect to take 300k-500k to expand our coverage and services and work on the venture full-time. Coincidentally, PG defines this as the median range of investment for startups coming out of YC in his "Why There Aren't More Googles" essay. I will try to be informative but discrete. We had between 1 million and 5 million unique visitors to our domain between Aug 15 and Sept 15. Our map is used as an embeddable widget on 400+ other sites, many of which are well-trafficked media outlets, and our map has been used on CNN during their hurricane coverage. O'Reilly also happened to mention our site during his Web2.0 keynote. Also, we have received hundreds of voluntary tips, donations, and thank-you emails. So what percentage should we expect to hand over for this
Why it failed: We are looking to place a value on our startup as we seek a round of funding. The startup was seeded on sweat and roughly 50k, and we expect to take 300k-500k to expand our coverage and services and work on the venture full-time. Coincidentally, PG defines this as the median rang
wensing
- startupShut down2007
Absolutely, DO NOT, get a co-founder!
An oft lamented consern is the difficulty in finding a co-founder. Next to this is the regular discussion of what kind of founder to get, how to know you've got a good one... and all the possible problems that can happen when founders don't agree. Well, I'm am old man at almost 40 and I've spent the last 18 years working for startups of less than 100 people, many of them successful, and almost all of them founded by more than one person-- and in almost all situations I knew at least one of the founders very well. The number one thing that caused the unsuccessful companies to fail was fights between the co-founders. And the successful ones-- were ones where the co-founders were very harmonious, because they had worked together for years before founding the company (multiple instances of this.) Of course, there were also instances where co-founders had worked before and they still fought a
Why it failed: An oft lamented consern is the difficulty in finding a co-founder. Next to this is the regular discussion of what kind of founder to get, how to know you've got a good one... and all the possible problems that can happen when founders don't agree. Well, I'm am old man at almost 4
BitGeek
- startupShut down2007
The Quotes That Motivate Me
Attitude determines outcome. - Jim McGraw, COO of Marion Laboratories Be the first, be the best, or be different. - Jacyln Easton Chance favors the prepared mind. - Louis Pasteur Elegance is for tailors. Don't always believe in the numbers. There is always room for human judgment. - Albert Einstein Great ideas come into the world as gently as doves. - Albert Camus Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is, I don't know which half. - John Wanamaker I do not love the money. What I love is the making of it. - Philip Armour I guess we can make them, although we never have. - Benjamin Franklin Goodrich I never gamble. - J. P. Morgan A man to carry on a successful business must have imagination. He must see things as in a vision, a dream of the whole thing. - Charles Schwab If I could get $25,000, I would spend $24,000 on advertising, the remainder in making Coca-Cola
Why it failed: Attitude determines outcome. - Jim McGraw, COO of Marion Laboratories Be the first, be the best, or be different. - Jacyln Easton Chance favors the prepared mind. - Louis Pasteur Elegance is for tailors. Don't always believe in the numbers. There is always room for human judgment
edw519
- startupShut down2007
What I learned about women & business today
Friday afternoon is Women & Entrepreneurship, a speaker series with sixty girls... and me. Today we had a panel of five women, all at roughly the vice president level of their respective organizations. Three were from Wall Street, one from NBC, and the last from Campbell Soup. As I walked to class in the rain, the questions raised by today's thread were still fresh in my mind. So I was pleasantly surprised that some of the discussion was useful for understanding why there aren't more female entrepreneurs. Today I discovered something. That is, if you take the time to ask women about their impressions of the business world you can learn some interesting stuff. What follows are some of the more insightful points that were made. I'm not making any claims about "the nature of women." Rather, I'm just echoing what was said. (I'll try to separate my commentary from the actual points.) So,
Why it failed: Friday afternoon is Women & Entrepreneurship, a speaker series with sixty girls... and me. Today we had a panel of five women, all at roughly the vice president level of their respective organizations. Three were from Wall Street, one from NBC, and the last from Campbell Soup
Alex3917
- startupShut down2007
Number of founders - statistics
I've done some research on how many founders successful technology companies have. Here are the numbers for 100 publicly traded companies +--------------------+-----------+ | number of founders | frequency | +--------------------+-----------+ | 1 | 40 | | 2 | 31 | | 3 | 17 | | 4 | 6 | | 5 | 2 | | 6 | 1 | | 7 | 1 | | 8 | 1 | | 13 | 1 | +--------------------+-----------+ Some caveats The number of sole founder companies is probably slightly exaggerated because sometimes one person is so much more prominent that the others are never mentioned. I did a little double checking though. Another important thing is that some companies were omitted because I knew only that they had several founders but I wasn't able to find out exactly how many. I suspect there are more companies with 4, 5, 6 or more founders. Unfortunately without numbers about failed companies we still don't know the success rati
Why it failed: I've done some research on how many founders successful technology companies have. Here are the numbers for 100 publicly traded companies +--------------------+-----------+ | number of founders | frequency | +--------------------+-----------+ | 1 | 40 | | 2 | 31 | | 3 | 17 | | 4
fauigerzigerk
- startupShut down2007
Non-US Visa Applicants to the US - Don't You Think It's Time We Compared Notes?
