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Did you or someone you know try to start a business that totally failed? Share it here! Too many blogs, podcasts, and books share inspirational stories of the bootstrapping entrepreneur and how they went from $20 in their bank account to millions seemingly overnight. What you don't get to hear about as often are the far more numerous failures that have led to lost time, money, and in some cases, ruined lives. The impetus for this thread is my own recent experience. The Beginning My friend and I were both at a point in our lives where giving a go at starting a business made sense. We were both unmarried and had recently voluntarily left jobs that were tolerable but not what we really wanted to be doing. We both had money saved up we were willing to lose so we began a search for a hole in the market. This was mistake number one. Instead of being experts in a field and taking a rolodex full of potential customers with us and doing our own thing, we identified a real need (preventing or reducing social isolation and loneliness) and decided we would try to come up with a service to combat that need. After a few weeks of refining the idea and getting feedback, external feedback became fairly consistent: this is a real problem and a great idea, but I don't see how you can make money with this. The idea's good! Let's forge ahead! Getting Started We had read startup books and advice online about the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) so it was time to get working on one. Because our service was web-based, almost 100% of the MVP effort would be in web development. We looked around at outsourced stuff but felt more comfortable hiring someone local so we could have regular meetings and updates and get things changed or fixed quickly. We interviewed a few people and settled on one. He ended up being somewhat competent but once we learned how to use Github (after we had paid him for several sprints) we saw just how little work he was doing for what we paid him. We then parted ways with him and hired some Ukrainian developers to continue the work The Train to Nowhere Comes off the Rails The Ukrainian company gave us a very reasonable price for our initial task with them and finished it quickly and with good quality. Finally we had found a good developer! Ignore that people were still telling us they couldn't ever see anyone paying for our service. Once we have a great website people will want it! Oddly, the Ukrainian company started to take longer and longer and the billable hours more and more as we stayed with them. We had a half finished website we couldn't really show anyone to try and sell because it was fully functional, so we stuck to it and finished the site. Selling (or Trying To) Now that we had a finished, functional site it was time to sell it. Cold calls and emails it is. That had a return rate of less than 5%. Then we started just showing up to places to introduce ourselves and either leave a card or get contact info for someone we could talk to later. That led to a handful of meetings that never led to anything as most people are too polite to say "I'm not interested. I won't be following up about this." Closing Up After a short time it was clear this service was doomed. After two months of aggressively trying to sell we decided to hang it up and move on. Tell me your stories of failed businesses!
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Nov 29, 2018 19:55
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Since it's already failed as apparently you couldn't monetize or attract users, if you don't mind sharing, what was the website for? How much money did you lose on it? I don't really have a story to share at this point, but I may in a year or two. Working in a "startup environment" right now but the future is pretty hazy.
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Nov 30, 2018 09:43
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The site was for a social wellness service that attempted to incentivize people to participate in social activities and events so they don't become isolated or lonely. The idea was to do something related to how insurance companies will either reduce premiums or provide rewards if people go to the doctor once a year, exercise, eat right, etc. Because there is a link to social well-being and physical and mental health, we thought people would be interested in a service like it. We spend almost $40,000 on it because we built a very complicated and fully functional website before we even asked people what they would want out of a service like this or if they even wanted it at all.
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Dec 1, 2018 21:33
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Modify it to reward people for calling their mother and charge the mothers per call.
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Dec 2, 2018 16:44
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