[switch]

Please Note: This might seem critical but I'm just pointing out three problems i.e. lack of effort, lack of measuring effort and other statistics, lack of empathy with customers.

My argument would be that without at least 2 of these 3 the OP will keep running into problems and keep blaming extrinsic meaningless things.

*

Credit to the person (aaron?) for writing this. However, the lack of measured numbers is terrifying. And the disconnect with the customer perspective is just hard to fathom.

1) How much time did you spend on this? Over what period of time?

2) How much traffic did you get? How many people bought coupons? How many people went to other sites from your sites?

3) What amount of money did you spend? On what areas? What amount of money did you make? From what sources? *

You say that you didn't listen to your customers. My point would be that you didn't realize that you were making something FOR THEM and not for you.

You should consider thinking from your customers' perspective.

They really don't care about some of the things that you think are successes i.e. using hosted services and learning Ruby and the site being BEAUTIFUL because you think a site being beautiful is important to you personally.

Unless Indianapolis is 99% users of HackerNews.

*

You say that you were shocked that small business owners don't track things - yet you write this post without giving any figures. Which makes a great post meaningless because we don't know what 'You had no skin in the game' means.

Did you spend 40 hours a week after doing your day job? Did you do that for 3 full years? Did you put in $100K of your own savings?

*

Finally, you went into a space where you had very few competitive advantages - not the first mover, not the best product, not the most money, not the most resources, no brand recognition.

If you had tried a niche within coupons or a new area you might well have seen much better results.

Also, you don't mention anywhere how much total time and effort you spent on this which makes it difficult to know whether your lessons are worthwhile or not.

If you spent 10 hours a week for 6 months - then obviously all your 'learning' is probably useless.

If you spent 40 hours a week for 2 years - then it's very valuable stuff.

which one is it?

[aaronlerch]

All fair questions (even if your conclusions about the value of my learning are a bit bogus ;) -- the value in learning does not always depend directly on the cost paid to learn.)

I have (almost) all the numbers. I can tell you what I spent, to the dollar. I can tell you about the traffic to the site, what they did, what was successful and what wasn't. I can't tell you how much time I spent on it because it varied so drastically over the past year. It ranged from 10 hours a week to 0 hours a week. It just depended on how busy things were at work and with the fam. (EDIT: my wife tells me it was more than 10 hours a week. ;) )

The point of the post wasn't to give detailed numbers, but just to generally convey what I took away from it. Whether or not you know my numbers doesn't change what I learned. And just because I didn't mention it in the post doesn't mean I don't have it, that is a large assumption. I'm not sure how it makes the post meaningless. Perhaps you can't tell if you can trust it or not because you can't measure it? But even if there were numbers, that doesn't tell you whether you can trust it any more or less, so perhaps that's not it.

I wrote the retrospective post about the things I care about, not the things my customers cared about. You're absolutely right that almost all the stuff I listed is meaningless to my customers, and I never even mentioned it to them -- they don't care! :)

Also, I didn't go into it in the post (I was going for something shorter and readable/consumable) but I had two customers. Small businesses listing coupons, and people using the site looking for coupons. I thought about it from both perspectives every moment I worked on it. I geeked out about how I was doing it, but never lost sight of my customers. Sorry if that wasn't clear in the post.

You're also absolutely right that it was a poor choice of spaces. That was a huge lesson I learned. :)

So to summarize, take it for what you think it's worth. There's no law that says you have to read my lessons learned and apply them. But they are lessons I learned, regardless. Thx for reading!

[switch]

It's my mistake - I made two wrong assumptions.

1) Firstly, that you were in business to add value to customers and that was the primary motivation. It seems your primary motivation was to learn/experience it. Which is fine - it's just not what I assumed it was.

As Zig Ziglar would put it - To get everything you desire in life you just have to give enough other people what they want from life.

* Who knows what approach works better. For me, the Zig Ziglar approach has worked much better but that's a sample size of 1 person.

2) Secondly, my mistake in assuming your post was meant to help other people. If you could have added a note that it was meant mostly as a catharsis and written for yourself.

Then I wouldn't have assumed that there might be a lot of value for me.

Right now the value is in seeing a few things but the amount of effort is just not enough to actually know whether any of your mistakes other than not putting in enough work matter.

*

See, the key thing is your line on work being from 0 to 10 hours per week with some weeks being over 10 weeks.

How can you know your ideas and business were right or wrong with that amount of time?

For entirely selfish reasons (to help myself) I wanted to learn from your experience. However, if your experience is based on working an average of 10 hours a week, then it doesn't really say anything about what the market opportunity really is/was.

*

On a related note there seems to be a fascination on hacker news lately on apps done in 5 days and 'passive income' and how to succeed without working hard.

Are there any people there who are succeeding after working really hard? Who are spending 5 months on their app and not 5 days?

