More on Entrepreneurship/Creators
Muthinja
4 years ago
Why don't you relaunch my startup projects?
Open to ideas or acquisitions
Failure is an unavoidable aspect of life, yet many recoil at the word.
I've worked on unrelated startup projects. This is a list of products I developed (often as the tech lead or co-founder) and why they failed to launch.
Chess Bet (Betting)
As a chess player who plays 5 games a day and has an ELO rating of 2100, I tried to design a chess engine to rival stockfish and Houdini.
While constructing my chess engine, my cofounder asked me about building a p2p chess betting app. Chess Bet. There couldn't be a better time.
Two people in different locations could play a staked game. The winner got 90% of the bet and we got 10%. The business strategy was clear, but our mini-launch was unusual.
People started employing the same cheat engines I mentioned, causing user churn and defaming our product.
It was the first programming problem I couldn't solve after building a cheat detection system based on player move strengths and prior games. Chess.com, the most famous online chess software, still suffers from this.
We decided to pivot because we needed an expensive betting license.
We relaunched as Chess MVP after deciding to focus on chess learning. A platform for teachers to create chess puzzles and teach content. Several chess students used our product, but the target market was too tiny.
We chose to quit rather than persevere or pivot.
BodaCare (Insure Tech)
‘BodaBoda’ in Swahili means Motorcycle. My Dad approached me in 2019 (when I was working for a health tech business) about establishing an Insurtech/fintech solution for motorbike riders to pay for insurance using SNPL.
We teamed up with an underwriter to market motorcycle insurance. Once they had enough premiums, they'd get an insurance sticker in the mail. We made it better by splitting the cover in two, making it more reasonable for motorcyclists struggling with lump-sum premiums.
Lack of capital and changing customer behavior forced us to close, with 100 motorcyclists paying 0.5 USD every day. Our unit econ didn't make sense, and CAC and retention capital only dug us deeper.
Circle (Social Networking)
Having learned from both product failures, I began to understand what worked and what didn't. While reading through Instagram, an idea struck me.
Suppose social media weren't virtual.
Imagine meeting someone on your way home. Like-minded person
People were excited about social occasions after covid restrictions were eased. Anything to escape. I just built a university student-popular experiences startup. Again, there couldn't be a better time.
I started the Android app. I launched it on Google Beta and oh my! 200 people joined in two days.
It works by signaling if people are in a given place and allowing users to IM in hopes of meeting up in near real-time. Playstore couldn't deploy the app despite its success in beta for unknown reasons. I appealed unsuccessfully.
My infrastructure quickly lost users because I lacked funding.
In conclusion
This essay contains many failures, some of which might have been avoided and others not, but they were crucial learning points in my startup path.
If you liked any idea, I have the source code on Github.
Happy reading until then!
Nick Nolan
4 years ago
How to Make $1,037,100 in 4 Months with This Weird Website
One great idea might make you rich.
Imagine having a million-dollar concept in college that made a million.
2005 precisely.
Alex Tew, 21, from Wiltshire, England, created The Million Dollar Homepage in August 2005. The idea is basic but beyond the ordinary, which is why it worked.
Alex built a 1,000,000-pixel webpage.
Each website pixel would cost $1. Since pixels are hard to discern, he sold 10x10 squares for $100.
He'd make a million if all the spots sold.
He may have thought about NFTs and the Metaverse decades ago.
MillionDollarHomepage.com launched in 2005.
Businesses and individuals could buy a website spot and add their logo, website link, and tagline. You bought an ad, but nobody visited the website.
If a few thousand people visited the website, it could drive traffic to your business's site.
Alex promised buyers the website would be up for 5 years, so it was a safe bet.
Alex's friend with a music website was the first to buy real estate on the site. Within two weeks, 4,700 pixels sold, and a tracker showed how many were sold and available.
Word-of-mouth marketing got the press's attention quickly. Everyone loves reading about new ways to make money, so it was a good news story.
By September, over 250,000 pixels had been sold, according to a BBC press release.
Alex and the website gained more media and public attention, so traffic skyrocketed. Two months after the site launched, 1,400 customers bought more than 500,000 pixels.
Businesses bought online real estate. They heard thousands visited the site, so they could get attention cheaply.
Unless you bought a few squares, I'm not sure how many people would notice your ad or click your link.
