What it feels like to fail | Hacker News Reader

What it feels like to fail

aflanagan.com

I really don't think that you have a failure on your hands.

You should stop to think that way and start to think about how you are going to monetize your users, one way would be to literally ask the community: "Hey guys & girls, this is going great but I need a living, what should I do for you to throw some money my way" might be a good start.

Most small scale bootstrapped start-ups would be trumpeting their success from the rooftops if they got a dedicated userbase like that.

So... did you ever try a revenue model? Make some sort of premium account? I'm not speaking from any amount of experience, but you have 7000 users, you're about to throw in the towel on the business end of things anyway, I would think it's worth trying to come up with something.

maybe it's a bit late, but i have to agree. try and put yourself back where you were a year ago, where 7000 users was a dream.

also, no offense but the name is godawful. there is simply NO way for my brain to remember it. ive seen it probably 5 or 6 times now and i still dont know how to say it, much less remember how to spell it to go back to the url.

thanks for sharing your story, but don't give up yet. a year aint that long to not be profitable.

I also feel that perhaps a name change (I have difficulty recalling it, even now) and a revenue model, perhaps capitalizing on the most loyal users, and word of mouth advertising, could really gear the website forward.

I wish I would have known about it when I was more into Spanish.

capitalizing on the most loyal users seems like a good idea to me. if they could make a business on it and you could skim off the top they'd be incentivized to grow it pretty quickly.

Sorry, I'm not quite sure if I understand your comment. What would you like to see them doing? If anything, I'll learn from this and hopefully, the founders might find a good idea or two on these comments.

i know absolutely nothing about the market, but my feeling is there is a pretty big opportunity in charging for one on one tutoring. you could have a whole ranking/review system etc. someone willing to pay for spanish tutoring here is going to be paying a boat load compared to what someone in latin america would be charging. so the key would be finding people who speak spanish and english well enough that they could tutor for less than a local american would do it for. i think that's totally possible - but again that's just one example of what capitalizing most common users could mean, i really don't know the market so i can only guess

edit: now that i think about it there's probably room for american tutors who charge more as well. have a find a spanish tutor search option and have price be one vector, location be another (let people find tutors locally?) etc. etc.

Lenguajero is a pretty bad name. It's easy to pronounce in Spanish (and is actually kind of witty) but is terrible in English if you don't know Spanish.

I'm the other co-founder of Lenguajero.

I'm having problems even beginning to imagine how I would pronounce Lenguajero. I definitely think you had a big naming problem and might want to consider persevering.

Maybe he should rename it to "Eyjafjallajokull"... all the Icelandic people have no problems with it.

yeah i kind of guessed that was it, it must be pretty hard to find a word that is witty and works well in both languages.

if you guys are serious about it being a failure, im sure there are a few HNers who would gladly take it off your hands and grow it into a biz (after rebranding it of course).

We tried a couple of different ideas, neither of which gained traction. The most promising was offering a paid tool to Spanish and English professors, who could sign up their classes and then monitor how their students were using the site.

We actually had about 50 universities sign up for a free trial, although only about 10 actually used the site actively last term. I think the biggest problem with this idea was that most university students who are studying Spanish don't really care about learning, and are just doing it for credit.

The most promising was offering a paid tool to Spanish and English professors...

Did you talk with your users about this and your other ideas? Do you know what roughly what proportion of your current userbase is made up of Spanish and English professors? If you want freemium to work, you need to be sure that you have enough "power users", and that those users have a hair-on-fire problem even if the majority of your users do not.

You can find out these kinds of things by running surveys, and by reaching out to individual users if you have their email addresses. You might be surprised how easy it is to get insanely valuable information for free this way.

I would say almost none of our users are Spanish and English professors (presumably they speak both languages quite well ;)). The idea was to get them to use the tool in their classrooms, where their students would be the users. They would have special accounts that would allow them to monitor their students use of the site without actually participating.

We did (and still occasionally do) run surveys and ask for member feedback. The feedback was great, and we made a lot of changes to the site based on that. I'm not saying that there isn't a way to monetize the site, I'm just saying that our two main ideas (ad revenue and a teacher tool didn't work out).

I think you need to reaccess who your paying clients are. People that are so desperate to learn they'll try anything - expats in a new country for a job (or dragged along by a spouse), contractors dealing with workers and language barrier, esl teachers, travelers who want to be prepared to communicate with the locals, etc. Less fun, and more solution based advertising. I know I've seen Rosetta Stone ads highlighting it's use with diplomats and the like.

Having moved to a new country myself recently, I would have loved the opportunity to talk to the locals about life in general - where to live, where to go out, etc (though in my case I moved between English speaking countries so the language wasn't such a big deal). I could see the same working for travellers.

