Your worst entrepreneurial failure... details please!

[mercenariez]

Act:

Kickstarter fail.

Thought I saw a need: hundreds of people commenting about it every day, hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube videos about this problem (unsolved), streamers talking every other day about this problem and how annoying it was, new YouTube videos coming out every so often about this problem (even to this day), etc.

So I created a solution. Took me ~4 months and about $1,000 in prototype testing and development. Doing everything related to the Kickstarter launch cost me time and energy too.

Little did I know that starting a Kickstarter is practically the same (at least it was for me) as doing grassroots person by person (one at a time) selling.

Second, the need was a lot less than I anticipated, or at least even though people were VOCAL about the need, they were not willing to PUT DOWN MONEY unless hard sold. The odd thing is they are willing to put down money for BIG NAME company “solutions” (basically keep rebuying the same defective product until it breaks, then rebuy, and repeat) but not for my solution (one time buy). Goes to show how hard it is to compete with the Big Dogs, even when your product is -literally- better, but you have no name and are basically a nobody.

Though my product solved the problem, overall though the customer probably saw my offer as weak (needed more time to make product more visually cool and advanced looking I guess), and 4 months, I realized, was the “event idealist” in me looking for that easy Kickstarter path to success, when in reality, even Kickstarters are long/hard PROCESSES. In other words, I would now say my product probably needed 1-2 more years of development on top of what I did to become a good enough offer for more customers to be interested in.

Assess:

My Kickstarter finished at 10% of its goal with no more than $10-$20 dollars spent in advertising.

I could have spent more on advertising and hard sold my way to 100%, but I actually already run more fruitful businesses, so I turned this pursuit down, since I expected it to explode on its own. Again, I thought there was a strong enough need for this solution to sell itself.

Assessment is I was wrong and I failed, though I learned a decent amount about Kickstarters I guess.

Adjust:

I don’t think I’d run a Kickstarter again knowing what I know now, but if I did I would do the following:

- talk to as many people DIRECTLY as possible (online and/or offline) re: what they thought about my product AHEAD of time, and ask for an order THEN and THERE to confirm buyer need as opposed to “I’m ‘interested’ but not willing to pay =D”
- ONLY if there was a LARGE amount of pre-orders ALREADY would I run the Kickstarter (60%-70% of goal, maybe even more)
- Don’t use the Kickstarter “guides” to make your page. People have low attention spans. Too lazy to detail what this means specifically, but basically don’t trust Kickstarter’s “tips”. Trust yourself and yourself only. You know what sells.

There is so much I can say on this but if anyone read this far my advice is don’t run a Kickstarter, honestly. I’ve learned so much from this experience re: why a Kickstarter is bad, but I don’t feel like writing any more about it right now due to typing fatigue. I am not saying it is impossible for one to run a successful campaign, or make money, but just that people should know that existing campaigns are highly deceptive in how they portray their “success” of funding, as event oriented (I got rich overnight!) instead of process oriented.

 

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[Eric Flathers]

Lol.

How did those dates go?

I just find it hilarious that these girls are out looking for love, and meanwhile @Eric Flathers is charming them into telling him all their darkest dislikes of dating sites.

Some went well others I got catfished. The whole verified photo idea got reinforced on some of them. Hey you have to do your market research and give people what they want.

 

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[Zcott]

My guitar teaching business is slowly failing over the last two years after I let it die.

I launched an online teaching membership website over the last two weeks. I had a high quality list of 2000 guitar players that liked my online articles and a free eBook they got. They liked the course outlines... but $29/mo was too expensive. One person signed up, and I refunded him and cancelled the launch today.

You sound very talented. Don't give up!

Why not adjust your prices? Maybe a lower monthly fee, or as suggested above, a single expensive fee.
Courses on Udemy are popular, you could also look into putting a course or two on there.
YouTube videos are a good idea too.

2000 people liking your content is a big number. Maybe you just need help with marketing your next steps. Start a progress thread and undoubtedly you'll receive sound advice.

 

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[Johnny boy]

I have more stories than I care to admit, but ~15 years ago I tried to start a book review business.

The idea was to provide book reviews for free, and charge a fee for an expedited review and distribution. The fee was something like $100 or $200, can't remember exactly, but it filled a need in the market at the time. Instead of waiting 6 weeks (sometimes months) for exposure, authors could speed up the process.

