Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
Had several: last minute airline seat bidding app with an interested airline. Fishing competition app with paying users. Housing valuation app for a city council, with the actual city council interested and opening up their API to us. The city council also wanted a parking app and water billing app. A telco requested a reloading app that was basically CRUD but offered 6 digits for a few days of work. There was a diet app with thousands of monthly active users and hundreds of dollars in monthly sales.<p>The failure reasons were all the same: business partners who sat on money and did nothing.<p>These people were not incompetent. They&#x27;ve built companies before. They own a Mercedes, BMW, or Mazda RX-8. They&#x27;ve dedicated decades of their careers to building these connections. I personally burned my credibility setting up some of these meetings.<p>The problem was they didn&#x27;t show up. Why didn&#x27;t they show up?<p>&quot;The poor and the middle class work for money. The rich have money work for them.&quot;<p>Nobody is naturally too lazy to take money that&#x27;s lying in front of them. These people have been conditioned to think that work is for fools. They love doing strategic shit like picking domain names and researching target market. They&#x27;ll never actually talk to the target market though. One entrepreneur even hired a &quot;personal assistant&quot; to do the talking, except the assistant was incompetent and just pissed everyone off.<p>Laziness is fine. Arrogance is fine. But anyone with a contempt for hard work will not get anywhere.