👋 2021 - Let's talk about failed projects and learnings
2021 has come to end and everyone is talking about what they achieved in this year which is good and all the power to all of them for more success in coming years.
But I want to highlight those who did their best this year but didn't reach their goal.
Could you please post your project below and tell me why you failed and what different you wanna do next year?
Let's help and motivate each other 😎
One more year passed and I didn't manage to launch anything, mainly due to scope creep and not being able to focus on only one thing (I tend to jump from one personal project to another).
This year I want to launch a game and a micro startup, no matter their quality and how polished they are. I just need to launch something.
I failed to get traction and users launching my personal finance app Pleke. My goal for 2021 was reaching 5 thousand subscribers and I got 3. Not three thousand, just three.
I tried Product Hunt, Reddit Ads and some Discord channels. It's hard to get people to try out a PFM app because there's quite a deal of effort involved to set it up and make it useful.
It was not all in vain, I'm commited to work on Pleke for the next ten years. All the feedback I got I used to improve the landing page, the product pages on the stores, the onboarding and marketing positioning.
For 2022 I plan on spending at least $2,500 on advertising and focusing on my own country and language first. My goal is to reach 1,000 subscribers on Brazil. Then reinvest the revenue to reach english speaking countries.
Marketing is hard. This is the main lesson. We need to believe in our projects enough to spend money in order to earn money.
What a year it has been! I successfully launched and failed 4 products in 2021.
My biggest lessons I learned, and learned repeatedly is: marketing
Bad marketing (aka no marketing) will kill every product and project I make. I spend lots of time coding and some time designing. I need to spend more time marking my products.
Right now the only real "marketing" thing I do, is build in public by sharing posts here on IndieHackers, and sharing on my Twitter (@nickfrosty). I need to expand outward and market more.
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Here is a quick burb about each of the products I launched:
nameea.com - Hand curated branded domain name.
I spend way to much time browsing for awesome domains. So I created a simple way to share them with others
spacebird.io - Search and explore Twitter spaces.
Spaces are still SUPER new. Twitter is VERY slowly rolling out features and support for them. At the time I created this, there was no real way to search for current twitter spaces. This site was a bit hacky and VERY much a MVP. But it got the job done. I and others could search for live spaces to listen to.
boomerang.link - A bookmark manager and reminder tool.
The idea is you can save your bookmarks, and set automated reminders to "boomerang" them back to yourself later.
I built this out of a real desire and use for myself. I always have loads and loads of tabs open on my laptop and phone (slowing them down) since I wanted to read the content later. I wanted a way to remind myself of them, and effectively save them for later
I can relate my failures with you... All we developers do in the name of marketing is to post on Indiehackers/Producthunt + tweets. I think there should be some marketing guide just for developers.
Your products are really cool, especially boomerang.link, I love the concept and feel there is a potential for this.
Thanks! Im glad you like them. I also think their is potential for it. Maybe not a very large business behind it, but a nice slow growth product. I was really struggling with the design. I just could not figure out a good one that made sense for it. I eventually settle on the one it has now. Very MVP
Have you read the Minimalist Entrepreneur? I'm going through it right now, and it has some good information on indie-marketing.
I have not even heard about it. What kind of marketing does it talk about? I'll have to check it out
What stood out to me was starting with a community, and serving them before starting to market to a larger audience. It is written by the founder of GumRoad.
Ohhh I have heard of Sahil's book! I'll have to check it out for sure
Listing your projects as active, autopilot, back burner and graveyard is neat, nice home site 👍
Hey thanks! I can take all the credit for the idea for that though. It's sort of a combo between how Rob Hope and Josh Piggord have their projects display
What was your experience like when building on top of twitter? Any specific learnings regarding that?
I'm wondering whether twitter could be a useful platform to build on top of, but I'm a little hesitant on how big the b2b market for it actually is. I'm kind of comparing it to Shopify, which has a huge app business, but I'm personally not that excited to work on ecommerce products.
It seems like their is real potential with building on top of Twitter. The market is huge, and their are tons of products that are very successful.
I think creating a product on top of Twitter is really awesome and can be very profitable. But it strong depends on the product. Most of them seem to do the same thing: schedule tweets, give better analytics, or both. Products like blackmagic.so are taking it to the next level. Basically building a full CRM for Twitter.
My experience was just okay. My view is a bit skewed from it. Mostly because the Twitter spaces are so very new, their API for it is pretty sparse. I have some plans for it in the future to create some sort of recording tool. But that's a future me thing.
Nice idea!
I "failed" with MandaEmprego (literal translation: send job): https://mandaemprego.com.br/
It's a platform to help people to find a job and build a career inside startups/tech companies reusing your knowledge of operational jobs e.g. attendant in call centers, markets, stores, etc
It started as an idea for my final project for MBA and I think this idea has a niche and could be profitable but I stopped working on this after I finish the final project. Maybe I return to work on it on 2022
This is interesting. I'm curious: what made you quit this project, though? Or at least call it a failure? Maybe you just need to change lanes and explore what directions this project can potentially take?
With my past projects, I've noticed it's also the narratives we build in our minds to call it quits. I've found myself calling a few past projects as "failures" instead of pivoting or being open to what other route might make those projects a success. Not sure if I can explain myself well but thought to share this.
It's a good point, I'll think about it... I believe there are other paths to follow with this project but I'm not knowing how to identify them
Looks cool idea. In my opinion as a founder of some products, I don't see useless but you need to make your landing page more beautiful 🔥
Asking the user details in the fold directly without letting them know first why your product is useful is a bit bad UX.
I agree on the UX bit with you @aliboukeroui
Thanks for the feedback, I'll search for better practices!
Check https://frontendor.com/
I sort of failed with https://opencoverletter.com:
It uses GPT-3 to generate cover letters. I got a few customers but this is not sticky enough to retain customers. Also, I had some stripe issues the day I launched on product hunt. On top of all that, it didn't work as well as it could now (Open AI allows custom training models now).
Hey, this sounds interesting. Are you open to making another tweaked version of this for a different audience? Let's talk if you are interested. This is one of the things I do - https://tractionmate.com
Yes, I'm definitely open to that. Want me to send you an email or Twitter message?
Perfect, let's connect through email and explore.
I developed and released https://booksbank.co.uk in 2021, but unfortunately I have totally misunderstood how complex it is to launch a project that require geografical number to reallt take off..
What i have learned is that need to make sure the next project has a good growth plan and does not require thousands of client for it to be usable!!
Built a hourly PSI & PM2.5 alerts to a Telegram channel this weekend, it is similar to a popular Flood Alerts channel.
I launched a product https://www.codepartner.me and failed to lift it off after having worked on it for over 6 months. I am still working on it and trying to figure out possible ways to pivot the idea.
The concept of the platform is to connect two coders through video call (and also provide tools like code editor and whiteboard) so that they can code together and do things like mock interviews, competitive programming, work on their projects, and do knowledge sharing.
We gained traction and got around 2,000 users on the platform but there is close to zero activity. I think people definitely found the idea interesting enough to sign up but weren't motivated to use it for some reason. There is also a challenge with this idea of maintaining a constant supply and demand of users from both sides, since we are connecting two users together (just like Uber).
This could be tweaked to connect "somewhat" knowledgeable coders with newbies.
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