I want to kill off my project, but now I have a customer...
I built Jamform in attempt to do something that wasn't "bold and revolutionary" and instead just get my piece of the pie of an established industry. However, after a few months of marketing I realized if I have the same product as everyone else then no one will choose me over the big guys.
Long story short, I'm spending about $100 a month to keep a project alive that has just about 0 active users and no unique selling point to acquire customers. I decided that instead of throwing money in a pit I would kill off the project and move on. However, I logged into Stripe and realized I now have one paying customer. This customer is only paying $9.99 a month, not nearly enough to offset the costs, but now I'd feel bad if I just ripped the carpet out from under them.
So I'm wondering, what's the best way to handle this? Send out emails to everyone and explain that I will be sunsetting the project in like 45 days? Offer assistance moving to an alternative platform? Drop everything and work real hard to acquire enough users to make up the other $90/month to cover costs?
Truth be told I've pretty much lost interest in the project anyway. Who would have known that the world of forms was filled with spam and other complications (everyone should have known that).
Shut down, give them enough heads up, point them to an alternative. Why are you spending $100 on what could cost you $5 or less a month?
I remember your launch on Product Hunt. 533 upvotes. 4 months later 1 customer. Sorry!
Inform your customer as soon as possible, refund and close the project with a deadline. Maybe open source the code? Inform the world what you have learned.
Agree with @davidcolby. If not interested, keep the lessons and move on.
To wind down, let your customer and users know. Double-check that you tracking usage properly and be prepared for some users to want to convert.
If someone paid, why are they still not active. They might be happy with just a refund.
Being alternative to spammy competitors is a good selling point - if you could get the word out - but again, only if your still into it
good luck!
This comment was deleted 5 years ago
Thanks! I appreciate the response and I feel like you're probably spot on. I'll do that with my customer as well as the free users but make sure the customer really gets the message and give them plenty of time to migrate.
I thought about selling, or even giving it away for free so someone else could run with it. But there is just sooo much to migrate (domain, code base, stripe, sendgrid, cloudflare, hosting, etc.) that it just sounds like it just wouldn't be worth my time.
It looks like you've got a good product there. The idea is a proven one, the design is good, the public documentation is good. So it sounds like it's just your marketing that is letting you down, if you don't mind me saying so. If I was in your shoes, I'd either really hammer down on marketing for a month and see if you can get some more traction, or hammer down on the technical docs whilst seeing if there's someone who is willing to buy. If you can even make say $1,000 selling it for one more month's work, that's got to be better than another loss-making month, right?