A burn out story about my first company

Tl;Dr how I started my first startup, learned how to code in the process, and then closed it as I burned out.

Around late 2012 I was in a non-technical job. I noticed that there wasn't a good management system tailored for my sector that I could use, which would work on mobile as well on desktop and that wouldn't cost me a fortune. So after sometime looking for a viable solution, I decided to see if I could build something myself. Apart from some basic knowledge of HTML and CSS, I had no skills in developing software. So I first started to learn a bit of JavaScript to understand if I could learn the minimum skill set required for the job.

After completing few basic training exercises, in 2013 I decided that I knew enough to embark on this journey. So first I hired a freelancer to help me get things started. The first MVP was really basic and only did one thing that I really needed on a daily basis.
At the time it was a mobile friendly web app developed in HTML CSS and basic JavaScript with a back and in PHP for page rendering. As time went by and my developing skills improved, I added features over features as I needed them. At the time I still had only a website and a shell company, but I wasn't promoting the app in any way whatsoever.

Even if the product was still very simple, I was noticing that few peoples were reaching the website through searches on Google as they were looking for a solution like the one I was building. Seeing this demand, I decided to invest more time and efforts in the product. So I really deep dived into JavaScript and I resigned the whole app as a single page application (2015). At this time I was doing the coding all by myself.

In early 2016 I released a new version of the app also for desktop, as an electron app (which was relatively new), and for mobile with Apache Cordova.

Now they offering was really very complete and the software worked well enough, and the exposure on the app stores gave enough visibility to have 10 new subscriptions per day.

At the time I wasn't charging anything, I could afford it because I was working on a full-time job. I thought that I would have been able to create an enough large user base to then introduce premium features that people would have bought. As you may have already figured out, that business model did not work.

As time passed by, I kept improving the software with thousands of bug fixes and additional features, some of which were seriously challenging like a deep integration with productivity suites like office and Gsuite.

Eventually I got tired and I decided to stop providing the app for free. I introduced a monthly subscription hoping that existing users would turn into paying users. At the time I add hundreds of active users.

Unfortunately, probably because I set the price to high, the conversion rate was way too small and revenues were insignificant. the good news was however that new users were still subscribing, and some of them were starting to pay. This proof that the demand was there kept me going.

Nevertheless, growth was way too slow and I was still going solo. I had tried to embark on my project some friends of mine, but none of them were committed enough to work on the project as needed and eventually all left (no hard feelings).

So in the end I was there with a very complete and big project, with apps for nearly every major platform (mobile/desktop), with paying users, not many though, and many years of hard work.

Since after many attempts I reached the conclusion that I was not able to significantly improve growth, and as I was still on a full-time job to sustain myself, I decided to close everything.

In retrospect, there would have been many many things that I could have done better and mistakes that I could have avoided. The biggest one was probably that I kept the project going on for too long without any significant results, so that I eventually got disillusioned about it and lost interest to the point in which I did not care anymore.