[aaronlerch]

You seem intent on believing the worst about my experience and efforts, and that's okay, as I said before, "take it for what it's worth." :)

But you did nail item #1 - I was primarily interested in learning/experiencing, and secondarily interested in adding value. That's one of the reasons I lost motivation and shut down the site, it is extraordinarily difficult for coupons/discounts to add value to businesses across the spectrum of business. Some businesses it works great for, many it doesn't. It was when I had that realization that I decided to end it.

I did spend time (sorry, probably not "much time") brainstorming business ideas that actually would add value to the businesses I knew, and I think some of those ideas are good, but just not feasible for me to do alone, so I'm not even pursuing them either.

I have a friend that has spent _years_ and tons of his own money working on his startup, and it's still struggling to succeed. I learned a lot from him as he was my mentor through this process. I hope his endeavor takes off, but it's a long road, and he has worked incredibly hard. I can connect the two of you if you actually want to talk to someone like that.

[switch]

I'm not.

My suggestion to you would be to consider whether you can put in more effort into your next startup.

We each have our own beliefs on what works and then there's reality. So there's probably a chance that there is something that works very well but both of us would have to look at things from a different perspective.

For me I tend to believe that you can't really succeed unless you're 100% in it. That having a family pretty much rules out having a successful start-up. That's obviously not true as there are exceptions. Perhaps lots of them.

I think in the end it comes down to not giving up. However, again, that's just a belief and who knows what the reality is.

Thanks for offering to connect me to your friend. Not interested at the moment as I'm quite overwhelmed and already places like Hacker News are putting too much of the possibility of failure into my head.

My attitude is that failure isn't really possible and it's working amazingly well so perhaps I should only read posts that are very positive like the Yoghurt business one.

[cjy]

How is time spent on something in any way correlated with how much he learned?

The whole idea of failing fast is that you don't need to invest pointless time after you have learned something is not going to work.

[pcote]

Failing fast doesn't mean much if you don't have a definition of failure to work off of so you can iterate. How exactly does one define these kinds of failures?

[diolpah]

If you believe the premise and results of the '10000 hours to expert' research cited by Gladwell's "Outliers", then the obvious conclusion is that time invested is highly correlated with learning.

[dean]

"Failing fast" and "10,000 hours to expert" are two entirely different kinds of learning. "Failing fast" is a lean startup idea where you are trying to learn, as quickly as possible, whether you have a viable product. You do the least you can do to determine this. After you have learned this one thing, if you find that no one is interested in your product, you are done. Move on to the next idea.

"10,000 hours to expert" is a different idea. Here, the idea is that to become an expert in a specific skill, you have to put in 10,000 hours of 'deliberate' practice.

These are two different kinds of learning. The '10,000' hours approach is not the kind of learning you need or want to do to determine the validity of one business idea. In this case, time invested is not necessarily correlated with learning.

[mattm]

10000 hours are needed to become a master or expert at something. An expert or master is in the top 1% of people who know that skill. But with learning something, anyone could reach the top 10% within 6 months. Dedicate to learning something for 6 months and you reach the top 10%. It doesn't take much time to go from nothing to a decent skill level. It does, however, take a lot of time to go from a decent level to a mastery level.

[switch]

What diolpah said.

I'd rather learn from the experience of someone who became an absolute master. Because the lessons of absolute mastery apply across fields.

Who cares about the top 10%? The top 10% isn't worth wasting your time on. Especially if it means you spend 6 months each on 20 different areas and become top 10% in 20 areas.

Much better to find 1 or 2 areas you absolutely love and become top 1%.

Top 1% - Going to the Olympics. Top 10% - Impress your friends.

[mattm]

While I mostly agree with you there are plenty of times where it's worth it to be in the top 10% (or upper quadrant) but not the top 1%. These are things that are important to be good at but not worth the time to be excellent at. To say it's a waste of time to be in the top 10% is nonsense.

Take driving for example. When I started driving I enrolled in a driving course for several months. Now it's debatable that this course put me in the top 10% but it probably helped to put me above average. I have no ambition to be a race-car or stunt car driver so this is a great trade-off. I believe I'm a safer driver because of it.

Negotiating would be another example. It would make a lot of sense for a lot of people to take a negotiating course or read and practice it for a few months to get good at it in order to be able to negotiate their salary. The payoff of just a few months work could result in tens of thousands of dollars over your whole career. It wouldn't really be beneficial to spend 5-10 years getting your negotiating skills to the top 1% unless you wanted to actually do that for work.

Also the 10,000 hours really depends on if you are actually progressing or not. I think it's pretty debatable whether merely 10,000 hours of driving would put you in the top 1%. It's like the old joke that some people with 20 years of experience actually have one year of experience repeated 20 times.

Yes, you can't be great at everything but I think it's more valuable to great at one thing and good at a lot of things rather than just great at one or two things and mediocre at everything else.

Basically my point is, strive to be in the top 1% for what you want to earn money at or do with your life and then be in the top 10% for other things that either help you with that or benefit you in some way.