I had no clue how many bad books were desperately seeking attention I was inundated with some of the worst stuff I'd never even thought could exist. There were a few gems hidden here and there, but I was so overwhelmed with the junk that I couldn't keep up.

If I'd had a clue, I could have sent these books out to "wannabe" writers/reviewers as a free gift in exchange for them writing the reviews, but I didn't know any better back then.

I think I ended up selling the site. I still got random free books in the mail a good 5 years later.

Why didn't you just charge more? It doesn't matter if it's junk. You still get paid. Make it efficient and outsource it to indian assistants for $4/hr and scale it with ads to people with writing as an interest on facebook and instagram. You could make a ton of money without doing a single review yourself.

 

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[Gepi]

The irony is I hadn't had any real big major business failures, except for the occasional month w/out income as a contractor, but I always made up for it one way or the other, because I pushed, coldcalled, sold until it worked again.
My biggest failure is not investing 100% all the time because I fail to set up plans and fail to believe in myself. I am a natural short term thinker (or maybe I should say I was, because I now have realized that I always need a plan to be good, I have learned that I am INTJ, and we always need a plan)
Yes, I would say, for me, not the biggest business failure but the biggest root from which they stem, is my own laziness and low self esteem, limiting my ability. I know I could be a lot better, if I was following through always. The other thing is, that I have often kept myself from advancing because I was not careful enough, and didn't consider the realistic options. So it is more inside, than outside (sorry for the philosophy )
If I'd always make solid plans, broken down into manageable pieces, and sticking to them, I know I could have much bigger potential. But I am happy, because I have understood it more and more, and I work towards overcoming all of those flaws day after day. And what gets measured gets managed, or so they say.
I also recently had a very strong spiritual experience (without any strange substance involved), which has shown me deep inside that I can achieve anything, if I step outside my comfort zone and sail to new shores. Sorry for not having any interesting real failures to share, but I think the inner mindset can be a big challenge as well, and plays a big role in one's ability to cast aside limiting believes or being open to change.
For example, I didn't learn maths since 9th grade (I hated it, because I was too lazy to really care) and now I have to relearn everything, because I enrolled in remote business college (tax funded in Ger, so no big debts coming up). Earlier in life I would think I could not learn. But not now.
Maybe this, at the core, was my biggest failure of all: limiting myself for far too long, letting myself being pushed around by the waves, without goals, without ambition. And the second one was trying weed much too early in life. I have given it up completely now, because it negates my energy and focus. So, yeah. Being not the best possible friend in this world was the reason of many of my biggest failures in the most important business I have: my life

 

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[rjrobbins2]

In 2004, I started an eBay business where I bought things from salvage auctions (new goods with damaged packaging or liquidation/overstock goods). I eventually found a source for Borders Bookstore overstock. I was getting entire pallets of books for $75. I was literally paying two cents per book. I spent more renting a truck to pick up than getting the books.

I listed all the auctions for 1 cent and priced shipping at $1 to $2 above the actual cost. Using media mail at USPS, it was still a fair rate. I got to where I was making $2k per month on these books. If they didn't sell, I took boxes to Half Price Books or donated some. Over time, eBay increased their fees, PayPal increased their fees, and eBay made booksellers limit their shipping prices. Sometimes, for heavier books, you took a loss on shipping. I ended up shutting down and donating the books because my profits kept dipping and I had other things going on in my life.

My failure is that if I had just done a little research, I could have moved over to Amazon and probably made more money. In my defense, I was working as a mortgage broker and was taking off. However, when banks going belly up in mid-2007 due to the forthcoming housing crises, I really could have used that income. Although Borders ended up closing, I would have had an existing platform with great reviews. I probably could have found another source. Outside of my family, friends, and pets, I have three great loves in this world - soccer, animals, and books. I would love to be a successful bookseller.

The lessons from this (at least the ones I took) is to prepare for things to change. Do your research and find alternative ways to do things. Have contingency plans and don't give up so easily. I am considering trying out selling books on Amazon after all these years. With the scanning app, I could use my love of scanning thrift stores and garage sales of books into sourcing product.

 

[Ernman]

Being a fan of Eco-friendly endeavors I applaud you for your attempt. The big lesson I think people should take from your story is NEVER to trust a government official unless you get it in writing and even then it's a crapshoot.

