Spectactular failure stories - got any?

This may sound like a parody thread but it's not - it's really not. I've been thinking about this for days.

I think it's pretty important to know what *didn't* work - and what happened, and why.

So, without further ado, here are some of my greatest failures!

* * * * *

1) Custom Furnishings Fail.

Yes, at one point I thought: how hard can it be to make a different texture on a chair or something and make it the way the customer wants, for say $L 50?

Well guess what, it's pretty darn hard.

That starter furniture set is *not* going to look like Marie Antoinette's yard sale for say, $L 250 worth of work. Nor will it, for $L 2500, or even $L 25000.

Yes, stupid of me, I know. I shut down that offer after two or three customers. Insult to injury moment: seeing the finished piece set for sale later, apparently just because the picky customer just got tired of looking at it.



2) Event Venue Fail.

Ever so creatively, I thought: hey, what if I make a really nice meadow, and rent it out with staff and such for say, weddings, or even duels (we provide the undertaker!).

I made an area, posted ads, you name it - and the silence was deafening.

Six months offered: not one bite. I put it out of its misery in 2006.



3) Wedding registry fail.

Alright, I had a budding architecture and furnishings business going, and a *lot* of my customers were newly partnered and looking for homes together. What better idea, than to have their friends get them stuff?

Well, doing nothing at all was a better idea, I just didn't realise it.

I spent a couple months scripting this... 'registration thing' with my products and all that kind of stuff in it. Fifty hours into it, I thought... this is stupid. Net loss: 50 hours of professional software consulting time (yes I was consulting then RL, and could have billed work to a customer but oooh no, I was messing with this).

So I put a dumb sign out saying: drop me a notecard and I'll deliver whatever. Brilliant! Simple! Until the custom requests started to roll in. See failure #1 above.



4. Sim Architect Failure.

Without going into the gory details, let's just say: don't start pouring in time on anybody's project just because someone says: "I am soooo doing this sim FOR SURE!"

Lesson learned...



5. Tulip Fail.

Okay, this was a bit of an experiment, and possibly, a huge success in some ways. But not in a business way. I made 100 rare tulips and decided to sell 99 for just $L 10 to see what happened to them.

Well guess what, people wanted them.

Really, really bad.

When it came time to set any new ones out, I was shadowed, followed - hounded for days! People watched my avatar from beyond my draw distance, to see if I'd go down to my shop. I'd log in, and people would log in all around me. IS HE PUTTING THEM OUT YET??? Many days and many silent screams later, all the tulips were sold off.

Sometimes people ask: hey, are you ever going back on your word and making more tulips? Hah! Got to be kidding me.



6. West Trade Imports LTD Fail.

Okay, so I had a successful content creation business that was humming along nicely at $L 200k/month. Great! Well stupid me, I decided to open a region just for some fun - maybe rent out a few lots, right?

Little did I know what estate management entailed.

Next thing I knew, I was busy like crazy and my architecture and antiques suffered. First it slid back to $L 150k/mo, then $L 100k/mo, then... it started to get really spotty after six or eight months.

Well, that stands to reason because I wasn't doing anything with it.

After three years of telling myself I'd get back around to it - I finally let it fall gracefully into history and sold off the land the business was on this summer.

I have to say: it's *hard* to neglect a $L 200k/mo business so thoroughly that it fails like that, but, I managed it. Wasn't easy! Just shows what can be accomplished with dedication and a modest bit of distraction. How many of you have driven something doing so well, straight into the ground? Not many I am sure!

* * * * *

Of course, I have a success story or two, but, that's not the point of this thread.

Let the great grid Fail Log begin!

Club failure:

Summertime Blues Club started out hot and stayed hot for about five months. Then one day...an empty club. The next day...still empty. The next day...3 or 4 people, and then back to empty. I had experienced it before, it always picked back up. This time, it didn't. I closed it down, rather than continuing to drop $300USD into it every month just to have no visitors.

Sim failure:

Purchased a sim and made a residential community (children welcome). Out of 38 possible rentals, the most I ever had at one time was 5. Rather than going the sex club routine (which was the suggestion of two close friends), I sold the sim. Ironically, since doing that, I have picked up 5 new tenants (only 1 a move-over from the other sim) on my other residential (mostly skybox) sim.

I still have my mall, Summertime Blues exists in a much smaller, unhosted version, and I still have a full sim and an openspace sim. Good enough.

I think that anybody who has a successful business and who doesn't have at least one of these sorts of stories has just been incredibly, incredibly lucky.

Learning what does and doesn't work in SL is tricky - you can't take RL paradigms and try to apply them to SL, because of the fundamental nature of the beast. The economy is built on a whole different set of drivers.

