Project failure lessons (let's learn together!)
I think we spend a lot of time congratulating ourselves and others when our projects succeed. This is a great way to build up positive reinforcement but as we all know there are at least 5 failures for every 'success'. Sometimes this number is more like 50:1 or more.
Success can mean anything like getting your first paying customer, reaching 500 users or being featured in a large publication.
On the other hand, failure can happen for a plethora of reasons and usually is caused by more than one factor. I personally wouldn't even know of many of the reasons why my old projects failed. I want to learn from your experiences and I want everyone else on Indie Hackers to be able to learn too.
If you please;
- list one or more reasons why projects of yours failed in the past (possibly telling us how you found out/fixed it).
In the end I didn't know what users really wanted and was instead developing the features I thought users would want.
I think many of my past projects failed because I spent too much time developing them before releasing them or asking potential users for feedback.
Any overall projects or idea or features can be tested with your potential customers.
See would they pay for it, how usable it is, or do they even like it!
Please validate your projects with real users as early and as often as possible.
I actually wrote a post the other day on my website, looking back at the ventures I've started that went nowhere and have shut down: https://mentalized.net/journal/2019/12/12/failures/.
The overall conclusion I could draw there is that regardless of your awesome idea, excellent execution, and product/market fit - if no one knows about your products, it's not going anywhere.
That's definitely a lesson I am trying to learn and act on.
I hear you. Many developers are great at just that and lack selling.
Places to promote would include:
Best of luck with future projects!
Failure #1 - did not have the capital to build a full product line and retail stores would not accept a startup without a full line.
Failure#2 - I was not agile, I wanted to release perfect, hug-free code.
Failure #3 - lack of shared vision with co-founder. One of the services we offered was web design. If a customer left their FTP and email passwords the same my co-founder was going into their email account and reading customer emails.
Wow. That's so very dangerous. Such an invasion of privacy would surely land you in trouble.
I know right! He was proud of his behaviour and said would do it again. I found out when he told me he cross-sold SEO services and under priced a competitor by a few bucks, based on the email he read in the customers' inbox. That ended that business.
Scenario: It was proposed that we dive into generating leads for medical tourism, using high-quality content to educate consumer on specific proceedures, and then send them to a short-list of top certified clinics.
Reason it failed:
Conclusion: this could have easily survived into a mediocre lead gen company, so success was not the question - we just didn't have our hearts in it.
That's fair enough. Thanks for sharing your story. It will certainly help some of us to remember (we forget from time to time) that you have to be all in for your project to succeed!
yes very nice articles I read some of them and its really good and motivational points that are mentioned in the articles you can see some more points here https://startmyhouse.com/