Ask HN: Most amount of time you spent on a project with nothing to show for it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7984083

by act9 • 12 years ago

13 18 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Edit: The question was meant for personal unpaid time, not a company funded project that was scrapped.

_random_• 12 years ago

Months.

_cheese_• 12 years ago

A person I know quite well explained to me how his company hired a team of six or so developers to work on a project full-time. They worked on the project for about about two years before feeling ready to showcase it to clients. Once they showcased it to clients they realized their solution was far too generic for its intended application and it had to be scrapped. Huge amounts of time and money lost due to bad project management and inability to meet market needs. The solution ended up so generic that it could not really fit the specific role it was needed for. Its intended market requires a high amount of attention to specificity and detail.

tomasz207• 12 years ago

At university, I spent almost a thousand dollars on an espresso machine and a few hundred dollars on cups. I was going to open up a to-the-classroom coffee delivery service. I just never pulled the trigger. I've had really good espresso every morning though, and the cups are reusable.

pistoriusp• 12 years ago

I spent 11 months writing an app, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS6Z81dMzhc, and sold less and sold less than 100 copies. It was probably too much to take on as my second app... I did learn a lot though.

coryl• 12 years ago

Make it free now and see where it goes?

pmurphyirl• 12 years ago

A whole summer mid-college in my late teens (three months of prime time it turned out!) coding a cloud e-learning platform for the industrial training vertical (what a Cornerstone does today basically) for a partner who then didn't sell any product, disappeared and I had to go and sue - cost me both time and legal fees!

eropple• 12 years ago

Years. I've made a lot of games not up to the level of quality I want to be associated with. They're in a graveyard on my NAS.

I don't buy into the "it doesn't have to be good, it has to be done"; for me it has to be good and done to feel okay having my name on it. But I'm getting much better at this, and am working on a project I feel good about.

binarysolo• 12 years ago

Worked with a friend and his family's privately owned SMB to monetize an additional revenue stream. Spent 6 months part time and used a bunch of social currency to get a Fortune-100 company on board as a paying customer for MVP.

Asked to signed a contract as a consultant so they could "properly compensate me" -- trusted and signed and got kicked out the next day + had a gag order in the agreement so I couldn't talk publically about it.

Lost a friend and learned a big life lesson there. The project floundered after that; it was my heart's desire to make it work even if I wasn't there, but they just shuttered it without letting me know. I emailed them to give me some peace and closure by at least letting me know why they did what they did but never got a response. I still see this "friend" due to a common-ish social circle.

Bad things happen some times -- I haven't lost the ability to trust and have faith in people; my opinion of lawyers and contracts that protect me have increased though.

richardjdare5• 12 years ago

My first game for an early mobile platform (2003) took me six months and sold 600 copies. My latest iPhone release took a couple of years of part time work, and doesn't look like it will even approach that. It won't even cover the cost of repairs I made to my macbook during development.

I am proud of my games, I only ever wanted to be a game designer but right now I'm feeling wary of expending so much effort again for so little reward or even recognition.

alphagenerator4• 12 years ago

Mind posting the URL to your iOS game? I would like to try it out.

richardjdare5• 12 years ago

http://antigengame.com

krapp• 12 years ago

I've had some web app projects i've been playing with for a couple of years now - i've completely rewritten some from scratch several times over (and I have yet to actually finish the custom framework I was going to make for my personal website which has been useless since about 2011.) And if you count Game Maker projects that i've started, stopped, and restarted again, and given up on again... maybe five or six years?

Although with my tendency to ignore projects entirely for weeks or months at a time, it's not as bad as it seems but still there's a long line of failed projects behind me. Really, what do I have to show for anything? Not much.

Ask HN: Most amount of time you spent on a project with nothing to show for it?

Related Stories