Thanks! The current Dino theme was intentionally silly because it was for a contest. :)
I'm in the process of making it an actual product, including rebranding it. Still with a dinosaur theme for now, but more like http://docraptor.com in terms of professionalism. If people use it, I might rebranded it yet again based on feedback.
Thanks John- I'll give out talkasaur.us codes to anybody who wants one. :) I made it for a twilio contest, and just didn't feel like personally funding the entire Internet's conference calls just yet. :) email me at aaronlerch at gmail for a code.
(btw it's currently browser only, but when it goes publicly available it'll be both)
Except in my case, since I was learning as I went, I didn't have time to figure out why the less-mature technologies weren't working just right. Or I'd look at a problem and see it solved nicely for relational DBs, but still needing some manual work to make it work with a NoSQL DB... and when it came down to actually getting stuff done, I hated writing code I didn't have to write.
That's actually an interesting thought: if you're trying to learn a technology, doing a startup is the wrong thing to do. Because ultimately you are just wasting precious time on things that the business side doesn't care about. I hit that "conflict of interest" quite a bit through this process.
In my new sideproject I'm using MongoDB for the first time in my life. It works well and I haven't run into any obstacles yet; however, the data model for this webapp is trivially simple.
I wasn't, unfortunately. This was self-funded. The idea was to give it away for a period of time ("3 months free! Buy today, pay later!!!!1! OMG!!") in order to crack the chicken-and-egg problem of content vs visitors.
It's the "we had to give it a way for free" part that you should rethink. People like us are way to quick to price low/free because that's what we'd pay for the service. Not at all what your target customers are willing to pay however.
Don't worry, I haven't given up. :) Well, I haven't given up for good... in the short term, I just can't swing work+fam+startup. For now I'll just keep working on side projects and see if any of them make any headway. ;)
All fair questions (even if your conclusions about the value of my learning are a bit bogus ;) -- the value in learning does not always depend directly on the cost paid to learn.)
I have (almost) all the numbers. I can tell you what I spent, to the dollar. I can tell you about the traffic to the site, what they did, what was successful and what wasn't. I can't tell you how much time I spent on it because it varied so drastically over the past year. It ranged from 10 hours a week to 0 hours a week. It just depended on how busy things were at work and with the fam.
(EDIT: my wife tells me it was more than 10 hours a week. ;) )
The point of the post wasn't to give detailed numbers, but just to generally convey what I took away from it. Whether or not you know my numbers doesn't change what I learned. And just because I didn't mention it in the post doesn't mean I don't have it, that is a large assumption. I'm not sure how it makes the post meaningless. Perhaps you can't tell if you can trust it or not because you can't measure it? But even if there were numbers, that doesn't tell you whether you can trust it any more or less, so perhaps that's not it.
I wrote the retrospective post about the things I care about, not the things my customers cared about. You're absolutely right that almost all the stuff I listed is meaningless to my customers, and I never even mentioned it to them -- they don't care! :)
Also, I didn't go into it in the post (I was going for something shorter and readable/consumable) but I had two customers. Small businesses listing coupons, and people using the site looking for coupons. I thought about it from both perspectives every moment I worked on it. I geeked out about how I was doing it, but never lost sight of my customers. Sorry if that wasn't clear in the post.
You're also absolutely right that it was a poor choice of spaces. That was a huge lesson I learned. :)
So to summarize, take it for what you think it's worth. There's no law that says you have to read my lessons learned and apply them. But they are lessons I learned, regardless. Thx for reading!
1) Firstly, that you were in business to add value to customers and that was the primary motivation. It seems your primary motivation was to learn/experience it. Which is fine - it's just not what I assumed it was.
As Zig Ziglar would put it - To get everything you desire in life you just have to give enough other people what they want from life.
* Who knows what approach works better. For me, the Zig Ziglar approach has worked much better but that's a sample size of 1 person.
2) Secondly, my mistake in assuming your post was meant to help other people. If you could have added a note that it was meant mostly as a catharsis and written for yourself.
Then I wouldn't have assumed that there might be a lot of value for me.
Right now the value is in seeing a few things but the amount of effort is just not enough to actually know whether any of your mistakes other than not putting in enough work matter.
*
See, the key thing is your line on work being from 0 to 10 hours per week with some weeks being over 10 weeks.
How can you know your ideas and business were right or wrong with that amount of time?
For entirely selfish reasons (to help myself) I wanted to learn from your experience. However, if your experience is based on working an average of 10 hours a week, then it doesn't really say anything about what the market opportunity really is/was.
*
On a related note there seems to be a fascination on hacker news lately on apps done in 5 days and 'passive income' and how to succeed without working hard.
Are there any people there who are succeeding after working really hard?
Who are spending 5 months on their app and not 5 days?
You seem intent on believing the worst about my experience and efforts, and that's okay, as I said before, "take it for what it's worth." :)
But you did nail item #1 - I was primarily interested in learning/experiencing, and secondarily interested in adding value. That's one of the reasons I lost motivation and shut down the site, it is extraordinarily difficult for coupons/discounts to add value to businesses across the spectrum of business. Some businesses it works great for, many it doesn't. It was when I had that realization that I decided to end it.
I did spend time (sorry, probably not "much time") brainstorming business ideas that actually would add value to the businesses I knew, and I think some of those ideas are good, but just not feasible for me to do alone, so I'm not even pursuing them either.
I have a friend that has spent _years_ and tons of his own money working on his startup, and it's still struggling to succeed. I learned a lot from him as he was my mentor through this process. I hope his endeavor takes off, but it's a long road, and he has worked incredibly hard. I can connect the two of you if you actually want to talk to someone like that.
My suggestion to you would be to consider whether you can put in more effort into your next startup.
We each have our own beliefs on what works and then there's reality. So there's probably a chance that there is something that works very well but both of us would have to look at things from a different perspective.
For me I tend to believe that you can't really succeed unless you're 100% in it. That having a family pretty much rules out having a successful start-up. That's obviously not true as there are exceptions. Perhaps lots of them.
I think in the end it comes down to not giving up. However, again, that's just a belief and who knows what the reality is.
Thanks for offering to connect me to your friend. Not interested at the moment as I'm quite overwhelmed and already places like Hacker News are putting too much of the possibility of failure into my head.
My attitude is that failure isn't really possible and it's working amazingly well so perhaps I should only read posts that are very positive like the Yoghurt business one.
