https://leadpilot.co - You could do cold email lead gen at the click of a button!
Well, it turns out that getting accurate lead information was hard, and LeadFuze was just crushing it in the space. I didn't want to compete with a fellow Micropreneur long-term. There were also concerns with how some people wanted to use the system. Someone wanted to purchase it off of me, and I ended up giving away the code for free.
CartHero - Abandoned shopping cart recovery! These are a dime-a-dozen nowadays, however I also wanted to spin it into something like a Baremetrics for e-commerce where it'd give you a nice breakdown on cross sells and upsells for customers, and which products people abandoned the most. This was fun, but a killer job offer about 6 months after I started pretty much caught my attention.
Pinix - The embedded operating system I designed and sold to some of the biggest pinball companies in the world. This is still in use today, but I don't license it out anymore. I just get a royalty check. This was truly a fun project to work on because who doesn't like pinball? Solenoids, switches, music, lights, it's the hacker's ultimate toy! It turns out that pinball companies only rev their systems once every decade or two, and their per-unit royalty margins are pretty slim, so I put this one on auto-pilot to focus on other things.
Subcast - Forecast and prevent subscriber churn by machine learning all of your subscriber interaction data and tying that to your marketing automation/retention efforts! My feedback on this is fuck machine learning. Data scientists are really smart, and they're super super valuable. I'm not one of them.
Still waiting to see if https://listninja.co makes it on the list, but I just started, so we'll see ;)
2
I would love to hear about Pinix. What made you start that? How did you make sales?
3
Hey Chip,
Sure, I'll gladly elaborate. So Pinix was an embedded operating system. Gaming devices are left on for hours and hours at a time and they need to be fault tolerant for a couple of reasons. In the event of a system lockup, you don't want to leave high voltage devices energized, and the system’s primary purpose is to make money on location, so it has to recover gracefully (or by a hard reset) when needed.
So, with that said, many of the control systems for these devices were moving from micro controller based systems to more full PC based systems. The bill of material cost and the potential expansion was a better deal for manufacturers wanting to put more HD content into their games. Many of the industry developers were just tossing stock linux/ubuntu images onto their games and experiencing a ton of failure due to either sudden power offs, disk corruption, background processes etc. My system pretty much out of the box solved a lot of those issues and included things like field upgradeability at the system level to either do full OS upgrades or strictly game code upgrades. There was also a very small DRM layer built in which some manufacturers required in order to do licensed themes (think Iron Man, AC/DC, etc).
I was a designer working on various software products and games in the industry already, so I knew people that were at the head of these companies. I also partnered with a friend that made hardware systems for the industry, and we sold our systems together as a package deal. It was a great benefit for the manufacturer and a great deal for us. It saved them R&D cost as well as time-to-market, and we collected up front fees on some deals, and recurring royalties on others. A lot of my sales can be directly attributed to me being involved in the community already (I was speaking at trade shows, etc), and I knew them very well. Now Pinix is used by 3 out of the 5 largest pinball manufacturers in the world as well as the largest air hockey and change-machine manufacturer in the world. It’s random, but it’s business, and thankfully it was in an industry whose chief product was fun.
I made Hear a Blog: we would have blog posts professionally read to turn them into podcasts. This was around 2010. We were the first startup to appear twice in This Week in Startups. We also started getting deals with some big blogs.
Ultimately it failed because to sell audio advertisement we needed a humongous inventory that would have required us to burn through about $10k a month. We didn't know how to raise money, we were Seedcamp Paris finalists, we went there and the investors weren't tech savvy, expected patents, etc.
We spent a total $2k launching that business and running it for about a year. I'm very proud of that.
1
That might work as productized service. So instead ad money bloggers would pay you to make podcast.
1
We didn't want to charge bloggers. We didn't think most bloggers would be interested in paying for it. It's a novel product for which there was no demand. To make an analogue, there was nobody asking newspapers to turn the news into audio, but radio happened anyway.
3
I've been through so many failed products... One of my first was an adventure tracking app+website called tracpod. It recorded gps coordinates so you could track and playback journeys (like for track days, or traveling). I even built a simple arduino + gps unit that it could read data from.
I was young and really didn't put effort into making it a sustainable business project, but it was great development + design experience. It landed me my first real internship! Here's a few screenshots, you can tell their relative date by the skeuomorphism. Also the dials... I was really proud of the dials because they'd live animate as the track played through 😂
Nice idea , I see this can be all done by Strava and MapMyRide Intergration now ..
3
A good while ago I built a full product with shiny user manual (researched hours just to get the image right in the footer...), then I waited for people to come and buy it.
Because it was obviously cool. (I still think it was cool indeed... well, never mind). And because I gave one presentation about it at a conference. I actually even had one dev interested, but I didn't ask money for it, instead shared it in exchange for testing.
Also, I feared to market it more, because sometimes it didn't start up properly on 64 bit Windows (which, at the time, was not overly common). In retrospect that was a big mistake.
Looked around in my backups recently, found all the manuals, binaries ... except the source code. Not that it would be that relevant today, just for fun.
1
thanks for sharing! what was the product idea?
