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Comment by talltimtom | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like he was too focused on inventing and forgot the production/sales aspect. He literally had the product and had thousands of people emailing him directly ready to buy! And he still complains that he couldn’t sell.

He should have realized his personal shortcomings and partnered with someone who had the qualities he lacked.

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This is precisely my takeaway as well. I wonder if there's more to the story than described in the article – maybe he's just really hard to work with? Maybe his prototypes are two expensive to put into any large scale production, and he's not willing to compromise? I feel like this story barely scratches the surface.

Agreed. The article also didn't really talk about what it was actually like after 30 years of pursuing his dream and failing. They just told a story without much detail. Seems like there would be a lot more interesting details.

Also while he did sacrifice a lot of savings, he still had a degree and a fallback career, even if it was a mediocre one.

Also, why didn't he start a Kickstarter campaign? I would imagine that crowd-funding would be the perfect approach to something unable to attract investors. He seems like a smart guy, I'm sure he must have considered it?

I agree too, the author really could have dug deeper and asked some questions instead of just focusing on his 30-years of failure (with some uplifting moments).

Exactly what I thought: Kickstarter

Based on the limited info we have, I would guess that he's a perfectionist. I've known a couple of people who have ruined great ideas and initial traction due to their perfectionism.

You can see an image of his later iterations later in the article [1]. It does look like there isn't much improvement between them, except what a perfectionist might find to tinker with.

[1] https://thehustle.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/protos.png

An excellent example of "perfect is the enemy of good".

I think it's even worse than perfectionism. It's a fear of success. Some engineers have this fear that they've only got a few good ideas in them and once they finish with this one, they'll never have a second one, so they've got to milk this one for all it's worth because once they're done they'll be all used up.

But in this case it's not like he's milked it at all.

Your description more aptly fits Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.

This guy is trying to milk it, because he thinks if he gives it up he'll have no more good ideas for the rest of his life. Mark Z. on the other hand is doing just fine and could start trying to do space travel like Bezos, but he doesn't really lose anything doing what he's doing because it's working.

But there isn't any milk. Zuck is milking it. Zuck could do other things, instead he continues to do Facebook and similar acquisitions. He is milking it.

This other dude isn't getting any milk. He's pulling a teet with nothing in it.

Perhaps it's that he believes he is eventually going to succeed and he's convinced himself of this since he also consciously or subconsciously believes that if he doesn't he won't have any other ideas so he might as well try forever to get this idea to work.

Potentially, but there still needs to be milk to milk it. Sounds like this guy is too focused on an idea that he hasn't executed well.

That's like trying to milk a starving cow, because none of the other animals on your farm are alive.

This happens sometimes to inventors who are not willing to cede control of the invention to investors. The investors aren't willing to put in $$$$ and not have control.

I think you're making an incorrect assumption. He had a series of prototypes, not deliverable products. Ramping up production for a complex product requires capital. As I read it He'd been seeking funding to get to the production phase and was using those thousands of emails as essentially M.O.U.s to show that a market existed and the product was desired.

> Ramping up production for a complex product requires capital

For a mass-market product, sure. But there’s no need to go from 0 to mass market. Had he priced his boots at $900 a piece and essentially sold prototypes, he may have been able to hit $100k in sales within a year. That’s the kind of traction investors look for.

Exactly. Going to market and being able to identify if his hypothetical quote “mid-30s” extreme sports enthusiast was his target market, and at the price they are willing to pay, was neglected in pursuit of the perfect product.

As Voltaire said, “Perfect is the enemy of the good.”

I think the only way that this guy could have won would have been to license the invention for a tiny royalty amount just to get the thing made and establish his personal brand. Then, once he had handed the invention off to someone else, he could have gone on to his next product and gotten a bigger development budget that would let him get out ahead of the competition before they could catch up.

Instead, he tried to do everything himself thinking he was a real business genius when he only had the idea and was a decent engineer. This is a typical engineering mindset. Engineers think they are smarter than all these genius marketers and hustlers out there. They think that being good at math means you're good at marketing, but they are really different skills and good marketers and promoters should be respected for the unique and genuine value they bring.

I don't know. There's many people that do practically nothing in that regard and become mega hits overnight. Happens all the time in software. How many sales people were marketing facebook back in the day?

You can become rich with 0 work. The harder you work, the more preparation you do, the more you minimize the luck factor.

"The more I practice, the luckier I get" used to be a common .sig quote.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/07/14/luck/

How many do you know? What percentage is that compared to how many projects are launched with 10 visits to the website after months of work..?

Almost every social media site wasn't marketed. MySpace didn't have marketing, neither did Facebook, neither did Twitter, Snapchat is still popular even though it struggles to make any money. Those are just the few that come to mind.

I don't have an exact percentage, and percentage wise its probably low when factoring in all the websites in existence.

So, you know of 5.

That's exactly my point.

facebook type products are an outlier. It did not require traditional sales and marketing in the true sense as it did one thing right : creating a tool for college kids like me where I felt like part of the community. The idea was brilliant to keep it to college campuses only. I remember looking at fb for the first time (circa 2004 when it was only on college campuses) and going "wow, they have listed my dorm name" and immediately felt a personal connection. genius!! And of course, the UI was far more engaging than the incumbents. So fb was selling itself but most products don't.

Facebook practically implemented a worse version of MySpace. The only problem with MySpace was security issues which I think ultimately killed it in the end.

Many people?

Facebook did things no one else did like allow you to import your hotmail contacts. They rolled out in small batches. At one point you needed a .edu email. The press was great. Facebook did so many things right marketing-wise in the beginning.. even now they always seem to be on the cusp of the next wave.

After reading the article, he seems to have a "build it and they will come" type of attitude. They did come but he failed to capitalise on it.

The big lesson learn here is to seek help in the area where you failing in, in his case - closing those sales!

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