10+ years and no revenue. Have we failed?

A brief view on the StartUp's (long) history

As passionate basketball player my best friend and I have been facing the same problem over a decade ago: Getting in contact with other players we don't know who they are and where we could find them.

Was the idea too late?

In times the smart phone was just introduced, Facebook was on the run and messengers like What's App seemed to be the answer to everything.
So the idea of an app with live activity data for a niche market was like beeing late and outdated by the big new digital big players.

No! The idea was not to late it was just a lot like to early:

• the technology had no level necessary for our idea
• the big digital companies get disrupted by
  niche products (e.g. auctioning apps for specific markets beating up ebay)
• poeple getting anoyed of the 5000th What's App group
• we're still facing the same problem like over 10 years ago

This is what we now today and we allways felt that the time will come for the initial idea. However over the years we pivoted the idea from a matchmaking website platform to matchmaking mobile app over to a mobile app with live activity data of basketball players all over the world always our BHAG in mind:

"For basketball players getting access to our app and services will be like getting a driver license to drive a car"

And after aditional 2 years waiting according to the COVID crisis where most public sports areas were shut down in Europe, in the last 2 weeks we just released our beta versions of our application.

Our StartUp will probably fail, but I have already succeeded!

So now we think our time has come. And probably we'll fail. Nevertheless - the StartUp will fail or not - I will never regret any minute of my time investing into our idea, 'cause it was also an investment into myself:

Everything I've learned in the past decade helped me growing as a developer, subject matter expert on several domains and last but not least as a person and human being.

Without this StartUp I would not be in the position I'm now in:
C-level Management in a mid-sized company with enough time to go on indiehacking.

How about you?

• Do you think you succeed even if your business fails?
• Had you an idea just a lot to early and thinking it's to late?