1
A preloader for swf games that pulled differential updates from your own CDN. The alternative at the time was using ad provider's preloaders, which then failed when the provider went out of business (and they did). First <I don't remember the name>, then MochiAds too.
2
It all started in 2011 when TripEdge was a holiday lead generation service for the independent UK travel agency market, it got lots of UK travel trade press mentions, holidaymakers loved it, it got a ton of organic traffic and requests for holidays, but no travel agent wanted to pay for it.
Then I turned TripEdge into a 'Groupon' style holiday offers by email service, again loads of sign-ups, but no travel companies wanted to advise their holiday offers in the emails (are you starting to see a pattern :)).
Then TripEdge became a holiday finder like 'FlightFox', that didn't work at all, no traction, no customers, no income.
Then I turned TripEdge into 'Travel Trade Intelligence', which was a curated email newsletter of the top daily travel news for travel company directors and business owners. I thought it was a good idea as no business owners I knew had time to keep up with the latest industry news, but business owners didn't agree.
Then I went freelance with pre-written travel content like holiday destination guides and got some much need travel trade press mentions, but again nobody wanted it, which leads to today.
TripEdge is now a 'productized' service that offers unlimited travel content for travel start-ups and online travel agencies in the UK for a fixed monthly fee, it launched on 7th May 2018 and hasn't gone so well so far...
Most of my failures aren't even up still. Although, I did spend more than a year building https://praconcloud.com, a project management app for CPAs, Lawyers.
Learned my lesson the hard way - Never build stuff for people you don't understand completely. Now, I am building for developers, and software companies and it's much easier to attract users now.
A transparent lead generation service for financial advisors. Turns out, a number of financial advisors didn't really want more transparency in client fees, they generally had more business than they could take, and the industry as a whole is crazy regulated to start with. The product was dead upon arrival and so, with a swift blow, we decided to pull the plug. The innocence of youthful entrepreneurship.
2
I made jobb.ie as a side project to find a job, and always thought it had potential but never put in the time to build it up.
I made mydeliverypal when I was delivering pizzas for a living. Turns out delivery drivers and fast food owners are hard people to reach (and please), but I thought the app had potential. App is now no longer live on play store... :(
Currently working on mydevportfol.io, but don't think it's going anywhere. Not sure trying to sell websites to developers was a solid proposition.
If you like failure stories you will love https://www.failory.com/
the unsuccessfull IH's brother
Oh boy, so many stories...
Well, it turns out that getting accurate lead information was hard, and LeadFuze was just crushing it in the space. I didn't want to compete with a fellow Micropreneur long-term. There were also concerns with how some people wanted to use the system. Someone wanted to purchase it off of me, and I ended up giving away the code for free.
CartHero - Abandoned shopping cart recovery! These are a dime-a-dozen nowadays, however I also wanted to spin it into something like a Baremetrics for e-commerce where it'd give you a nice breakdown on cross sells and upsells for customers, and which products people abandoned the most. This was fun, but a killer job offer about 6 months after I started pretty much caught my attention.
Pinix - The embedded operating system I designed and sold to some of the biggest pinball companies in the world. This is still in use today, but I don't license it out anymore. I just get a royalty check. This was truly a fun project to work on because who doesn't like pinball? Solenoids, switches, music, lights, it's the hacker's ultimate toy! It turns out that pinball companies only rev their systems once every decade or two, and their per-unit royalty margins are pretty slim, so I put this one on auto-pilot to focus on other things.
Subcast - Forecast and prevent subscriber churn by machine learning all of your subscriber interaction data and tying that to your marketing automation/retention efforts! My feedback on this is fuck machine learning. Data scientists are really smart, and they're super super valuable. I'm not one of them.
Still waiting to see if https://listninja.co makes it on the list, but I just started, so we'll see ;)
I would love to hear about Pinix. What made you start that? How did you make sales?
Hey Chip,
Sure, I'll gladly elaborate. So Pinix was an embedded operating system. Gaming devices are left on for hours and hours at a time and they need to be fault tolerant for a couple of reasons. In the event of a system lockup, you don't want to leave high voltage devices energized, and the system’s primary purpose is to make money on location, so it has to recover gracefully (or by a hard reset) when needed.
So, with that said, many of the control systems for these devices were moving from micro controller based systems to more full PC based systems. The bill of material cost and the potential expansion was a better deal for manufacturers wanting to put more HD content into their games. Many of the industry developers were just tossing stock linux/ubuntu images onto their games and experiencing a ton of failure due to either sudden power offs, disk corruption, background processes etc. My system pretty much out of the box solved a lot of those issues and included things like field upgradeability at the system level to either do full OS upgrades or strictly game code upgrades. There was also a very small DRM layer built in which some manufacturers required in order to do licensed themes (think Iron Man, AC/DC, etc).
I was a designer working on various software products and games in the industry already, so I knew people that were at the head of these companies. I also partnered with a friend that made hardware systems for the industry, and we sold our systems together as a package deal. It was a great benefit for the manufacturer and a great deal for us. It saved them R&D cost as well as time-to-market, and we collected up front fees on some deals, and recurring royalties on others. A lot of my sales can be directly attributed to me being involved in the community already (I was speaking at trade shows, etc), and I knew them very well. Now Pinix is used by 3 out of the 5 largest pinball manufacturers in the world as well as the largest air hockey and change-machine manufacturer in the world. It’s random, but it’s business, and thankfully it was in an industry whose chief product was fun.