Agreed, but here's a twist. I followed the rules, got the permits, inspections, etc. Uber said screw the rules and used their size and money to plow through. When some cities did try to enforce the rules, Uber let their "contractors" the drivers take the heat. I don't intend this to be an Uber bashing. Simply the observation that if government isn't going to enforce the rules, there's both risk and opportunity.

 

[maverick]

So who was your target customer, the one who pays... bank C-suite-ers? And the end user was just banking customers?

So the person buying it would be a C-suiter. The person using it would be part the compliance department of a given bank.

Quote from Forbes:
Some major financial institutions spend up to $500 million annually on KYC and customer due diligence, according to Thomson Reuters.

This department works very manual. They go through each dossier 1 at a time. The problem is that many people who work here, are contractors. They do not have an incentive to speed things up and/or make things more efficient.

Learning here is to have direct access to (motivated) end-users.

Full Forbes article here:
Know Your Customer (KYC) Will Be A Great Thing When It Works

 

[ZeroTo100]

Love hearing these stories...it’s enlightening to know that we are all grinders in the same battle. What separates us in the beginning from someone who has already experienced an exit or a successful business...is traction. It’s important to maintain a continuous hustle.

I had a quite a few failures....But I have always knew my limit in how much time and money I wanted to spend...except this one time!

In 2009 I launched a site called TeePaign that tried to capitalize on social movements (even though most of them I did not agree with lol). I hired a designer to create a few tee-shirt designs and built a few sample pages with e-commerce functionality for specific social issues and tried to sell them.

The idea was to try to get these leaders on board to use the site as a platform to push their issue. The selling point was they could sell their own design and raise money along with keeping the group unified with the same official shirt. Plus, people could comment on the page and the page was easily shareable. Easy peasy, I got this!

No, not really...

Who were these organizers and how the heck could I find them? They sort of emerge and you just can’t pick them out. I was a 20 something kid from Queens and had zero care or impact on social change. Frankly, I was most likely the cause of this failure lol!

The problem with the entire model was finding these people which was not easy. When I did find them, convincing them to come on board even though I cared less on what they were about. They could read right through my BS. They knew I was piggy backing on their community.

It was a bridge type business model which I absolutely learned to hate. I learned that it’s externally difficult to find people to use your site along with finding people to buy from your site.

It was tech heavy and I wasn’t very tech savvy either at the time and spent a lot of money building out a half a$$ site that didn’t function the way I wanted it.

My biggest lessons learned...

Websites (I learned enough code to get started), even with Wordpress.

I learned that building websites were a process, not an event. The site is never finished. Build the most important feature and launch with that.

I learned that I prefer to have just customers and not build something that focuses too broadly on separate parties. Some people want to build that marketplace style business but I’m not the brightest guy and it’s easier for me to focus on just customers.

This business scared the crap out of me, honestly. It was chaos every single day, every email, the site; it was just an utter disaster. I shut it down, it wasn’t for me.

Know when to quit and move on.

 

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[Ecom man]

I stumbled into an ebay business. Realised that I could make +300% markup buying used clothes from charity stores and selling on ebay. Then started ebuying and selling on ebay to build up more stock. Income was pretty good for a part time second job and I enjoyed the "treasure hunting".
Then about 2 years ago ebay started changing fees and selling expectations and sales completely slowed down. The final nail was when looking at the profits and assessing the hours put in - not good.
My method was to add lots of high quality photos and details to help drive sales - which was good, but when I realised that each item took 30 mins to fully list, plus sorting postage, drop offs, returns and items that did not sell - the hourly rate was so poor.
Im now stuck with about £4000 worth of stock but have not desire or motivation to list it all.
Maybe I will gift it back to the charities...

I used to call this business "bottom feeding", I now call it sidewalk!

Take your knowledge of clothing, styles, etc. and turn it into a real business. You can still sell on eBay but if you have 300 of one item then you don’t have to keep creating new listings. You can also set up a website and start a clothing brand... I did this exact thing with eBay a few years ago (except in a different niche). Sales went from 100% eBay to below 1% last year and my margins increased a good amount as well.

 

[SK1]

It's working and will continue to work. Because I am going to continue to work at it until it does.

Great mindset.
Well done.

 

[StrikingViper69]

Try this:

Make as many videos as possible of "how to play ___ by ____" and make as many as you can. Use blackhat SEO tricks from blackhatworld about how to get videos ranking quickly on youtube.

Raise your prices and become an expert offering $300 lessons.