A sponge website owner emailed Alex:
“We tried Million Dollar Homepage because we were impressed at the level of ingenuity and the sheer simplicity of it. If we’re honest, we didn’t expect too much from it. Now, as a direct result, we are pitching for £18,000 GBP worth of new clients and have seen our site traffic increase over a hundred-fold. We’re even going to have to upgrade our hosting facility! It’s been exceptional.”
Web.archive.org screenshots show how the website changed.
“The idea is to create something of an internet time capsule: a homepage that is unique and permanent. Everything on the internet keeps changing so fast, it will be nice to have something that stays solid and permanent for many years. You can be a part of that!” Alex Tew, 2005
The last 1,000 pixels were sold on January 1, 2006.
By then, the homepage had hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors. Alex put the last space on eBay due to high demand.
MillionDollarWeightLoss.com won the last pixels for $38,100, bringing revenue to $1,037,100 in 4 months.
Many have tried to replicate this website's success. They've all failed.
This idea only worked because no one had seen this website before.
This winner won't be repeated, but it should inspire you to try something new and creative.
Still popular, you could buy one of the linked domains. You can't buy pixels, but you can buy an expired domain.
One link I clicked costs $59,888.
You'd own a piece of internet history if you spent that much on a domain.
Someone bought stablesgallery.co.uk after the domain expired and restored it.
Many of the linked websites have expired or been redirected, but some still link to the original. I couldn't find sponge's website. Can you?
This is a great example of how a simple creative idea can go viral.
Comment on this amazing success story.
Aaron Dinin, PhD
3 years ago
Are You Unintentionally Creating the Second Difficult Startup Type?
Most don't understand the issue until it's too late.
My first startup was what entrepreneurs call the hardest. A two-sided marketplace.
Two-sided marketplaces are the hardest startups because founders must solve the chicken or the egg conundrum.
A two-sided marketplace needs suppliers and buyers. Without suppliers, buyers won't come. Without buyers, suppliers won't come. An empty marketplace and a founder striving to gain momentum result.
My first venture made me a struggling founder seeking to achieve traction for a two-sided marketplace. The company failed, and I vowed never to start another like it.
I didn’t. Unfortunately, my second venture was almost as hard. It failed like the second-hardest startup.
What kind of startup is the second-hardest?
The second-hardest startup, which is almost as hard to develop, is rarely discussed in the startup community. Because of this, I predict more founders fail each year trying to develop the second-toughest startup than the hardest.
Fairly, I have no proof. I see many startups, so I have enough of firsthand experience. From what I've seen, for every entrepreneur developing a two-sided marketplace, I'll meet at least 10 building this other challenging startup.
I'll describe a startup I just met with its two co-founders to explain the second hardest sort of startup and why it's so hard. They created a financial literacy software for parents of high schoolers.
The issue appears plausible. Children struggle with money. Parents must teach financial responsibility. Problems?
It's possible.
Buyers and users are different.
Buyer-user mismatch.
The financial literacy app I described above targets parents. The parent doesn't utilize the app. Child is end-user. That may not seem like much, but it makes customer and user acquisition and onboarding difficult for founders.
The difficulty of a buyer-user imbalance
The company developing a product faces a substantial operational burden when the buyer and end customer are different. Consider classic firms where the buyer is the end user to appreciate that responsibility.
Entrepreneurs selling directly to end users must educate them about the product's benefits and use. Each demands a lot of time, effort, and resources.
Imagine selling a financial literacy app where the buyer and user are different. To make the first sale, the entrepreneur must establish all the items I mentioned above. After selling, the entrepreneur must supply a fresh set of resources to teach, educate, or train end-users.
Thus, a startup with a buyer-user mismatch must market, sell, and train two organizations at once, requiring twice the work with the same resources.
The second hardest startup is hard for reasons other than the chicken-or-the-egg conundrum. It takes a lot of creativity and luck to solve the chicken-or-egg conundrum.
The buyer-user mismatch problem cannot be overcome by innovation or luck. Buyer-user mismatches must be solved by force. Simply said, when a product buyer is different from an end-user, founders have a lot more work. If they can't work extra, their companies fail.
You might also like
The Verge
4 years ago
Bored Ape Yacht Club creator raises $450 million at a $4 billion valuation.
