Share your failed projects?

Me: "Hey do you know that you can also touch a touch screen with your nose?"
Me2: "wow dude, that is so useful!"
Me: "For what?... I know! We can make a Coke snorting game!"
Me2: "What... no, what's wrong with you... we can make a Push Ups app using your nose!"

Me + Me2: "Great, let's gather up 6 random fitness trainers for a photoshoot day for them to perform push ups against a glass wall with a green screen so they will disturbingly train the user while he performs the push ups, and get a cool American voice to accompany it!"

And so Nose Push Ups was born:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.com.KalromSystems.NosePushUps

https://apps.apple.com/il/app/nose-push-ups-chest-fitness-breast-workout/id1152446600

And it failed. But it was fun :-)

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I’ll probably write up a longer version of our experience for IH, but my biggest take away was: Kill your babies. I had too much emotionally invested in the potential of the idea to shut it down until long after it was time. I had serious loss-aversion about what it could be and what it meant about who I was if it stayed alive.

In the end, it was an anchor (financially, emotionally, and legally) that needed to be cut loose. Doing so gave us the space to make Tiler More and explore other ideas. Should have done it sooner!

In my previous career, I was a teacher. I spent ~5 months developing a mobile app that allowed my kids to maintain some of the math skills they'd potentially lose during COVID. Was a great first project but doomed from the beginning… waaaaay too many math apps out there.

Later on I built a digital student data folder https://app.schoolbo.io/ in hopes of turning it into a modest source of income. It was a classic case of building before validation 😵‍💫

I’ll leave it at 2 to keep the comment relatively short, but there’s plenty more.

Moral of the story: To take an “L” usually means you took a Loss. But it can also be you learned a Lesson. It just depends on how you look at it.

Maybe not failing, but definitely growing slower than what's ideal: https://www.updog.marketing is Chrome extension that shows the engagement rate of any TikTok or Instagram account. The problem is that there are no growth loops and no network effects, so currently it relies completely on word of mouth which means it's essentially at a stand still to glacier pace in growth.

My takeaway it so approach new project ideas through the lens of whether they can sustain growth by themselves, as part of the core mechanism of the platform or product. If they can, maintaining it as a side project will be a hell of a lot easier :)

I made a color app that can generates palettes for your website:

• ensured all colors gel well together, since it was based on human designers
• could distinguish between muted, vivid, and other palettes
• could generate thousands of colors with the quality of hand-picked colors
• recommend color pairings for brand guidelines via AI

Alternative to:

• Color generators based on math that often clashed colors or felt unnatural
• Picking colors by hand, though beautiful, was error-prone and time-intensive

I shut it down because I didn’t think I could make money from it and only specialized designers could really see and understand the value of it. I hope to revive it in the future, but I have to focus on other monetized tools for designers / marketers / freelancers first.

I built astramind.io which was a community of makers building in public. I was able to onboard 60 makers on the platform but the engagement rate was less than 5% despite special efforts like email digests & community activities.

Never really took off and was burning out as a result. So had to shut down the product.

if you're interested, I have described my full story here Shutting down Astramind

https://emojihomepage.com - a simple emoji finder that remembers your recently used emojis. It's kind of impossible to promote a similar project unless you focus on the long-tail-SEO opportunities (IMO). So, it never picked up as a single-page project. Although it's being used by about 200 persons daily, there's no growth. ¯\(ツ)/¯

I built an escape room style game: https://11thhour.xyz/ as an art project. Basically, 1 hour per week, across the world, the game opens, and everyone competes to solve the puzzle as quickly as possible.

It got a few hundred users, but never really took off. Fun project though :)

In 2015 I created the Crux Collective (this is a snapshot of it cruxcollective.marcrleonard.com) ... It was a news aggregator for the outdoor industry. A part of me wishes I could spin it back up, but with more automated systems. Though, ultimately, I don't think I want to run anything resembling a media site ;-)

Back in 2015, I created a social selling site called SocialTraders. My goal was to build a competitor to Craigslist. I went with a Pinterest-style design and forced users to log in using Facebook so they would not be as anonymous as users on Craigslist. This was around the same time you would hear in the news about people being kidnapped while meeting to buy stuff on Craigslist. I was able to get a few hundred users listing items on the site. Some even made sales. This was my first large solo development project, and I learned a ton. Around 2016, Facebook released Marketplace, and I realized my site didn't stand a chance :)

To keep up with my latest projects, follow me on Twitter and My Blog