If you need some attention just go run the field at a pro baseball game with a big sign that says "guitar lessons $300 call 555-5555", go viral and then sign up some people. You'll pay $1,000 and a night in jail. Get a friend to film it, watermark it heavily and give it to big instagram accounts and as a condition they have to post your phone number to call for lessons. I bet it would work.

Anything is better than quitting and being a loser forever until you die.

Thanks man, I needed that, I was feeling pretty down when I made that post.

Yeah that's this weekend sorted - "How to" videos.

I'm hitting my mailing list, and social media with free 15 minute guitar consultations.

To clarify, if I do have to move with my parents, or go bankrupt, I'm not quitting music. I'll just have a bit of a shit time with life for a little while.

 

[handog]

Yes, if I were to start an online directory now I would definitely find some businesses that wanted to get listed before even building the website. If I could pre-sell the listings that would be great, if not for an initial free trial. Conversations would happen first. I would want to prove that I could help businesses and find the market before burning all that time and money.

I've read the affiliate marketing threads here and would not attempt the email sales letter series until after I've accumulated hundreds, if not thousands of emails. I'm not even sure I would try affiliate marketing at all, but maybe once I had an audience I would look for synergies between other website owners. I would definitely try to increase traffic before thinking about selling space on the site or putting in adsense to generate any revenue.

I spent alot on getting articles written for good content initially, but I should have become an expert in the niche first instead of just diving in, and focus on delivering unbelievable value to the niche.

 

[Deleted50669]

For example: I kept paying more and more for the GPS-function.

This is the real value of learning coding; not having to rely on third-party libraries and having no price control.

 

[Eric Flathers]

My worst failure to date:

I started an eco-friendly car service in NE Florida. I had lived on Cape Cod for several years and used a company called Green Shuttle. All their cars were hybrids or electrics. Their drivers and customer service were fantastic - still are. I had moved to Florida to help start up a small logistics company and the eco-friendly car service seemed like a reasonable expansion. Fortunately for my business partner I kept it separate from the logistics company. I had several meetings with the Green Shuttle owner on Cape Cod and we had a great plan for customer sharing, connected websites, etc. I was concerned about Uber, but was reassured by the county licensing folks they had no intention of allowing Uber to start up there. Within one year Uber was eating everyone's lunch. Established car services had to shut down. My guppy of a startup was swallowed by the Uber shark - and they didn't even know I existed. I also failed miserably at understanding the very strong "conservative" leanings of this region. Let's just say, GREEN is about as far away from RED as one can get around here. Not making excuses - these were all my failings. But damn I learned a lot.
ACT: Provide an environmentally friendly alternative to taxi that provides superior service and up front pricing.
ASSESS: Yes, Uber is coming to this county and no the politicians cannot/will not stop them. Sometimes politics does matter in business.
ADJUST: Learn to make social changes an enabler to success, NOT a potent competitor. That and don't trust politicians

Ernman,
Being a fan of Eco-friendly endeavors I applaud you for your attempt. The big lesson I think people should take from your story is NEVER to trust a government official unless you get it in writing and even then it's a crapshoot.

~ EF

 

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[StrikingViper69]

My guitar teaching business is slowly failing over the last two years after I let it die.

I launched an online teaching membership website over the last two weeks. I had a high quality list of 2000 guitar players that liked my online articles and a free eBook they got. They liked the course outlines... but $29/mo was too expensive. One person signed up, and I refunded him and cancelled the launch today.

I launched a heavy metal album two years ago. Got great reviews... and really struggling to make any sales on that. Had a sales funnel running and came close to making it break even but couldn't get to that point.

I know that I can:

• write great music
• play to a very high level
• teach people very well - you can give me the most musically retarded person ever and if they want to learn guitar I will get them playing, writing and improvising.

But I'm struggling to find the right combination that works from a business perspective and also works for me.

ACT: I'm trying new things and trying to figure out something that sticks and that I can stick to long term without feeling like my soul is being destroyed piece by piece. I'm growing a more engaged social media following of people who really like watching me improvise and my music.

ASSESS: In person 1-2-1 lesson and groups lessons don't work for me (although people will pay astonishing amounts). Selling lessons online is incredibly difficult from the sheer competition and amount of free stuff (the free stuff actually holds people back) - at least, from what I've tried.