Yuga Labs, owner of three of the biggest NFT brands on the market, announced today a $450 million funding round. The money will be used to create a media empire based on NFTs, starting with games and a metaverse project.
The team's Otherside metaverse project is an MMORPG meant to connect the larger NFT universe. They want to create “an interoperable world” that is “gamified” and “completely decentralized,” says Wylie Aronow, aka Gordon Goner, co-founder of Bored Ape Yacht Club. “We think the real Ready Player One experience will be player run.”
Just a few weeks ago, Yuga Labs announced the acquisition of CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs. The deal brought together three of the most valuable NFT collections, giving Yuga Labs more IP to work with when developing games and metaverses. Last week, ApeCoin was launched as a cryptocurrency that will be governed independently and used in Yuga Labs properties.
Otherside will be developed by “a few different game studios,” says Yuga Labs CEO Nicole Muniz. The company plans to create development tools that allow NFTs from other projects to work inside their world. “We're welcoming everyone into a walled garden.”
However, Yuga Labs believes that other companies are approaching metaverse projects incorrectly, allowing the startup to stand out. People won't bond spending time in a virtual space with nothing going on, says Yuga Labs co-founder Greg Solano, aka Gargamel. Instead, he says, people bond when forced to work together.
In order to avoid getting smacked, Solano advises making friends. “We don't think a Zoom chat and walking around saying ‘hi' creates a deep social experience.” Yuga Labs refused to provide a release date for Otherside. Later this year, a play-to-win game is planned.
The funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, a major investor in the Web3 space. It previously backed OpenSea and Coinbase. Animoca Brands, Coinbase, and MoonPay are among those who have invested. Andreessen Horowitz general partner Chris Lyons will join Yuga Labs' board. The Financial Times broke the story last month.
"META IS A DOMINANT DIGITAL EXPERIENCE PROVIDER IN A DYSTOPIAN FUTURE."
This emerging [Web3] ecosystem is important to me, as it is to companies like Meta,” Chris Dixon, head of Andreessen Horowitz's crypto arm, tells The Verge. “In a dystopian future, Meta is the dominant digital experience provider, and it controls all the money and power.” (Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen sits on Meta's board and invested early in Facebook.)
Yuga Labs has been profitable so far. According to a leaked pitch deck, the company made $137 million last year, primarily from its NFT brands, with a 95% profit margin. (Yuga Labs declined to comment on deck figures.)
But the company has built little so far. According to OpenSea data, it has only released one game for a limited time. That means Yuga Labs gets hundreds of millions of dollars to build a gaming company from scratch, based on a hugely lucrative art project.
Investors fund Yuga Labs based on its success. That's what they did, says Dixon, “they created a culture phenomenon”. But ultimately, the company is betting on the same thing that so many others are: that a metaverse project will be the next big thing. Now they must construct it.
Tim Denning
3 years ago
The Dogecoin millionaire mysteriously disappeared.
The American who bought a meme cryptocurrency.
Cryptocurrency is the financial underground.
I love it. But there’s one thing I hate: scams. Over the last few years the Dogecoin cryptocurrency saw massive gains.
Glauber Contessoto overreacted. He shared his rags-to-riches cryptocurrency with the media.
He's only wealthy on paper. No longer Dogecoin millionaire.
Here's what he's doing now. It'll make you rethink cryptocurrency investing.
Strange beginnings
Glauber once had a $36,000-a-year job.
He grew up poor and wanted to make his mother proud. Tesla was his first investment. He bought GameStop stock after Reddit boosted it.
He bought whatever was hot.
He was a young investor. Memes, not research, influenced his decisions.
Elon Musk (aka Papa Elon) began tweeting about Dogecoin.
Doge is a 2013 cryptocurrency. One founder is Australian. He insists it's funny.
He was shocked anyone bought it LOL.
Doge is a Shiba Inu-themed meme. Now whenever I see a Shiba Inu, I think of Doge.
Elon helped drive up the price of Doge by talking about it in 2020 and 2021 (don't take investment advice from Elon; he's joking and gaslighting you).
Glauber caved. He invested everything in Doge. He borrowed from family and friends. He maxed out his credit card to buy more Doge. Yuck.
Internet dubbed him a genius. Slumdog millionaire and The Dogefather were nicknames. Elon pumped Doge on social media.
Good times.
