Failure Stories?

Success stories are everywhere and honestly, sometimes they can get you down if your business hasn't been doing so well recently. Let's hear some failure stories.

I'll go first:
I started a site called Wesaturate about 3 years ago. It was a RAW photo-sharing website for photographers. It was very basic at first, but people were showing interest and were signing up in large numbers. We did 0 marketing, but people kept coming and only a year in, we were pretty well known in the photography community.

The problem with Wesaturate was that it was free photo-sharing, so we didn't make any money. After the 2 year mark, we had hit 100k users, but had made no money.

To monetize Wesaturate, we tried:

• Ads (they were ugly and didn't really make much money)
• A "Pro" version with additional features (0 people signed up for that)
• Selling presets (no one seemed to be interested in the idea)
• A marketplace to hire photographers on the site (no interest)

So... After about 3 years, we shut Wesaturate down. It's still crazy to think with all those users, we couldn't think of a way to monetize the site. Now, using what we've learned with Wesaturate , we're working on a payment processing platform for freelancers called wesat.io. Let's hope this one turns out better than Wesaturate did!