ADJUST: Trying some B2B ideas with music (writing an album of instrumental music they can use as part of an opt-in campaign), posting classical style compositions with a tab that people can download for $3 (I have successfully sold some tabs for pieces), will try a subscription DVD and book program for guitar method (partner with a comic book that has distribution, give away the first one for free), a fan membership site, putting courses for sale on my website where people pay per course. I'm also looking to see if I can find people who will pay to have a piece of music written for them (I thought it could make a fancy gift maybe)

I think my audience is too small to monetise from a sponsorship perspective but it's also something that I'm going to look into.


Something needs to work and soon, because at this right I'll be bankrupt and moving back in with my parents.

 

[Zcott]

Im now stuck with about £4000 worth of stock but have not desire or motivation to list it all.

Why don't you pick up where you left off and maybe move into selling it on other channels as well?

 

[Deleted50669]

Let us know when it's ready to test I'm sure The Forum would be happy to give you feedback.

~ EF

Hey @Eric Flathers, I appreciate the offer. For the first round of testing I'm being very cautious, as I don't trust the internet not to steal my idea. Once I formally release the app I will create a thread.

- Cheers

 

[Gepi]

@WealthyMarketer what an interesting read! Thanks for sharing. When you are still in the middle of (mostly) selling time for money, to even make this much without big effort certainly seems like a dream. People will always fall into traps, good to know one more of them!

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Bump.

 

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[Eric Flathers]

C'mon ya'll, step forward! I know there's a ton of failure on this board!

Remember this poll?

NOTABLE! - How many Business Failures did you have before success?

Hundreds of failures reported!

Let's hear it!

If there aren't enough failures for this post I have plenty more in a binder I keep.
~ EF

 

[Eric Flathers]

ACT: I tried to build a leadership training app on WordPress... LOL. I spent weeks writing the content, drafting sequences for modules, and writing questions. That was all good fun, until I realized I'd have to pay for an expensive WP plugin that couldn't do half of the features I wanted to implement. Once I got passed that hurdle, I found out most leaders want classroom-based leadership training.

ASSESS: Well, it was evident that I went for a walk down dumbass lane. I didn't do any initial market research, nor did I select suitable technologies for what I assumed would be a profitable opportunity. So two lessons; validate your idea before committing to development & learn the correct tools for the job.

ADJUST: Since late October I have taught myself javascript on a painfully deep level and am about 60% done with an app that has market validation. I am excited to get the first round of user tests in later next month.

- Cheers

Let us know when it's ready to test I'm sure The Forum would be happy to give you feedback.

~ EF

 

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[Johnny boy]

My worst failure: All my business ideas in my life

I cannot count how many business ideas I have had in the last 10 years. And all of them failed because of action faking and over thinking. I know this thread is about specific examples, however, I still hope that someone gets something out of this post.

ACT: During the past 10 years I have tried to start so many thing. The best example I can give is when I tried to start a web design company 5 years ago. At the same time one of my good friends was starting a company creating animation videos for the B2B market. Our journeys went completely different. While I was action faking with working months on setting up the correct website, doing free portfolio work and focusing on the wrong clientele while just being lazy, my friend was just taking action and following through from the first moment. Do I need to say that my webdesign company closed down after around 6 months. This day today my friend has one of the biggest animation video companies in our countries. We starter at the same time, yet this is how different our journeys went.

ASSESS: At that time my mindset was completely wrong. Because it had to be the business and the clientele there was something wrong with. It couldn't possibly be me and my lack of action taking. So I spent the next 5 years doing the same thing over and over again. Almost starting a business....

ACT: Now when I have finally realized that the problem this whole time has been ME! A couple of months ago this same friend convinced me to just take action and start my own little agency. I am still far from being where I want to be, but I have learned some many new things in the past 2 months and gained so much discipline and so many new skills. All by not over thinking and taking action. Imagine if I had done that 10 years earlier!

What I want to say is don't be like me. If you feel you can bring value or solve a need then just go for it. Start doing and adjust on the way. Taking action is the best way to learn and to grow.

A huge thanks to @MJ DeMarco, my good friend @Natural and the rest of you forum members for changing my mindset and soon my life for the better. Hopefully more people in my shoes will experience the same aha moment and valuable advice when joining this forum!

What's hard about a web agency?

-Make a website
-Post ads on craigslist in major metro areas
-Post simple youtube videos for businessnes "how to grow your dildo business" and use some SEO hacks to get it ranking quickly.

