I started Notify.Domains about a year ago, mostly to scratch my own itch and monitor a few domains I owned as well as domains owned by my clients (from another project).
I quickly started adding different features that I thought would be important (for me) like blacklist monitoring, ssl monitoring etc. If you are a programmer you know the thrill. You think that by adding features you will get everyone to pay for it. You don't even think about marketing. You do it (or at least I did) because you love programming new stuff, because you enjoy the moment you start crafting a new project but most importantly because you believe it will help you or someone else.
After a while, I thought I'd try to get some traffic, test the waters and see if it could become something more than a side project. I started with some reddit posting, later gave free accounts on facebook groups, finally cold emailed a few people but didn't get the traffic I wanted. Either my marketing skills aren't great or nobody needed something like this. Probably both.
Anyway, I had a working product, I was using it a lot for a bunch of domains but ultimately I failed to launch it. I failed to launch a lot of products in the past, mostly because I am a developer who develops stuff but never pushes them to the finish line. I know, classic. This one felt different. Every new project does.
A couple months passed, I got an offer to sell the project. We exchanged a few emails but I was very reluctant to give it away. Then got another offer, then another. Got 3 offers in about a month's time. Wasn't sure what to think, it was a bit strange too. Yeah users were registering, traffic was slowly increasing but I didn't think anyone would be interested in buying it at this point.
I finally decided against selling it, the fact that I got offers to sell gave me (false?) hope that this could one day skyrocket (yeah, magically). I would come back to the project and suddenly it would have thousands of users.
About 5 months later, I got another offer. By that time, the git history of the project was the same. I didn't come back to it. Instead, I worked on other stuff, stuff that were working better than this one. I was busy learning new things, trying other ideas etc.
At that point, I realised It was time to give it to someone else. Whatever they decide to do with it, I have to move one to something else. I probably wouldn't come back to it anyway..