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How My Startup Failed
- nopassrecover 17y agoI could swear this has been on here before... In any case an interesting story though perhaps not relevant so much to web startups
- mseebach 17y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=303780 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=303780
- nopassrecover 17y agoGood find :-)
- mseebach 17y agoNot really :) http://searchyc.com/condom http://searchyc.com/condom
- rjurney 17y ago"I was about to become the first person in America to sell condom key chains." Just in case you didn't rtfa yet, this is how it opens :)
- edu 17y agoThere was no doubt about it: I had discovered The Next Big Thing. Like Edison and the lightbulb, like Gates and the pc operating system Ouch.
- jjs 17y agoI adore that customs clerk!
- gord 17y agoIts always nice to read about how startups succeed, but maybe more can be learned from these postmortems. I was thinking you almost want a dedicated site for these... but could that be achieved by just having tags and filtering by tag on HN ? Tags would help with a range of scenarios, such as if I'm only interested in Erlang posts by squid-farming bodybuilders, for example.
- ktharavaad 17y agoHe has an MBA
- djahng 17y agoYeah...MBAs don't really teach you how to be an entrepreneur.
- run4yourlives 17y agoIrrelevant, really. Most startups, by definition, will fail.
- mixmax 17y agoWell I guess that shows which is easier: Investment banking or doing a startup. ;-)
- flooha 17y agoThis would have been a perfect fit for "sell before you build". If he would have secured a large order from a retailer and then put it in production, he would have been successful. Not securing a large order would have told him it just wasn't worth doing. I don't think the "sell before you build" method it is a good fit for all businesses though.
- bemmu 17y agoOkay, let's think about how this could have been successful. My next suggestion would be to let the people in that Thai factory do all the packing etc. work such that a finished end product could have been shipped. I think a factory worker's salary in Thailand is around $100 / month.
- flooha 17y agoOriginally, the Thai company did do all the packing. The original shipment had seepage of the lubrication, so he sent them back. The reason he had to do a lot of hand work was because, after receiving the new shipment, he realized that: "According to the Food and Drug Administration, I needed to include a "how to use" guide with each key chain.". So, he was stuck doing this work himself.
- sown 17y agoYou know? This was one hell of an education, the kind of thing I wish I could read and learn more about.
- callmeed 17y ago"Though I had a Stanford MBA and regularly consulted on multimillion-dollar projects, I didn’t know the first thing about starting a business." That's a little scary.