OK, I'll kick things off. In our case, we have a US founder and two UK founders, a further two US employees, and a UK employee.. We started life as a UK limited company, and then incorporated a US Delaware parent co. So now the UK company is wholly owned by the Delaware corporation, and all the shareholders hold stock only in the US co. Sound complicated? It is, but entirely doable and we negotiated fixed fees and payment deferral with our US lawyers (UK lawyers are twice the price by the way..). This was not the most efficient way of getting from zero to functioning company, but it has presented us with some interesting options for visas. Firstly, the UK guys (founders and employee) can be employees of the UK company and get B1 visas for the US for the first twelve months . Physically, we can be in US, but be paid by the UK entity. We can do this for 12 months than get E2 (Treaty Invest
Why it failed: OK, I'll kick things off. In our case, we have a US founder and two UK founders, a further two US employees, and a UK employee.. We started life as a UK limited company, and then incorporated a US Delaware parent co. So now the UK company is wholly owned by the Delaware corporati
petesmithy
- startupShut down2007
The Entrepreneurial Attitude
My girlfriend works at a little coffee shop called "It's a Grind". Recently a Starbucks moved in right across the street. The owner, John, tacked a letter up on the wall. I thought it was so great and inspiring that I took a picture and decided to share it. Here it is: ==== To: TEAM GRIND From: John Guys, We have had a lot of questions from customers and friends about Starbucks going in across the street. Here are some things you might share with customers, assuming that you agree with them: 1) Starbucks WILL be competition. Will Starbucks get some of our business? -yes. Will we get some of their business? -YES. Our drinks taste better than theirs, our store is nicer and more comfortable and our staff is more friendly. I get a lot of positive comments about our staff-it's doubtful that Starbucks does. These things will keep us competitive in spite of Starbucks brand recognition. An impor
Why it failed: My girlfriend works at a little coffee shop called "It's a Grind". Recently a Starbucks moved in right across the street. The owner, John, tacked a letter up on the wall. I thought it was so great and inspiring that I took a picture and decided to share it. Here it is: ==== To: T
palish
- startupShut down2007
Ask YC: Experiences with founder burnout?
One of the reasons I've started using this forum is because I'm burnt out. I've been in a product development startup in China for the past 10 months (as in the design and engineering of real, physical products to ship back to Canada/the US) and it's been the most exciting and learning-intensive time of my life, but I've hit a wall and now it looks like this means the end for all of us here. We were undertaking a pretty ambitious project (though we only learned of its true difficulty along-the-way), and it's still technically possible and definitely marketable -- but requires a lot more money and time than can be committed given my pretty-much-incapacitated state. Burnout feels incredibly illogical, because you can't do what you tell yourself you want to do. You can have a conversation with someone and get right fired up about an idea in-the-moment, but when you try to execute, a blanket
Why it failed: One of the reasons I've started using this forum is because I'm burnt out. I've been in a product development startup in China for the past 10 months (as in the design and engineering of real, physical products to ship back to Canada/the US) and it's been the most exciting and le
h34t
- startupShut down2007
What ideas have you implemented that have failed, and why?
In the "What ideas do you regret not implementing?" thread, Maurycy suggested turning it around and asking "What ideas have you implemented that have failed anyways?" After all, most of us are more worried about the risk that we'll work our asses off building something cool and then find nobody likes it rather than the risk that we'll never get started at all. I agree with maurycy that this is a far more interesting question, so I took the liberty of submitting this as a discussion topic. Please be more specific than "Because there was no market for it" - that's obvious, why wasn't there a market for it (or turning it around, why'd you implement it if there was no market), and how does it differ from projects you've done that have succeeded.
Why it failed: In the "What ideas do you regret not implementing?" thread, Maurycy suggested turning it around and asking "What ideas have you implemented that have failed anyways?" After all, most of us are more worried about the risk that we'll work our asses off building something cool and t
nostrademons
- 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
- 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
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