My Startup Failed, But It's OK
In this postmortem from 2012, @coderholic candidly breaks down the dissolution of their startup, examining the fatal assumptions, misallocated resources, and market dynamics that led to its shutdown.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Early signals were often rationalized away instead of prompting an immediate pivot in distribution or pricing.
The psychological toll of running out of capital compounds operational friction in a solo or small team setup.
Key Antidote: Validate paying willingness before committing months to building sophisticated product features.
Community Debate Themes:
Community discussions on HN centered on identifying product-market fit early, avoiding vanity metrics, and the emotional recovery process after shutting down.
CATEGORY Postmortems & Failures →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 146 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 30 comments
I agree it can be a positive. Actually, before I really even knew much programming I built an online paintball ecommerce store (using a CMS system that I just customized with my HTML knowledge, etc), I had some business experience that I used to gain vendor accounts with companies, etc and actually was able to move tens of thousands of dollars of products through the site over a few months (exploiting a discontinued item I was able to buy in large quantities that people still wanted) but then it fizzled out, I didn't have the technical knowledge to build the site into my vision but it left me hungry and wanting to learn more, I can fairly confidently say it directly lead to my becoming a professional programmer as I became interested in learning how to build what I had wanted to build originally, I think there's always a positive to take away from things like this.
I have discovered that the only real way to learn is to make mistakes. You can read about mistakes in a book, but until you actually make them and experience the consequences, you haven't really learned. Once you make the mistake, you will try to avoid the pain it caused by doing something different the next time. This applies not just to startups, but to pretty much everything.
Case in point - my first startup failed as well. We tried to do things the "right way," but we still made tons of mistakes. But we learned, and at the very least my second startup has gone significantly further than the first because I have avoided some of the mistakes I made the first time around. For example, I picked a cofounder who had skills that I didn't have on the founding team the first time around. Those skills have allowed us to succeed where we failed before.
Thanks for writing this up, and I know exactly what you mean about making all the mistakes you've read about. I've been there too. If you're smart, you only need to make them once. I'm still making a few of them over and over.
I'm also happy to see that most of the comments here are positive. I'm sure you'll get some "Oh, well you should have just done ..." crap here too, but you probably know to ignore that by now.
Good luck in your future ventures and just keep at it. There's no guarantee you'll ever be successful, but doing nothing guarantees that you won't.
This post is frustratingly vague. It almost reads as pure HN-bait, promising some honest insights to call attention to your new ventures yet without actually relating something of substance. I don't mind that you get attention as you sound deserving, just dont tease us.
I'd say about 99 percent of us are not in your shoes. Do you really think you can say "Not only were none of the mistakes we made novel, a lot of them were mistakes I'd read about before and was sure I'd avoid." and think that most of us, even on HN, know what you mean?
Can you give an example or two of mistakes that you had read about "in the abstract" and how they manifested in your particular case?
Like you, I've found myself in situations where I realize after the fact, "oh, that's what they were all warning against!" It might have been sunk in better if I'd been given a practical example rather than abstract advice.