>We were creating a solution for which there was no problem.

As a lawyer I have always had a similar idea in mind for a '"mint" for assets."

I know you tried to pivot and already made the always difficult decision to shut down, but your UI looks great and please consider the following:

Let me just sell you on the market first, there are about 40 million US citizens 65+, 2.5 million US citizens die every year, and 55% die intestate (without a will). I could not find any specific number, but as a practicing attorney I can tell you it is not uncommon for those that do have a will to have multiple versions and people (typically family) fight over assets, and it can be an expensive fight.

At this point you should know where I am going, a "mint" for assets would be an unbelievably useful tool for probate lawyers and estate planners. In terms of the business just quick ideas: 1. license the software to probate attorneys, 2. cut out lawyers and be your own non-legal entity providing these estate planning services (similar to legalzoom but you have a niche on estate planning).

Feel free to email me, I am non-technical, but this is a unique occasion on HN where I might have a little knowledge to offer.

This was exactly what I was thinking, also for insurance purposes. Another 'hook' here would be that you partner with a homeowners insurance company which can give more accurate home owners insurance rates based on what someone actually has, and it helps in making a claim. I do the cheezy thing and basically walk around with an HD video camera every couple of years and film what is on the shelves and in the drawers. If nothing else it helps refresh your memory.

We actually talked to a few insurance people and the consensus was that insurance company didn't want something like it. It's not in their interest for you to make claims. Our response from users was basically that it was valuable whenever they needed to make claims or inventory to buy insurance but otherwise wouldn't use it often. That was key for us. As a free service, we didn't see a way to monetize if users didn't come back.

These articles are great. Sad, but great. They somehow feel more real than the "I made X in a weekend and sold it for a billion dollars" type of stories.

I can relate to this story and would combine points 1 and 3. We often do it to scratch an itch or to engineer a beautiful a solution to a non-technical problem.

In my last job in IT-healthcare, i learned not to rush to automate any process because the problem is probably a people problem and not a technical problem. And you can't fix a people problem with a computer.

I think there should be more of these stories. Many people starting companies learn much from success stories through books and blogs but I think there may be more lessons to learn about how not to fail from people that have.

If you see more, please add them here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5270826

(I have a couple of others linked. Perhaps I should have named them but it did not occur to me.)

I used to work at a company that had an asset management product.

The problem with asset management is that the concept makes a lot of sense, and sounds very useful, but it requires a great deal of discipline. It's basically like Quicken for businesses. Quicken makes a lot of sense, but unless everything is automated, people get bored, and once you fall 1 month behind, people usually give up. Basically, it's the human element that fails.

It's the same case with asset management. It requires someone to do the boring task of keeping track of everything. The other thing is that GAAP allows for a certain tolerance of things like valuation of assets, depreciation, etc, so you don't need to be exactly right. This gives less incentive for people to maintain a tight inventory on all their belongings.

One of my relatives owns a store, and they track inventory very loosely, because they know that their things will get shoplifted, suppliers will ship them a different amount than they requested, etc. They build in a tolerance for errors, and it's a widely accepted practice. As long as this tolerance is good enough, then having an exact count plus the amount of time required to be exact, makes the entire concept not worth it.

Do you have a version of akumulate.com floating around. We are a small business with an asset tracking problem. Just got burned by ManageEngine's AssetTracker and would like something more in depth than SpiceWorks offers. Perhaps I can tour and buy the code base for modest amount for internal use?

We actually never modified the codebase to handle business assets. We were in the discovery phase to find out if we can repurpose the code. When we shut it down, it was still a product for managing personal assets.

So, I'm interested in making a play in a similar market (small companies/individuals) Well, "making a play" sounds more ambitious than I am. Mostly, I need it for me. But, like most people, I think that if I need it, others might, too.

My angle is focused more on locating the item than valuing it, (and I have the basics of a barcode inventory system) but I'm also wanting to add valuation (well, and 'where is the invoice') tracking to it.

I think your problem with small companies was that you went after companies that expected to be acquired.