Also the chance to make some contacts in the country before I arrived would have been good - making friends in a new city is hard.

I would have paid for that kind of service.

Not just diplomats, either. While we were living in Puerto Rico, we knew one family from Denver; the husband had a management job in a local factory, and the company gave the family a $10,000 budget for language courses. And that was a small company - turns out this is generally worth the expense, because it reduces management turnover.

A 20% conversion rate? Man I'd give up my left pinky finger for that. Maybe even the right one if every conversion (university) brought in enough users.

I would too! Unfortunately the teachers weren't interested in paying, just using it while it was free.

1. Your domain is, in my opinion, terrible. We spent three minutes trying to pronounce it.

2. "We have >7,000 users, and lots of them are still super active in the community." That's actually great start! Why aren't you trying to expand?

"All told we are probably out ~$2,000 and one years worth of work."

Clearly all businesses should be ROI positive after $2000... let's give up!

I don't think the $2,000 mark is really of any significance in deciding whether to move forward or not. If we had a business model that I truely believed in I would be happy to invest a significant amount of money into it. As it stands at this point I don't.

Makes sense. From re-reading the blog post I wouldn't classify it as a failure as much as a "it's time to move on"-ure.

Generally, you would start offering new services that people are willing to pay for.

How about e-learning modules for businesses that are $50 / exam?

Yeah, I'm getting that a lot on here. I think it is a hard name for people who only speak English, or speak English and other languages that aren't latin based. (Our Spanish speaking members really like the name.)

So use multiple domain names.

This is your best bet. I really like "Lenguajero", but I lived in Puerto Rico for a couple of years.

This is not what it feels like to fail. You've got an active, committed community of 7000 users - that is not even close to failure.

When I built Despammed.com in 1999, I peaked at around that. Donations were plenty to keep the site running and even paid for the mortgage once or twice when things were tight. You've got a much more committed community there, and while you're not going to be the next YouTube (because learning a language is hard, while watching TV is not), you've built a useful service that can run in perpetuity and that, my friend, is what success feels like.

I think you need to move on to your next idea; let Lenguajero run for a few years, try to think of a premium version of the service in some way, but mostly just let it ferment and grow organically, and get yourself engaged in something you'll find fun. Keep yourself moving.

Thanks Vivtek. I appreciate the feedback. While we do have 7000 users I would say that really our "committed community" is much smaller. The site does pay for itself, and on average makes $100-$150 a month in profits from ad revenue. But, I certainly could never count on it to pay for a mortgage.

We have no intention of shutting down, and will definitely keep it going as a hobby (and yes, maybe a premium version, or some other revenue model will come into existence in the future.) Until then, I'm looking for a new project to start, which isn't so bad. ;)

Since you mentioned donations, I figured I'd ask you this. I've got a site I'm working on that I want to commit to full time, potentially without any other source of income. When you say it was "enough to keep the site running", do you mean enough to maintain servers, or enough to maintain your refridgerator and roof as well?

Also, is it ok to have a donation based site if you eventually hope to profit significantly from it? Or does that tend to imply that it's a "community" or "non-profit" sort of thing they're putting money towards?

By "keep the site running" I mean it paid to keep the server hosted at a local ISP. (Good Lord, what a blast from the past; it was the last server I ever actually physically saw, a used SPARCstation running Solaris, and I carried it to the ISP myself.) Occasionally, I had enough in the kitty to pay some personal bills. That was just on PayPal donations from one link in the corner of the home page.

But I wasn't even close to being committed to Despammed full time (although it sometimes felt like it during my trial-by-fire sysadminning lessons when things went wrong) - so I don't think there's much to generalize from. You have the advantage of full attention - but I was the only free spam filter in the world for a short time, and a few people were pretty virulently thankful about it.

As to the morality of donations when you hope to profit later - absolutely. You're not forcing people to donate, and if they like your site well enough to give you money, they will not only cheer you on if you become profitable, they'll even feel personal pride that they helped you on your way. The Knew-Him-When effect. I think only a few people would feel you'd sold out. And you can ignore them; they'll be looking for a way to feel superior no matter what, so you might as well let them feel superior all the way to your bank. Everybody's happy.

Now if you actually sell yourself as a community effort, then appropriate it to yourself when it's time to make money, that will piss people off, and rightly so. It's really all your attitude, though, that sets the tone. If you're honest about your plans, that's all people want.

Just for the fun of it does anyone want to throw out some new names for the site? Lenguajero is pretty bad in English. I think we fell into the trap of speaking Spanish everyday and thinking that it just sounded cool (and a bit witty). Ideas???

secondspeak.com is currently unregistered, and makes sense to me as a name for a site for people learning a second language.

"... secondspeak.com is currently unregistered ..."