Neat! Thanks for the info. Sounds like you utilized your network and unique skills to fill a need. I had never heard of HD pinball, so I googled it and found this. It's the most media I've seen on a pinball machine :D https://www.thepinballcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Dialed-In-LE.png
I made Hear a Blog: we would have blog posts professionally read to turn them into podcasts. This was around 2010. We were the first startup to appear twice in This Week in Startups. We also started getting deals with some big blogs.
Ultimately it failed because to sell audio advertisement we needed a humongous inventory that would have required us to burn through about $10k a month. We didn't know how to raise money, we were Seedcamp Paris finalists, we went there and the investors weren't tech savvy, expected patents, etc.
We spent a total $2k launching that business and running it for about a year. I'm very proud of that.
That might work as productized service. So instead ad money bloggers would pay you to make podcast.
We didn't want to charge bloggers. We didn't think most bloggers would be interested in paying for it. It's a novel product for which there was no demand. To make an analogue, there was nobody asking newspapers to turn the news into audio, but radio happened anyway.
I've been through so many failed products... One of my first was an adventure tracking app+website called tracpod. It recorded gps coordinates so you could track and playback journeys (like for track days, or traveling). I even built a simple arduino + gps unit that it could read data from.
I was young and really didn't put effort into making it a sustainable business project, but it was great development + design experience. It landed me my first real internship! Here's a few screenshots, you can tell their relative date by the skeuomorphism. Also the dials... I was really proud of the dials because they'd live animate as the track played through 😂
https://ibb.co/iYSWky
https://ibb.co/nj3hsd
https://ibb.co/dNjoXd
Nice idea , I see this can be all done by Strava and MapMyRide Intergration now ..
A good while ago I built a full product with shiny user manual (researched hours just to get the image right in the footer...), then I waited for people to come and buy it.
Because it was obviously cool. (I still think it was cool indeed... well, never mind). And because I gave one presentation about it at a conference. I actually even had one dev interested, but I didn't ask money for it, instead shared it in exchange for testing.
Also, I feared to market it more, because sometimes it didn't start up properly on 64 bit Windows (which, at the time, was not overly common). In retrospect that was a big mistake.
Looked around in my backups recently, found all the manuals, binaries ... except the source code. Not that it would be that relevant today, just for fun.
thanks for sharing! what was the product idea?
A preloader for swf games that pulled differential updates from your own CDN. The alternative at the time was using ad provider's preloaders, which then failed when the provider went out of business (and they did). First <I don't remember the name>, then MochiAds too.
It all started in 2011 when TripEdge was a holiday lead generation service for the independent UK travel agency market, it got lots of UK travel trade press mentions, holidaymakers loved it, it got a ton of organic traffic and requests for holidays, but no travel agent wanted to pay for it.
Then I turned TripEdge into a 'Groupon' style holiday offers by email service, again loads of sign-ups, but no travel companies wanted to advise their holiday offers in the emails (are you starting to see a pattern :)).
Then TripEdge became a holiday finder like 'FlightFox', that didn't work at all, no traction, no customers, no income.
Then I turned TripEdge into 'Travel Trade Intelligence', which was a curated email newsletter of the top daily travel news for travel company directors and business owners. I thought it was a good idea as no business owners I knew had time to keep up with the latest industry news, but business owners didn't agree.
Then I went freelance with pre-written travel content like holiday destination guides and got some much need travel trade press mentions, but again nobody wanted it, which leads to today.
TripEdge is now a 'productized' service that offers unlimited travel content for travel start-ups and online travel agencies in the UK for a fixed monthly fee, it launched on 7th May 2018 and hasn't gone so well so far...
You can read more on my Crunchbase profile at https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tripedge#section-recent-news-activity
I like the constant iteration
Most of my failures aren't even up still. Although, I did spend more than a year building https://praconcloud.com, a project management app for CPAs, Lawyers.
Learned my lesson the hard way - Never build stuff for people you don't understand completely. Now, I am building for developers, and software companies and it's much easier to attract users now.
Hoping https://monitorcertificates.com doesn't make it to the list. :D
A transparent lead generation service for financial advisors. Turns out, a number of financial advisors didn't really want more transparency in client fees, they generally had more business than they could take, and the industry as a whole is crazy regulated to start with. The product was dead upon arrival and so, with a swift blow, we decided to pull the plug. The innocence of youthful entrepreneurship.
I made jobb.ie as a side project to find a job, and always thought it had potential but never put in the time to build it up.
I made mydeliverypal when I was delivering pizzas for a living. Turns out delivery drivers and fast food owners are hard people to reach (and please), but I thought the app had potential. App is now no longer live on play store... :(
Currently working on mydevportfol.io, but don't think it's going anywhere. Not sure trying to sell websites to developers was a solid proposition.
But it's all good. Few more ideas on the way 👍