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12 Comments

What are some of your recent failures?

Every day I learn new things from fellow indie hackers' small win stories like 'we got our first customer' or 'we just crossed 25k MRR'.

So I just got curious to know if anyone likes to share recent lessons from failures like https://twitter.com/yongfook/status/1171311476222464001

Let's celebrate failures & grow.

  1. 5

    We were a couple weeks out from launching a new platform for our clients which was 3/4 months in the making. Lead dev terminated his contract with us and had to throw the entire project away. Was a blessing in disguise - Ended up reconnecting with an old friend I worked with 5+ years ago and we're a week or so away from launching an entirely new idea for our clients! Entrepreneurship is all about getting hit over and over again and finding ways. I wouldn't change it for anything! 😍

    1. 1

      I am glad that your back with a new team now :)

  2. 5

    We lost 1/3rd of our traffic in May after a google algorithm update. Up until then it had week over week up and to the right and we were just about to hit 50k monthly in organic traffic.

    We are still slowly recovering traffic-wise but it was incredibly demoralizing and demotivating.

  3. 3

    I missed my launch date. Goal was to have the new platform available before the beginning of the school year, and well, that didn't happen. So I pushed out a free half baked solution that can deliver what I promised if the user is willing to put in some extra effort. Not perfect, but something.

    I've decided hard deadlines don't really work for me and I'm setting small goals and grinding away at them. Hoping that gets me to the finish line sooner than later.

    1. 2

      My favorite mental model for product development is the Kaizen method. Kaizen is Japanese for "improvement", and the method is super simple:

      1. Ask yourself "what can I make and ship today / this sprint that makes my product a little bit better?"
      2. Make it"
      3. ship it"

      It has some pretty strong advantages;

      • You ship in small increments, which gives you a really tight feedback cycle.
      • Your product is constantly improving.
      • You have a strong sense of progress.

      It rests heavily on the compounding effect, where small improvements over time are worth more than the sum of the individual improvements. It works really well for software development, where you do not have many problems in terms of logistics.

      1. 2

        Hey @undreren I was not aware of Kaizen method. Thanks for sharing it. This is something I am practising right now with my team but didn't know it's called Kaizen :)

        1. 3

          It also works in terms of looking at your business as a product; "What can I change about my business that helps me get more done / deliver more value?"

          People often forget that the business is one of the products, they use to get work done.

      2. 1

        Hey thanks for sharing. I'll look into that!

  4. 3

    I pushed a new version of my Android app without properly testing the release version that worked like this:

    • Open App
    • App Crashes

    It was live on Google Play for about 4 hours before a user pointed it out to me (in French 🤷🏼‍♂️)

    Either (a) test your code or (b) don't rush out production releases. Ideally, both!

    1. 1

      Agree. One of my biggest learning as a coder is to take the database back every day and don't rely on hosting providers.

  5. 2

    Well, I just broke Danger World for a few days earlier this week. Like many stories, this one begins with a bug. I got reports that games were acting weirdly and someone got spammed with the system maximum (50) notifications waiting for them! I thought I had fixed it at the end of the first day, and my "final" smoke testing of live prod led me to get hit with 50 notifications in a single-player game! I hadn't realized it could do that! The bug report I had gotten about notifications was from a multiplayer game.

    Danger World has a "What's New?" pop-up, and I used it to tell everyone that Danger World was going to be off until fixed. It was very stressful having the game be unavailable, especially with the ads I had been recently running. Onboarding was unaffected by this entirely, but no player wants to go through a whole first-time setup process only to be told to come back later if you want to actually play the game.

    Everything is back up now. I'm grateful that I was able to temporarily turn off things and inform my users quickly and reliably. I reached out to everyone that reported the bug and collected more feedback.

  6. 4

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

    1. 1

      Will have a look. Thanks for sharing.

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