Hosoi, as a company, in the time I was with it, has had a few false starts - projects that just didn't resonate with anybody - or not resonate enough to make any money. We just kept on with different things until we found the one that "stuck". Now, of course, we have a business success on our hands, look at what we have done and wonder why we didn't come up with that idea in the first place. I mean, it's so OBVIOUS!!!!

The people that cash out after the first failure don't deserve success, in my opinion. Working hard at something is the art of recognising that something isn't working, trying to figure out why, and then changing it.

"Tulip Fail" had me laughing. Awesome story. I could just picture it.

My biggest fail is that I never seem to get started.

1. "SLDoBetter":

This was my first "big idea". It was a free system that allowed you to place a floating cube above any item on your land, so that if someone else could build the same thing better, they could submit their improved version to you to replace the one already there.

Um, oh boy. I really didn't get it at that time.

--

2. "SLotto":

Not a total failure, but not a shining moment. I was commissioned to create a lottery system similar to the one used in Bravo Bravo. Since it was back in the early, "bad ol' days", everything had to be done by eMail, and it took a lot of fiddling around and testing to get it to work. But eventually, it did work, and the build was good, and I sent it to the customer, and they were satisfied.

All good so far? Well, from my point of view, yes, but overall apparently not. The customer apparently then went on to sell the scripts to someone else, and they paid me a share of the sale - which was a lot of money. I said it was too much, and gave some of it back. When I spoke to the new owner of the scripts, though, it transpired that they had believed they were buying not just the scripts but an in-place and fully deployed cross-grid system and had paid hundreds of thousands of L$ on that basis. The original customer (who sold the system) had left SL by that time. If I hadn't refused the original high payment, I'd have been able to refund them reasonably: as it was, I gave them some money back, but it wasn't a patch on what they'd spent.

--

3. "Magical Mischief":

The group I started on about my second day. When I completely missed the point of how large group RP works, and has to work. Needless to say, it went dead almost instantly. When the Lindens build the next WA, they should have it begin with a big stone archway on which is engraved: "Thus God and Nature link'd the gen'ral frame, and bade self-love and social be the same..."

One non-spectacular failure:-

At the time, I had around 60 skyboxes rented out and a spare 8k piece of land, so I decided to use a bit of the land for my tenants to freely place their things for sale - things they didn't want any more and things they'd made themselves - and I promoted it in Classifieds. Maybe 4 or 5 people actually used it and, even though it was only a 1024 area, I had to make the place look full with my own stuff. As a concept it was near total failure, but it did have and unexpected outcome.

I decided to make a few more bits and have an actual shop of my things above the yard sale area. It was only a 1024 area and I soon filled it. Then I kept making more things, moving the walls back, making more, moving the walls back, etc., and all the time, sales kept increasing amazingly. In the end I have the store I have now, and I stopped renting out skyboxes a very long time ago. So I'm very glad that I thought of offering that failed free service to my tenants.

Attempting to stay single. (=_=)y

See your not like most consultants, they would have charged a client $50 a hour *while* working on SL things.

Hummm...

Well, my initial forrays into fashion design cetainly were not all that successful.

I started selling T-shirts, and barely broke even... Managed to sell just enough to cover mall space, with a hair left over.

I expanded into making dresses, and later hats and other clothes... and still barely broke even on my mall space rental costs.

Tried making custom clothes... Spectacular fail... Only had a couple takers, and never got enough for any of the jobs to really be worth the time and effort it took to make them.

But while I was doing this, I did improve my texture making skills, to the point where I was offered work as a texture artist. Soon my texture sales dwarfed the income from the clothing stores, and though I kept the clothing stores around for another year or so for sentimental reasons, they never did amount to anything.

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Furniture: Tried making and selling desks, chairs, benches, couches... Got complements on how nice they looked, and I licensed some very good quality animations to use in them, but like the clothes, they didn't really sell enough copies to be worth the mall floor space to sell them in. That tanked and got shut down the same time as when I closed the clothing stores.

====

(Indirect fail...) Sim design.

Built a spectacularly beautiful two-sim pair of tropical islands for a client. His idea was to have several sizes of pre-existing bungalows and homes that could be either rented or purchased, with a shared recreation area and pool, and a lagoon for boating and surfing. Also had a nice club in a skybox, for strippers and/or a rental venue. And a "lover's cave" on one of the sims, for couples or escorts to use for romantic get-aways. All in-theme as a tropical paradise.

I lived there, and loved it. A couple other people bought or rented homes there... But the majority of it went unoccupied. It was a decent paying project, and established my credentials as a sim designer... But the sims themselves failed, and were eventually sold. Wasn't my job to advertise or rent the places out, but I did try to help manage the area.

Goes to show that even if you build something really nice, it can still fail if not managed and marketed well enough.

You accidentally posted a success story. I see what you did there! It's like how you answer that "what's your greatest flaw" question in interviews.

