Ask HN: What are your failures?

If you're anything like me you will have several, so maybe just list the one you were most enthusiastic about which didn't work out the way you thought, and what you see now that you didn't then. I'll start.

I had a site called becomeatypist.com which taught people to type. I started it because I saw that thousands of people monthly were searching for 'learn to type'. This was back in the day when I was pretty much in a minority (compared to now) who knew about this thing called a keyword search tool - the original one from Goto/Overture before even Google had theirs. This is almost too embarrasing to list, but a large portion of my homepage was an image. Go ahead, laugh. Ironically, I'm almost the polar opposite with my knowledge of seo now, but at the time I was only thinking of usability from a user's perspective, which I thought was the only thing I should worry about focusing on. Before you ridicule me too much the site was mildly successful, breaking even after accounting for PPC advertising, and some weeks making me a whole $5 to $15 profit. I had customers write to me saying they found my course helpful. Unfortunately, no one ever went past the first 2 lessons out of 10 which would have meant they learned all the keys, and probably given me a renewal or two at $4.99/mo.

Things I learned: I think I did a lot of things right such as a free lead in, but many wrong. I should have done more than just try to build a functional product and wait for cash to roll in. One competitor, an ad supported (and I think distractive) free course is still near the top of Google, I think my presentation could have been way better too, but I'm a programmer not a designer. I also overestimated user attention span/determination needed to learn something new.

(maybe next time I'll tell you about passflicks.com, my DVD trading by mail and how my hopes were shattered as thorougly as my test DVDs got when mailed at a single stamp packaging cost ;)