We spent 2 years building a side project. Got 20,000 users. Made $0. Then we shut it down.

Not every failure is a pivot story.

Sometimes you just build the wrong thing for two years, get enough users to feel like it's working, and then realize the market was never going to pay for it.
That's what happened with Letspl a side project platform we ran in Korea. We grew it to 20,000 members. We added features constantly, trying to find some combination that would make people pay. Nothing worked.

The market for side project communities in Korea just wasn't there. Not at a price point that could sustain us. So we shut it down.

The part nobody tells you about shutting down a product with real users: it's not dramatic. There's no big moment. You just quietly stop, and most of your users don't even notice.

What we took from it: we had learned how to run a community, how to build product quickly, and exactly how painful the "should we build this?" phase is when you're doing it manually. So we built Bunzee an AI tool to automate the market research we wish we'd done before Letspl.

Whether Bunzee works or not, I don't know yet. But at least this time we validated the problem before spending two years on it.

Has anyone else shut down something with real traction because the business model just wasn't there? How long did it take you to admit it wasn't going to work?