What products have you failed at?

I started a coworking space around 2008. I loved it. Had great times, met lots and lots of people. Made stuff happen irl.

I started it with two other people which ended up being a bad fit. One had lots of personal things going on. The other just ended up being a ****. So after 2 years of effort and zero monetary benefits I left. I chose not to keep any shares as the whole situation was just too difficult and stressful.

It's still going today, but it's lost all the community aspect which is what I brought to it.

I tried to bring Açai to the US about 10 years ago (as a dessert, not as a "health food"), with a couple business partners. Didn't really lose any money, so that's good.

On the surface, it's hard to imagine marketing a higher-calorie alternative to Ice Cream and Smoothies :)

Turns out, it's a logistics & import/export problem as well. Açai loses it's flavor rather quickly (in Brazil it's served very, very fresh). It can be flash frozen, but a lot of the nutritional value is lost in the process (along with the flavor, imo).

Around the same time, a company successfully brought it to market in the US (I believe capitalizing more on the "health food" fad than the genuine taste of the dessert). I end up buying some and trying it every few years. It tastes horrible (and they cut it with blueberry pulp, which just ends up making people think açai tastes like blueberries, and they probably lose interest).

Not too upset about it. Definitely validates the advice that you should spend a lot of time and effort validating your assumptions to death before spending any money on a concept. Probably could have spent a fortune figuring all this out.

Now, if someone has a process for getting Cupuaçu to the US I'd sink a small fortune into that :)

My friend and I started a pop-up fried chicken shop called Pollo Disco.

This was super fun, but 1. backbreaking physical work and 2. money losing.

We've taken a 'hiatus' for now, but my advice to anyone looking to start a pop-up restaurant (unlikely on Indie Hackers) is understand how time consuming this will be, and pick food that's easy/cheap to make!

I'm writing a longer post on how to apply learnings from this to building basically anything. Hopefully, I'll be done soon.

Not sure if something can fail if I didn't even launch it but there were multiple small products I tried to make but them being built soley for the idea that it might make a little money rather than wanting to build them led me to losing all motivation and dropping them.

Back in 2011, I was working on a cross-build service for Unity. Everyone wanted to build games for iOS (which Unity had just started to support) even though they owned a PC. I built a service to do the iOS build, but never launched it. I couldn't figure out how to get people to give me their code (this was before giving an external service access to a git repo was cool a-la circleCI, etc) so people had to FTP me their code (not the end of the world), but I kept adding features and never launching.

Project lost momentum and I quit...wish I hadn't because then Unity launched a similar service, at a premium cost and the community rejoiced at their brilliance. Wish I had known to just freaking ship my stuff, I could have done so much with the simple MVP I had built.

In 2016 I joined a group of people working on an app to monitor heart failure patients on medicare (it was about hospitals avoiding fines from the US government for readmissions). Problem here is selling in hospitals is INCREDIBLY BRUTAL. I learned a lot about what it takes to sell to hospitals and what it means to deliver value for an individual vs an organization.
In that one I learned that software in hospitals isn't bought, its sold- and without an industry insider that people respect, it is an incredibly difficult sell even when you generate lots of value.

My previous startup, Doko - a social media platform to focus on long-form content.

In 2015, we started exploring the idea of creating a social platform that's more like a bite-sized magazine, to create a place for longer-form, and hopefully more meaningful, content. It was after Apple had stopped Newsstand, and I wanted a place to continue some of the beautiful mobile-first magazine experiences.

We spent a lot of time creating a powerful mobile-first publishing experience, and I am proud of the tool we created and some of the amazing content published on the platform. We even got a feature on Adobe's blog!

However, the market was not on our side. Mobile Social Media moved further into short-form content, with the rise of IG stories, Tik-tok, and further into video format. Our idea of a text driven long-form mobile magazines found loyal users but ultimately failed to gain a large enough audience to attract further funding.

Key Learnings:

• Two-sided market takes time and resources to build. One of the key failings of the product was the time it takes to create a piece of content. Because it was long-form, people would take up to an hour to create a post. These are beautifully crafted content, but it also means for most of the users who read and not create, they don't have a lot of new content everyday to keep them coming back.
• Keep an eye on retention. Even though we had some successful partnerships with social media influencers to drive installs, the lack of constant content update means we aren't keeping enough users over time.
• Ship early! It took us about 1.5-2 years to build the product. Even though we've been talking to potential users throughout this whole time, there are many crucials things that we did not realise until we shipped. (This is why for markd.co (relationship manager), we shipped super early and continue to try to ship as often and as much as we can — and really push for feedback from users)
• On a personal level, I've also learned to not stress about every thing. There are a million things you can stress yourself over when working on a new product / startup / project. However I've learned that most of that stress has no value, and 99% of the things I worried about had no impact.

The company was closed down, along with the app and related websites. You can still see a glimpse of it here: (https://www.pepwuper.com/portfolio/doko-powerful-social-media-publishing-platform/)

My first failure! Death by lack of an existing audience.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1059050891/blacklet-the-premium-black-paper-notebook?ref=nav_search&result=project&term=blacklet