IMHO It's not the real reason behind the fail, the real reason is not using the limited resources for gaining a ramen profitable state. If you do not have "unlimited" or more than 6 or so months of funds to run the company you can not play with luxury items. For this particular case playing with a "luxury input style" not any means necessary for the problem or the application. This luxury input style feature is a monster funds eater. May be the application could run on any vps for years for a fraction of the funds the company burned for this monster servers. Some engineering and planning in time could help and prevent this failure.
In essence we are in agreement. Better goal planning sure would have helped. It certainly may have kept me focused on my initial goal. The unfortunate reality was that I went wrong very early on in my thought process.
The "cool" feature I wanted to add and implement for the main app should have been filtered out immediately since it did not really add to the core need I was addressing.
That's what I failed to realize. The feature I wanted to add became the main goal and the main solution took a backseat. From that point forward all my thought processes were biased relative to implementing this feature. This of course is what I believe was the single biggest reason that led to its failure.
Who knows if I would have been successful otherwise. Maybe.. maybe not... It might not have been the next digg or even close to that but I'm sure I could have gotten to ramen profitable state. I will make a second attempt soon, minus the shiny features this time...!
p.s.
Purchasing the servers was besides the point. I should have never even gone that far. I never would have purchased them had it not been for that feature.
I'm sorry for your failure. But it's a win situation for you, a costly one perhaps. For your next try you will be wiser. Any sane man reading this will be. Thank you for sharing this event. I think it must be hard to admit failures.
Better luck for the next run.
Also would you like to share more about your situation after the failure? Your economics, how you handled failure in psychological sense? Your relatives reactions etc?
I'm an eternal optimist so I don't suffer from having failed. It makes one feel alive actually.
Economically I'm wounded but still alive and healing. Without being too specific I am 10s of thousands in debt because of my failed startup but not all is lost. There is a lot of reusable code and designs for the second time around =)
My family and friends understood when I told them what had happened. I have pointed them to this article actually.
"if the shiny feature you want to implement is not absolutely necessary for your solution and it will take more than a day or two to finish then move on"
small hooray for shiney, unnecessary features that do get done in a day or 2 though! keep 'em guessing. =)