I did it and made a grand from a 2-hr conversation. No web design work. Just "consulting" lol. Should take you no more time. It's easy bro just stop doing it the inefficient way.

"free portfolio work"? lmao just find a good site and say you built it. 0.1% of people will follow up and check. After your first customer just change it.

 

[Ernman]

My latest failed business just came to a quick end today. As I stated in another post I had made a deal to go in to the mattress business. I had even seen the mattresses in their plastic that made them look new and I was SOLD because I've been wanting in the mattress business and the price was GREAT for name brands! I was all excited and was there when the shipment came and even helped with a few.... those damn things are HEAVY!! Then I noticed..... wait a damn minute..... are these new? Come to find out, the reason for the great prices was that they were I guess 'technically' new but not really 'new' as one would expect. They were returns within 30 days and floor displays. So I said, "Hell no! Load 'em back up and take them back". The seller understood and 'said' he was sorry for not explaining it better. Uhuh.... riiiight. So, there is my latest venture down the drain. On the bright side, it only cost me $50 for the labor of unloading and then loading them back on the truck.

I'm curious, what was your plan for scaling this mattress biz?

 

[MJ DeMarco]

I had no customers or process to attract customers

So who was your target customer, the one who pays... bank C-suite-ers? And the end user was just banking customers?

 

[EPerceptions]

Why didn't you just charge more? It doesn't matter if it's junk. You still get paid. Make it efficient and outsource it to indian assistants for $4/hr and scale it with ads to people with writing as an interest on facebook and instagram. You could make a ton of money without doing a single review yourself.

Today, absolutely. Back then there weren't all of the outsourced resources. And 99.9% of the junk was from people looking for the free service. Not paid. Still doable, but I didn't know better at the time.

 

[BlokeInProgress]

I laughed when I just looked up my old site and thought how my approach would be so different now.

Thanks for sharing that story. Mind if I ask what is your approach now?

 

[ShamanKing]

I stumbled into an ebay business. Realised that I could make +300% markup buying used clothes from charity stores and selling on ebay. Then started ebuying and selling on ebay to build up more stock. Income was pretty good for a part time second job and I enjoyed the "treasure hunting".
Then about 2 years ago ebay started changing fees and selling expectations and sales completely slowed down. The final nail was when looking at the profits and assessing the hours put in - not good.
My method was to add lots of high quality photos and details to help drive sales - which was good, but when I realised that each item took 30 mins to fully list, plus sorting postage, drop offs, returns and items that did not sell - the hourly rate was so poor.
Im now stuck with about £4000 worth of stock but have not desire or motivation to list it all.
Maybe I will gift it back to the charities...

I used to call this business "bottom feeding", I now call it sidewalk!

Congrats. EBay changed their selling and listing fees again

 

[BaraQueenbee]

This is the real value of learning coding; not having to rely on third-party libraries and having no price control.

If you have a rather small project (up to ~600 hours of development) it may be beneficial to negotiate a fixed price for the whole project with the developers.
Pros: you know how much you would pay and what you would get for the money, no surprises.
Cons: specifications should be pretty clear at the beginning and it requires extra estimation step from the developers which you would also pay for (either directly invoiced or hidden somewhere in other tasks).

That way, if they're good, they should not ask for extra money even if they f*cked up the estimate or had some unseen issues along the way. Of course, if you want some significant amount of extra functionality, that is paid extra and negotiated separately (for example not only showing user GPS locations on the map as was discussed during the estimate but also some alerts if users leave an area quicker or stay for too long). Sure, you still have to give them feedback and control the progress. Dedicated developers (paid per time) are great for big projects and support, usually with some tech-savvy people on the client side.

Those estimates are pretty fine for both sides, but surprises do happen. Remembering once we charged for 200+ hours but actually done it in like 60 (realized that we could build a small framework since a lot of stuff on that project was pretty repetitive), another time charged for ~120, but put like 180 (underestimated the complexity of client's legacy system), still delivered on time. Both clients were happy and returned with more work.

You both are VERY right.
And that is what I had in mind of doing with the changed plans.
Set price, and having a third party who understands coding, review the proposal and estimate.

 

[GoodluckChuck]

I started a website, posted content, and ran it for six months building up an audience to eventually sell a product.

When I finally went to sell the product, I couldn't get a payment processor. There were also some legal questions that were threatening the integrity of the business.

Almost a year later it's still unprofitable and has been a total failure. Learned a ton though.