From $180,000 to $1,000,000+
TikTok skyrocketed Doge's price.
Reddit fueled up. Influencers recommended buying Doge because of its popularity. Glauber's motto:
Scared money doesn't earn.
Glauber was no broke ass anymore.
His $180,000 Dogecoin investment became $1M. He championed investing. He quit his dumb job like a rebellious millennial.
A puppy dog meme captivated the internet.
Rise and fall
Whenever I invest in anything I ask myself “what utility does this have?”
Dogecoin is useless.
You buy it for the cute puppy face and hope others will too, driving up the price. All cryptocurrencies fell in 2021's second half.
Central banks raised interest rates, and inflation became a pain.
Dogecoin fell more than others. 90% decline.
Glauber’s Dogecoin is now worth $323K. Still no sales. His dog god is unshakeable. Confidence rocks. Dogecoin millionaire recently said...
“I should have sold some.”
Yes, sir.
He now avoids speculative cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin and focuses on Bitcoin and Ethereum.
I've long said this. Starbucks is building on Ethereum.
It's useful. Useful. Developers use Ethereum daily. Investing makes you wiser over time, like the Dogecoin millionaire.
When risk b*tch slaps you, humility follows, as it did for me when I lost money.
You have to lose money to make money. Few understand.
Dogecoin's omissions
You might be thinking Dogecoin is crap.
I'll take a contrarian stance. Dogecoin does nothing, but it has a strong community. Dogecoin dominates internet memes.
It's silly.
Not quite. The message of crypto that many people forget is that it’s a change in business model.
Businesses create products and services, then advertise to find customers. Crypto Web3 works backwards. A company builds a fanbase but sells them nothing.
Once the community reaches MVC (minimum viable community), a business can be formed.
Community members are relational versus transactional. They're invested in a cause and care about it (typically ownership in the business via crypto).
In this new world, Dogecoin has the most important feature.
Summary
While Dogecoin does have a community I still dislike it.
It's all shady. Anything Elon Musk recommends is a bad investment (except SpaceX & Tesla are great companies).
Dogecoin Millionaire has wised up and isn't YOLOing into more dog memes.
Don't follow the crowd or the hype. Investing is a long-term sport based on fundamentals and research.
Since Ethereum's inception, I've spent 10,000 hours researching.
Dogecoin will be the foundation of something new, like Pets.com at the start of the dot-com revolution. But I doubt Doge will boom.
Be safe!
Ashraful Islam
4 years ago
Clean API Call With React Hooks
| Photo by Juanjo Jaramillo on Unsplash |
Calling APIs is the most common thing to do in any modern web application. When it comes to talking with an API then most of the time we need to do a lot of repetitive things like getting data from an API call, handling the success or error case, and so on.
When calling tens of hundreds of API calls we always have to do those tedious tasks. We can handle those things efficiently by putting a higher level of abstraction over those barebone API calls, whereas in some small applications, sometimes we don’t even care.
The problem comes when we start adding new features on top of the existing features without handling the API calls in an efficient and reusable manner. In that case for all of those API calls related repetitions, we end up with a lot of repetitive code across the whole application.
In React, we have different approaches for calling an API. Nowadays mostly we use React hooks. With React hooks, it’s possible to handle API calls in a very clean and consistent way throughout the application in spite of whatever the application size is. So let’s see how we can make a clean and reusable API calling layer using React hooks for a simple web application.
I’m using a code sandbox for this blog which you can get here.
import "./styles.css";
import React, { useEffect, useState } from "react";
import axios from "axios";
export default function App() {
const [posts, setPosts] = useState(null);
const [error, setError] = useState("");
const [loading, setLoading] = useState(false);
useEffect(() => {
handlePosts();
}, []);
const handlePosts = async () => {
setLoading(true);
try {
const result = await axios.get(
"https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts"
);
setPosts(result.data);
} catch (err) {
setError(err.message || "Unexpected Error!");
} finally {
setLoading(false);
}
};
return (
<div className="App">
<div>
<h1>Posts</h1>
{loading && <p>Posts are loading!</p>}
{error && <p>{error}</p>}
<ul>
{posts?.map((post) => (
<li key={post.id}>{post.title}</li>
))}
</ul>
</div>
</div>
);
}
I know the example above isn’t the best code but at least it’s working and it’s valid code. I will try to improve that later. For now, we can just focus on the bare minimum things for calling an API.
