There's an interesting story hiding between the lines in the post.
The first two ventures, polishmywriting and kindling, seems to me to be great ideas - yet the author failed even though he had a working product. The third product made it because of good press. It seems like talent and hard work has gone into making these products, and the first two shouldn't have failed outright. What went wrong?
In one word: Sales. This is an often overlooked component of doing a tech-startup. founders spend their time making a great product and rely on the techcrunch effect (or the slashdot effect, word of mouth, call it what you want) to sell the product. Unless you're really lucky, or have an extraordinarily good product this approach won't make you money. The article is a great example of someone making a product, and then giving up when noone comes to the website to buy it. Selling it is at least as much work as creating it. Pick up the phone and call potential customers, go to tradeshows, stop people in the street, sell to all the people you meet in your local bar. It works.
Note - I'm not in anyway trying to degrade the author (or anyone else). It's an easy mistake to make, especially if selling isn't really your thing. I've made this mistake myself.
You're dead on. One day I'll write about how I kept hitting my head against the wall, figured it out, and made $$$ then I'll write an innovators guide to selling. You'll know about it because I'll be that good by then. I'm not there yet.
I've been meaning to do a post like this, listing all of the dozens of things I've tried. What I've found success with is similar, try to find environments where ideas are already being proven and take the best parts. I adapted an HTML widget that was making the rounds on layout/generator sites to become a Facebook widget, and that reached 9 millions users.
What upset me though was the difficulty of monetizing some small fun widget. So next I looked at what is working on Facebook and that could also make money, and found some widgets where you can collect points to rank higher among your friends. Sort of like social games, just without the game part. I implemented a similar app, but simplified it even further. It is doing very well and is now in the top 20 apps on MySpace.
I had no success at all with ideas that were purely my own, and had to look for elements elsewhere. It's like taking ideas from nature, except in this case nature is the app ecosystem.
Great post. I think you highlight the real value of the HN community. High quality discussion makes listening for ideas easier as there is more signal with less noise to wade through.
There are few other places on the web where you can listen for quality ideas, discuss problems, and get feedback at a really fast (and efficient) rate.
Good post. I find it really interesting that you'd have a bunch of ideas that you did actually follow through, though I am left with the following questions:
1. What was the timeline between the projects, how much time did you spend with them ?
2. Whats the aftermath of PolishMyWriting and Kindling ? What did you learn, etc ? Where did it take you ?
There is more to the story but I tried to stick to the main point I was making. In the future I'll cover what happened to PolishMyWriting. It's a problem I am passionate about. Eventually PMY found an audience and I used their feedback to turn it into a software service to check grammar, spelling, and style in web applications. I "launched" two weeks ago but that is a story still being written.
The first two ventures, polishmywriting and kindling, seems to me to be great ideas - yet the author failed even though he had a working product. The third product made it because of good press. It seems like talent and hard work has gone into making these products, and the first two shouldn't have failed outright. What went wrong?
In one word: Sales. This is an often overlooked component of doing a tech-startup. founders spend their time making a great product and rely on the techcrunch effect (or the slashdot effect, word of mouth, call it what you want) to sell the product. Unless you're really lucky, or have an extraordinarily good product this approach won't make you money. The article is a great example of someone making a product, and then giving up when noone comes to the website to buy it. Selling it is at least as much work as creating it. Pick up the phone and call potential customers, go to tradeshows, stop people in the street, sell to all the people you meet in your local bar. It works.
Note - I'm not in anyway trying to degrade the author (or anyone else). It's an easy mistake to make, especially if selling isn't really your thing. I've made this mistake myself.