Why I Restarted a Business I Built 5 Years Ago

Why would someone restart a 5 year old business today when it didn’t work back then?

For me there are several reasons:

The market is highly fragmented
The backend of the SaaS platform works pretty well
There is really nothing new I’m inspired to build right now
I think the business didn’t work was because I didn’t take the necessary marketing steps.

Highly Fragmented Market
My product https://kisReviews.com helps businesses get reviews and testimonials. There are large companies that do this but there is no dominant company, like Google in search.

Software Backend Works
When I say the backend was over engineered. Take what you’re thinking and triple it. It was out of control.

I wrote the backend in Laravel. So I did have to upgrade the framework. Events and listeners still not up 100% and 3rd party integrations have to be refactored.
The original platform used Laravel Blade and was all server side. I had started using Vue for other projects so I decided to upgrade the front-end. I know this isn’t the best idea for a launch, using a technology that you are not great in, but I didn’t think I could offer the same user experience that customers would be accustomed to.

Turned out to be a great decision. Once I got over the learning curve, using Vue templates is great! I realized how much domain logic had crept into views and extra javascript was necessary . With Vue the template only cares about the data and because Vue handles re-rendering when data changes it simplifies the code.

Inspiration
I don’t have any product I am inspired to work on. But I do enjoy building. I’ve built multiple now defunct products over the last few years. I know it made sense to me back then, but it does not make any sense to me now. I built ETFDraft.com that had tools to analyze ARK ETF funds, S&P 500, QQQ and Dow Jones. I built Mailflagger.com that did email analytics. I built PriceAlertMe.com that allowed users to track products on Amazon and be notified when the product reached the desired price. I built LaraNx.com an SEO marketing package for Laravel that manages the SEO Meta tags. (this one I actually use).

Why Will The Business Work This Time
Finally, why will this business work this time? With certainty I don’t know if it will, but I know that I am certainly going to do the marketing portion differently.

I know that I did not do sufficient marketing last time around. And to be honest even for my defunct products I did not do enough marketing.

So I will start here. I’m writing this post. I’m more active on X.com and LinkedIn.com. I’m committed to writing 2 blog articles per week. I'm going to go out and talk to (potential) customers.