Here, you can try to get posts data from JsonPlaceholer. Those are the most common steps we follow for calling an API like requesting data, handling loading, success, and error cases.
If we try to call another API from the same component then how that would gonna look? Let’s see.
500: Internal Server Error
Now it’s going insane! For calling two simple APIs we’ve done a lot of duplication. On a top-level view, the component is doing nothing but just making two GET requests and handling the success and error cases. For each request, it’s maintaining three states which will periodically increase later if we’ve more calls.
Let’s refactor to make the code more reusable with fewer repetitions.
Step 1: Create a Hook for the Redundant API Request Codes
Most of the repetitions we have done so far are about requesting data, handing the async things, handling errors, success, and loading states. How about encapsulating those things inside a hook?
The only unique things we are doing inside handleComments and handlePosts are calling different endpoints. The rest of the things are pretty much the same. So we can create a hook that will handle the redundant works for us and from outside we’ll let it know which API to call.
500: Internal Server Error
Here, this request function is identical to what we were doing on the handlePosts and handleComments. The only difference is, it’s calling an async function apiFunc which we will provide as a parameter with this hook. This apiFunc is the only independent thing among any of the API calls we need.
With hooks in action, let’s change our old codes in App component, like this:
500: Internal Server Error
How about the current code? Isn’t it beautiful without any repetitions and duplicate API call handling things?
Let’s continue our journey from the current code. We can make App component more elegant. Now it knows a lot of details about the underlying library for the API call. It shouldn’t know that. So, here’s the next step…
Step 2: One Component Should Take Just One Responsibility
Our App component knows too much about the API calling mechanism. Its responsibility should just request the data. How the data will be requested under the hood, it shouldn’t care about that.
We will extract the API client-related codes from the App component. Also, we will group all the API request-related codes based on the API resource. Now, this is our API client:
import axios from "axios";
const apiClient = axios.create({
// Later read this URL from an environment variable
baseURL: "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com"
});
export default apiClient;
All API calls for comments resource will be in the following file:
import client from "./client";
const getComments = () => client.get("/comments");
export default {
getComments
};
All API calls for posts resource are placed in the following file:
import client from "./client";
const getPosts = () => client.get("/posts");
export default {
getPosts
};
Finally, the App component looks like the following:
import "./styles.css";
import React, { useEffect } from "react";
import commentsApi from "./api/comments";
import postsApi from "./api/posts";
import useApi from "./hooks/useApi";
export default function App() {
const getPostsApi = useApi(postsApi.getPosts);
const getCommentsApi = useApi(commentsApi.getComments);
useEffect(() => {
getPostsApi.request();
getCommentsApi.request();
}, []);
return (
<div className="App">
{/* Post List */}
<div>
<h1>Posts</h1>
{getPostsApi.loading && <p>Posts are loading!</p>}
{getPostsApi.error && <p>{getPostsApi.error}</p>}
<ul>
{getPostsApi.data?.map((post) => (
<li key={post.id}>{post.title}</li>
))}
</ul>
</div>
{/* Comment List */}
<div>
<h1>Comments</h1>
{getCommentsApi.loading && <p>Comments are loading!</p>}
{getCommentsApi.error && <p>{getCommentsApi.error}</p>}
<ul>
{getCommentsApi.data?.map((comment) => (
<li key={comment.id}>{comment.name}</li>
))}
</ul>
</div>
</div>
);
}
Now it doesn’t know anything about how the APIs get called. Tomorrow if we want to change the API calling library from axios to fetch or anything else, our App component code will not get affected. We can just change the codes form client.js This is the beauty of abstraction.
Apart from the abstraction of API calls, Appcomponent isn’t right the place to show the list of the posts and comments. It’s a high-level component. It shouldn’t handle such low-level data interpolation things.
So we should move this data display-related things to another low-level component. Here I placed those directly in the App component just for the demonstration purpose and not to distract with component composition-related things.
Final Thoughts
The React library gives the flexibility for using any kind of third-party library based on the application’s needs. As it doesn’t have any predefined architecture so different teams/developers adopted different approaches to developing applications with React. There’s nothing good or bad. We choose the development practice based on our needs/choices. One thing that is there beyond any choices is writing clean and maintainable codes.