Since I started in SL, back in March of 2007 (this includes my first account), I've tried to have some sort of gallery up in SL. Gallery of my real life artwork. I had galleries up for more than a year. The only time anyone visited, for the most part, was that field trip undertaken by Forum Hangout members some time back.

The closest I ever came to success was when I was allowed to have some of my stuff up for free in a "guest artist" type slot at a huge art place. And being one of the artists in an artist event. Both were success stories in being recognized, both are failures in execution.

The guest artist slot was in a separate building near the main gallery. It "obviously" was part of the whole complex, but still, no one ever visited. The artist event was fun, but it included a live music performance. No one could move. Everyone was focussed on the musician. Oh, and both occurred very quickly after arriving in second life. I haven't had anything like that since.

Is it a failure if none of my art is up at the hangout any longer? After slowly being returned to me over time?

hehe. The original intent was a near total failure though. What developed from it made the failure worthwhile. I admit that there's nothing to be learned from it.

Camper Shooting
Charging people $10L to shoot campers earning more Linden than people were paying to shoot them
Maybe it might work on a big RP type scale................

I have no problems getting started, once I get started. It's getting past 80% that kills me every time..

Hilarious! Too bad it failed.

LOL I remember that! I was a camper then. (though not for this).


I'm still working on a success story and refuse to recall my numerous failures.

Lexxi's post reminded me of another of my own failures.

Artist's Agent:
Thought I could represent a reasonably good furry artist in SL, before he ever came to SL himself. I got his permission to post samples of his work in several galleries, and had notecard givers about how the art could be purchased, or how he could be commissioned to do custom avatar portraits in traditional pen and ink work, or as higher-resolution 3D work than SL could represent at the time. He would sell his customers both the digital version and photo-quality prints of the art. This is a guy who could go to a furry con, doodle in the artists area, and easily get more commissions than he could complete in the next three months, and whose rates were pretty darned reasonable for work of a similar quality level on the con art circuits.

The result? Spectacular fail! Not ONE commission for him, not even a sale of a print of an existing piece... No one in SL was willing to pay even a fraction of what he regularly would get at furry cons for similar art. Result: Though he eventually joined SL himself, he doesn't bother to even try to sell his art here any more.

Hey Desmond,

I want a tulip! They sound lovely! Surely you still have them in your inventory?
Pretty Please? A Rare Desmond tulip, I can see it in my garden now.

Cheers
FaTeke

"So shines a good deed in a wearly world."
Willy Wonka

I've heard that if you follow him around long enough, he'll give you one.

I plan on starting to follow him around.

It wasn't bad for stress relief, sometimes just randomly grenading people or letting loose some damage dealing critters to see how many campers were AFK

LMAO. Do you know what that means?

From what I've read in other threads, he's already given several of the forum ladies one

once upon a noobie time, I went to pick from a money tree. Instead of harvesting that Linden buck on it, I pulled up the whole tree.

Our very understanding and patient friend put the tree back, and my sweetie went to pick from the tree... also yanking it out.

Eventually it dawned on us why the tree came out. Because we were in the same group as the tree was set.. etc.



I tried my hand at making clothes and set out to make a skirt. It was so far from a skirt it wound up being a lampshade.

I scared myself so bad scripting once that I decided I wont do that again.

Learning animation, I had a lot of failures... they looked fine in the program and hideous in SL. However, all wasn't lost there with a few of them, a friend had a "circus freak" event, and viola, a few failures became the "contortionfreak" gesture dance combo.

This is a great thread, here's some of my most spectacular failure.

L$400,000 for 32sqm fail
there's not much to the story but way back when I was at the height of my smugness some smart arse came up with a way to change land prices very very rapidly. I woke up one morning to discover all my bots had been drained of cash. When I checked what was going on I discovered we'd bought two separate 16sqm parcels for L$200,000 each. I pretty quickly found a way to avoid being ripped off and proceeded to win future parcels from this scammer for the cheap price the next 30 or 40 times. I think I managed to eventually get my costs down to about L$500/sqm or so. I submitted tickets to LL but I never saw that L$400k again.

Bought the same parcel 100 times
A fair while back SL would go through little phases where a parcel would stay for sale even after you paid for it. Even after you paid for it dozens of times. The first time I paid for a parcel Guy Linden berated me for trying to buy the same parcel more than once. The second time it happened due to various glitches in mine and SLs software my bots paid for that same "cheap" parcel about 100 times until I finally ran out of money. The Lindens were definitely not amused.

Set all my land for sale for L$1/sqm
I have this bot that runs around setting all the prices on my parcels. Not sure what happened but one day I accidentally set the price wrong and it whizzed around merrily dumping all my land for a tenth of it's value. I have no idea how much I lost before I noticed but it was 10s of thousands of sqms.