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swami108 | 2 years ago

Tells you how many years I’ve been failing

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_fvh3|2 years ago

Haha, I only looked at your profile to check out your "failed" projects. If it's okay with you, could you please provide a brief description or links to those projects that didn't quite work out?

Edit: If this sounds like an AI response I used ChatGPT to correct my grammar, I can barely write a coherent sentence on my own, even though I am a native speaker.

swami108|2 years ago

Haha, no worries :)

My latest failure was Wize, a mobile app that let anyone share their skills. It was a great idea, a bit early for its times (live streaming app before Instagram Live and Tik Tok), and it had a great start--we were in the top 20 at the Launch Hackathon, won an award from Google, and we had grammy award music teachers teaching on the platform. It failed because we pivoted too early. Building the two sided market was challenging, but instead of narrowing our focus to one topic, we decided to pivot to a "professional 1-1 coffee chat platform", and then again to a networking app–"Tinder for professionals." After going to a lot of conferences and meetups and talking to professionals, the resounding message we heard was that this domain was tough to dominate and it was going to be an uphill battle for us.

The biggest lesson I learnt in this is take advice with a pinch of salt. There are many successful apps today that resemble v1 (Maven), v2 (Intro), and v3 of Wize, and I think we would have been fine if we had persisted.

A more detailed write up of Wize, if you're interested: https://swamiphoto.com/wize