Companies like mine that you expect to run long term are very different beasts with very different needs. And I know it doesn't seem that way in silicon valley, but there are more of us than there are "startups"

I mean, the 'where is the invoice' and the depreciation bit is important if I get audited (and I will, eventually) - but, see, I build computers and maintain networking equipment; I spend more time looking for tools/parts than I spend actually working with those tools/parts.. So a 'where is my stuff' thing is pretty dang useful.

Of course, it probably makes sense to have separate applications for inventory and for accounting value. But there are problems with that, too... for instance, it's dang difficult to come up with a solid/standard UPC database. the nature of barcode stickers is such that you probably have your own, unique numbers (which then, if you had a complete-ish upc database, you could link to) and small items? well, getting durable barcode (or rfid or NFC) tags appropriately sized for small things is usually difficult or expensive or both.

A reasonably written barcode (or rfid or nfc) based inventory thing means that other people can put things away and I can still find them; one of those things that makes living with other people (or hiring other people to help out) much easier.

We consulted a few small companies. I'm not sure I'd categorize the companies as startups hoping to be acquired. They had been around for a while and made money. I think many companies lease machines so the need to track those assets didn't exist.

We were in the middle of working on an iOS app for users to scan stuff around their house and we'd lookup those items to add to our inventory list. When we decided to pivot, we wanted to use that scanning functionality to scan asset tags. Obviously, we didn't pursue it any further but we were heading in that direction.

>I think many companies lease machines so the need to track those assets didn't exist.

Hm. Well, it's possible I'm imagining my own need here. I mean, all accounting work is a hedge against an audit and the resulting tax debt, and it's possible that it's acceptable to just handwave your small assets.

But yeah. In my experience? small, single owner businesses don't lease, 'cause it is both more expensive and less flexible than ownership. I mean, obviously, if you are a short-term business, leasing is great, as you get the stuff up front, and you only have to pay for it if you don't go out of business meanwhile... but it's generally a bad choice for the long-term slog kind of businesses I'm talking about.

>We were in the middle of working on an iOS app for users to scan stuff around their house and we'd lookup those items to add to our inventory list. When we decided to pivot, we wanted to use that scanning functionality to scan asset tags. Obviously, we didn't pursue it any further but we were heading in that direction.

The problem most of these apps have is that they use the built-in camera... which is way too slow. You need something like 250ms (certainly under 500ms) item scan ->recognition times, which usually the camera barcode decoder app thingie can't do at all. It does better with 2d barcodes; much better, but probably still not good enough.

Can you give us a rundown of the codebase / language / db / size / documentation? I can likely repurpose this for my own use as well.

Not sure if we're gonna release the code but was written using django/mysql. I don't remember how much code we wrote. I'm guessing something in the area of 10k lines.

I like your observations, especially #1. May I recommend this book before you give it another shot? http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-Abou...

Related to the pivot idea, I can's seem to find an asset manager that will work for my organization. They are either tied to business processes (e.g. selling products), don't allow custom attributes, etc. I work for a non-profit tied to govt/education and we have incredibly strict rules for managing inventory. Sadly, it is all being done by Excel and is a brutal mistake prone system.

Thanks for the recommendation. I'll check it out!

This is a good problem to solve. Not sure what efforts did you put in to find the target audience, we have had good results so far in building a solution for similar problem focused on IT Infrastructure. Wish you luck in your future endeavors.

Thanks. We're putting some effort into creating an inventory management system for Square users. https://shopventory.com if you're interested in just checking it out.

And to be completely honest, as my post mentioned, our day jobs were more important at the time so we tried to find the target audience but not hard enough.

Great story. Thanks for sharing. I like the No3. "Working on a problem that people don’t have probably means that people won’t be willing to pay for that product."

Almost crapped myself reading this, working on something very similar... I wonder if it will meet the same fate.

As with any consumer type app, monetization is key and unfortunately it's something I feel businesses should have a clear path to but many do not. This is part of the reason why we wanted to pivot toward a B2B type service.

Yes ours is quite a different beast, we're not entirely sure what will be best but a freemium model is plausible/likely for us.