That also means you could try other languages. Something that should be considered. Chinese/English for example could give you a lot bigger user base.

wow, that's a very good name! Especially if you thought of it in minutes. Oh, and I just checked it, it's taken now, hope OP's the one who got it and not someone else taking the advantage..

Just to clarify. I'm not shutting down Lenguajero. It will keep on running (at least I'll still use it to practice my Spanish :)), and maybe we'll come up with an idea on how to monetize.

One of the challenges we faced in monetizing the site was monetizing our international members. A really big chunk of our users are from Central and South America. When it comes to advertising we don't make any money off these users (say $0.05 per click versus ~$1.00 for someone in America). The majority of these users also don't have credit cards or paypal so getting them to pay for a premium version of the site would be difficult.

I'd kill for $1.00 / click on any traffic. $0.05 is still pretty good.

Startup failure != you as a failure.

It's 2 separate events. Associating startup failure as you as a failure is a very slippery slope; because eventually you won't get out of bed because everything you can possibly do when you get out of bed is going to result in failure anyway, so why get out of bed. Remember - 2 separate things :)

And as others have mentioned, many other startups wished they had 7K of passionate users.

Keep tryin! :)

Thanks jayliew. I don't actually think I'M a failure. I was just trying to express the gamut of emotions that one feels when a startup doesn't work out.

I think it's a great idea. Are you sure you want to give up on it ? Why do you call it a failure ? I wouldn't call having 7000 users a failure. You have plenty of room to grow.

Let me know if you want feedback. One reason a lot of people trying to learn a new language give up is because of lack of motivation after a while / not finding people to converse/practice/learn with (and I talk from first-hand experience)

I've been feeling the same way about my startup, which has almost 17,000 users but only a small amount of them are paying customers (launched a paid plan a few months ago). I keep wanting to ask myself how much longer I should give it to see if it reaches profitability, or should I just shut it down? Anyway, right now I'm creating a survey for the paying users to be able to tell what they like/don't like about the paid plan. I also plan on doing a referral program that benefits both parties (I did get both of those ideas from a slideshow about a startup and their freemium model, forgot which). Keep those ideas in mind if you ever plan on introducing any paid plans and good luck.

Thanks. I really appreciate the feedback and advice (from everyone on HN). The whole "wondering how much longer I should give it" phase lasted from about February until early April.

One of the first things that made me realize it might be time to cut my losses and focus my attention on other projects was when we launched this website in mid Feb - http://toeflnow.com

We sell a TOEFL Tips and Strategies guide eBook, and while it certainly isn't earning enough to pay all the bills it is making substantially more money than Lenguajero. In fact, in its first week it made more money than Lenguajero did the entire month of Feb.

That was a real turning point. It was like "Hmmm...hundreds of hours spent on Lenguajero vs. ~40hrs spent on an ebook. Maybe I should be doing something else right now..."

Good luck! I really hope it works out for you. What's the website if you don't mind me asking?

Thank you! That's amazing about your TOEFL vs. Lenguajero revenue. My site is http://soshiku.com and my submission to HN is http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315281 (submitted ~19 months ago, yikes).

As a member of a small group of friends, venturing into the possibility of our first start-up, seeing the failures of others can be really eye opening.

I suppose I haven't thought too much about a revenue source, however the first major thing we're going to do is an Android app... If you can call that major.

Launching real products for real users it major :) Good luck.

I'm coming off a very painful startup failure myself, but I am honestly very thankful for the experience. There is an old cliche that says you learn more from your failures than your successes. It's become a cliche for a reason, it's usually true.

I reflect often on the entire experience and constantly go over all the mistakes we made in hindsight. It's painful, really painful, but you learn from the pain. The pain makes it real so you won't ever make the same mistakes again.

I'm onto my next startup now and all that hard learning is paying off. I'm working even hard but with much less stress since I know I'm doing the right things this time around.

I'm really surprised at all the negative comments on the domain name. I thought it was great!

I've picked a poor domain myself, due to the influence of another language (Mandarin), but this is Spanish! Not only is it the #2 language on the planet, it's a language that I thought would instantly recognizable to both Europeans and Americans.

Moral of the story: Make domain names out of English words and never ever assume your users have exposure to other languages.

"I thought I’d be the next YouTube"

As far as I know YouTube is far from being a financial success either...

Yeah, but YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 BILLION at a time that they had around 70 employees. So it was at least a financial success for the founders.

Keep going, even if this isn't the site. Like you said, you've come miles in just one year, and you've achieved more than you're giving yourselves credit for.

Turn off Mixergy and get to work. :)

how to get over failing: move on.

Have you thought about putting a donate button for now? Might make a few bucks a months?

Stop-loss on your time and effort is at times a smart business decision. There is no point in sugar coating it. That being said, a failed business does not make you a failure. Not at all.

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