You're right -- it takes a long time for most media companies to get off the ground, and it's often near-impossible to raise money in the early days. But how many youtube channels that get ~7,000 weekly unique viewers are able to convert ~1,200 into paying monthly subscribers?
Consider this: you might not already know everything there is to know about my business by skimming one blog post!
A piece of friendly advice: I get that you're in a pretty low place right now, and that this is your baby, but don't take comments on HN so personally.
You're coming across as pretty defensive, which is understandable, but probably not helpful. People here can see this from a perspective that you can't, and if you're defensive, you're missing out on learning something.
Otherwise, why are you bothering to interact here?
I was in a really low place a couple weeks ago, but I actually honestly feel pretty fine now. I've given myself the space I need to process it. I definitely wouldn't have been able to publish this post when it first happened.
Also, I totally get that it seems like a total waste of time to engage with the comments here. A lot of people have told me the same thing on Twitter. But the thing is: I think it's really special that someone on the other side of a computer screen read this thing I wrote and is thinking about what they would do in my shoes. Even if they express it in a way that's kind of rude or condescending, it means something to me!
I'm sorry if it seems like I'm being defensive. When I think of what the word "defensive" represents, I think of someone who is totally unwilling to consider other points of view and is trying to shut out the world. I don't think that's what I'm doing. Nothing is more important to me than learning from what happened and growing into a better, smarter person. I totally appreciate the fact that I am just too close to the thing to really understand what happened. I need help from objective third parties to learn the most from this.
That's actually why I'm replying to the comments. There's the naive DHH-cheerleading reply to anyone who is "yet another dumb unicorn chaser". But I want to go one or two levels deeper than that. I don't think those replies are particularly helpful, but I think the people that write them totally could be helpful. They just need to actually have a desire to understand in more detail what my business is/was doing. I accept that most people here will never care enough to really dig in. But I think the probability is high that some people here actually might really care. So I'm engaging here while it's on the front page of Hacker News, because I won't get another opportunity like that for a long time.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to think that through more. I hope it answers your question.
I'm sorry. It's all too easy to play backseat driver on an internet discussion board. It's far tougher to actually go out and build something with your real life and your relationships in the mix.
I've been part of a failed business that's left my father with a mountain of debt in his late middle age. I am in the process of retooling my life to go back to school and earn a degree. I recognize what it's like to face a crossroads in your life. It's not something that can be casually dismissed.
"Now, everyone has moved on but me, and I’m trying to figure out how to move forward. For the time being, we’re not going to be able to release any new stories (it sucks, I know), but the app and website will stay up. I am not ready to quit just yet. There probably will be some big changes, but I am not finished."
Also:
"The second option [continuing with our same model & creating all the content myself] is tempting, because I have no significant new data that changes my mind about Hardbound’s potential. Investors are wrong all the time. But if I just jumped into that, I would need to spend all my time working on new stories and I wouldn’t have very much time to learn from what just happened. So I have reservations about immediately jumping into this route."
When I reference "failure" in the post, I am referring to my failure to keep our bank account full.
I appreciate that! I mean, obviously I was wrong about _some_ things, otherwise I wouldn't have had to write that post. So I'm super open to new ideas and learning. That's also why I'm replying to all these comments. I'd rather reply with more detail so people can give better feedback. I just wish more of the commenters here would start from a perspective of asking questions, than thinking the answers to all my problems are glaringly obvious. Reality is extremely nuanced, in my opinion! I would love if more people were asking more questions, rather than making strong claims based on a very small amount of information that was more intended to communicate a very important life event to friends and users, than to be a detailed diagnosis of everything that happened.
Keep your powder dry probably refers to gunpowder... old flintlock rifles had separate gunpowder and bullets, and if the powder was really wet the gun wouldn't fire. So, have faith but do everything you can to improve your chances of success.
It's definitely something we considered! We actually were really focused on that for a long time, but didn't get a lot of traction with it, because creating content in our format requires illustration and animation, which is not easy to do. A lot of people said they wanted to do it, but very few followed through. We did some partnerships with media companies but we didn't solve a critical problem for them (the original inspiration was the end reader experience) so there was not very much urgency or willingness to pay. So we pivoted to a "full stack" model where we create the content and build the platform. It was working decently well (it's not easy to get 1,200 people to pay for access to content), but just not well enough.
Have you tried creating a 'creator's' software that's lightweight, easy to use and has lots of pre-loaded illustration packs (with a wide variety of themes) & drag-and-drop style animation presets?
The ferrari thing was definitely a little distracting, for sure, but literally it was the only good free photo I could find of a car driving towards the horizon in the desert.
Yep, I understand that, I only saw it as "funny", I am sorry, but it is stronger than me, you depicted verbally something very like the final of Terminator (1st), "a storm is coming":
OP here. I'm curious, what makes you think that you know anything about what our plans were?
You're absolutely right that we weren't profitable at our current scale, and that our goal was to raise funding from VCs, and since we couldn't do it we had to make really tough changes. But this was a risk that we all accepted! Would I do it exactly the same way again next time? No, of course not. I learned a lot from this experience. But do I regret going for something big that I believe in, even if it wasn't a plan that was easily bootstrapped? Absolutely not.
You are smart, and you make a lot of good points. I could learn a lot from your way of thinking! But--you're also being a bit of a condescending know-it-all. This is a perfect example of why everybody makes fun of Hacker News comments.
I think many, many more people make fun of the startup mentality. Which is harsh, but justified.
It's nice that you chased your dreams. The problem is, this is how almost all startups end up, with the last guy wondering what to do next. If you get struck by lightning, you get acquired. If you get struck twice, you get VC money.
That you "accepted" the risk just means you took a very bad bet. If you learned from that, great. No shame in that. But it's not something people are going to be impressed by, especially this late in the game.
You're right that the probability of any individual "unicorn" type idea succeeding is ridiculously slim. But I think you're not appreciating the larger context. Consider this:
1) I have never had more job offers in my life than the past 24 hours. Like, really good jobs. Obviously that wasn't the goal, but it's not like I'm out on the street or really in any way worse off than I was before.
2) I learned more in the past two years than I have any other time in my working life. So again, I'm not in that bad of a spot. It wasn't a waste of time at all.
3) Even though there are very few massive hit VC successes, they do happen dozens of times a year. Just because something is low-probability doesn't make it stupid. Do you think people are dumb who write novels? Or become actors? Or open food trucks? Nobody should try anything that probably won't work?
To be blunt, you're the one who complained about the outcome in your blog post and the one who is angrily seeking validation in Hacker News comments by personally attacking critics and saying nobody understands your unicorn or your boldness in rolling the dice.
If your goal was to get some job offers, great. I got the impression that wasn't your goal, though. That you're fine, personally...well, I assumed that, given you bothered to blog about it. But yes, that's good. I hope that's true of everyone else involved.
But to answer your last question...it's the wrong question. The real question is whether it's smart to pin all your hopes on a really unlikely way to succeed when other approaches exist. Most people who write novels, become actors, etc. don't quit their day jobs until they actually start to make it. Food trucks that don't turn a profit don't tend to get investors to save them. Most new businesses aren't wannabe unicorns.
Ha, it's amazing to see a Leo Strauss reference in a HN thread! I majored in Political Theory at Michigan State, and the department was full of Straussians. Worlds colliding.
Consider this: you might not already know everything there is to know about my business by skimming one blog post!