How My Startup Failed

nopassrecover · on March 30, 2009

I could swear this has been on here before... In any case an interesting story though perhaps not relevant so much to web startups

mseebach · on March 30, 2009

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=303780

nopassrecover · on March 30, 2009

Good find :-)

mseebach · on March 30, 2009

Not really :)

http://searchyc.com/condom

flooha · on March 30, 2009

This 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 · on March 30, 2009

Okay, 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 · on March 30, 2009

Originally, 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.

edu · on March 30, 2009

  There 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.

gord · on March 30, 2009

I'll see your ouch and raise you one Gary Kildall.

eru · on March 30, 2009

Discovered. Not invented.

eru · on March 30, 2009

To clarify: Bill Gates discovered operating systems, and made a lot of money producing and selling them. He did not invent them.

callmeed · on March 30, 2009

"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.

gord · on March 30, 2009

Its 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.

rjurney · on March 30, 2009

"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 :)

ktharavaad · on March 30, 2009

He has an MBA

run4yourlives · on March 30, 2009

Irrelevant, really. Most startups, by definition, will fail.

djahng · on March 30, 2009

Yeah...MBAs don't really teach you how to be an entrepreneur.

sown · on March 30, 2009

You know? This was one hell of an education, the kind of thing I wish I could read and learn more about.

jjs · on March 30, 2009

I adore that customs clerk!

mixmax · on March 30, 2009

Well I guess that shows which is easier: Investment banking or doing a startup.

;-)