RewoHub - (Report #31) FIN

Ahoy everyone, today I want to invite you to celebrate another big milestone in RewoHub's development together with me it's shut down.

After one and a half years of development, I've decided to halt development on RewoHub and take it offline on the 1st of July 2023. Allow me to explain my reasoning for this and why I think it's something to celebrate. Learning from one's failures is the way of the entrepreneur so let me share this compressed retrospective on RewoHub's one-and-a-half years of development.

Focusing on my needs instead of finding customers.

I often proclaimed to be RewoHubs first customer. The first features were tailored to my needs. My thoughts were that if I can use it, someone else will also be able. The question was if those features were really interesting to other people. I was the happiest when I could migrate all my planning tickets from GitHub to RewoHub. The moment I implemented the backlog from which to move tickets to 'active' sprints was another major motivational boost. And the WebRTC video chat with a working TURN server, so lovely! Since I was always listening to my own needs, I didn't listen to the needs of others. I should have asked the first users who signed up directly what I can do to improve the product for them the second they signed up.

From this, I've learned to look for feedback from others as early as possible.

Highly educational, disastrous for profits

In 2021 I came across this wonderful tutorial about Microservice Architecture from Steven Grider. Learning about fully asynchronous, event-driven microservices was a joy. So naturally since I was holding a baseball bat, everything looked like a baseball to me. I was searching for a problem to a solution I wanted to use. Finally, a project where I could learn about K8S, event bus, MongoDB, microservice architecture, TURN, STUN, and GitHub workflows for containerization CI/CD. All the good stuff. Challenge after challenge, my techie's heart was beating high. I was so busy learning new technical stuff that I absolutely ignored the other important aspects of a successful business like marketing and sales. The first possibility to 'buy' RewoHub was 10 months after its inception. In hindsight a bit cliche for a developer, ain't it? There were no profits made with the project, in fact, I'm around $1000 in the minus for RewoHub. But that sum dwarfs the number of hours put into the project.

From this I've learned money must be the primary goal in every business.

Overengineered from the beginning

As stated above RewoHub has a thick tech stack in order to operate due to choosing the fully asynchronous horizontal microservice architecture. The architecture is great in order to decouple multiple teams from each other. I could feel the massive benefits of resilience when one service went down and the other services were unaffected. It comes with its 'glue code' tax for listeners/publishers and event definitions and managing data locality. I never could reap the benefits as I was a solo Developer so I got mostly only the negative consequences. When I started Ahoystack, I used a monolithic approach and oh boy was I faster. This was my standard approach in the past and will continue to be in the future. Microservices are awesome as a solution to problems it was designed to counter, RewoHub never got there. Build small, stay small.

From this, I've learned to use the simplest solution you can get away with.

Underestimated the power of marketing.

You Marketeers were right, I was wrong. Nobody cares unless you promote it. Perhaps if it's a super hyped topic it will flame up but I wouldn't bet on it. No marketing, no customer. No customers, no money. Additionally, I should have cared more about my Twitter presence. I've hit a wall at 150 followers which I could not seem to break through. It's time to level up my profile. Marketing is certainly a topic where I need to invest more resources in my next project. The landing page, arguably one of the most important ones, was off with bad messaging. A bit of an eyesore.

From this, I've learned that I must convey the product's story louder and through more channels.

Trying to solve too many problems at once, not enough focus.

How big can a small version of Jira, Teams, and Miro really be? Turns out that many small things still can give you huge trouble. Focusing on one thing at a time helped with motivation. There was lots of good progress and perhaps there is even a way ahead but I feel too burned out with the project to keep going at this point.

1,5 years of development no paying customer.

For most, this would have raised alarm clocks already after a few months. The excitement and joy I received when building RewoHub was my payoff. Now that inflation hits Austria so badly I honestly could use the extra dolleroos. Even worse, I was paying around 50$ a month for the K8S cluster and nodes. This was a direct consequence of choosing a way to sophisticated architecture. When ignoring the diverse skill improvement one could say RewoHub was a big loss of money.

From this I've learned to listen more cold, hard metrics.

Not a one-person show

Trying to implement the light versions of Jira, Teams, Miro was a daunting task, to begin with. When only being able to invest on average 1 hour per day it looks almost impossible. Consistency is key, and by working even a little every day soon I've achieved milestone after milestone. Most of them are technical in nature. What broke the camel's back was likely that two and a half month break I needed to take in order to fulfill my duties at my workplace. Additionally, I believe the growing number of out-of-date dependencies was also a big contributor. I will be way more selective with my next projects. Having an idea is cheap, the execution is the expensive part.

From this, I've learned Start Small, Stay Small (It's also next on my reading list).

Short rehab of what RewoHub is. RewoHub's mission is to support remote working companies with a compelling priced web app offer for organizations. Combining a kanban board (Jira), a video chat (Teams) and a whiteboard (Miro) in one WebApp, the latter has never been released. RewoHub is my third startup, the first one as a solo entrepreneur. It was the first project where I needed to get my feet wet in marketing and financial stuff.

Another one bites the dust.

Till next time ✌️.

Yours truly, Dodo