One on One Meeting
Note-taking and tracking tool for 1:1 meetings
Some of the reasons for it:
- after more than a year working on it I am still far from product/market fit;
- it is a B2B product where sales are the center of it (and I am unable and unwilling to engage in enterprise sales);
- the only active users I had were at the free plan, once I started charging none of them became a paid customer;
- now that I left my former day job (where most of my active users were), I lost contact with the users, it is harder to get feedback;
- the market is full of choices with more features and some even for free, my whole product sometimes was just a small part of their products
Any of that alone could be handled, but all of it together makes it very hard for a solo founder to succeed. On top of that are two more reasons: costs and personal interest.
Hosting costs mainly are not neglectable for a zero revenue product. Also, the way to move forward with the business seemed to require paid advertisement.
And, at last, there is personal interest. I started another side-project that I am much more interested in pursuing right now. Its own nature solves a lot of the above problems: it is B2C, no enterprise sales, and I am building it on a serverless architecture that is basically taking advantage of a lot of things that Netlify offers on free plans. So far, I have zero cost running it. And most importantly, is a product that I enjoy more building.
I completely rewrote the interface with a new color scheme, branding, logo, and UI.
I am no designer, but researched a lot for references and tips and, in the end, I think it is nice (not awesome though, I guess it needs a professional designer to generate awe).
A manager - acquired through a cold email - signed up to the free plan and soon enough upgraded to the premium one! Awesome!
I had a few (free) users already, but most of them I knew personally from working at the same company as I at the time. This customer was the first one that I never met!
There it was, a very crude, ugly, basic, bugged software. But it kind of worked and had a paid plan, so I just launched. Told people, shared on the usual websites (HN, PH, Reddit...)
Mostly, showed to some manager at my then employer who decided to give it a try.
I decided on this idea (1:1 meeting software) because some manager at my (then) employer used a sort of expensive alternative for managing their 1:1 and I saw the opportunity.
Also, it seemed a good fit for me: niche product, technically simple (it's just a CRUD) and small enough that I could handle myself.
3 Comments
Good job for making the strong decision to shut down. It's just another learning step in the process.
If you don't mind, what were the major lessons learned from developing the product and then shutting it down? How can your experience be transferred to the next project?
Best of luck!
Some unorganized learnings:
When your target is managers, you have two paths to success: the managers unconditionally love your product and think it's amazing or you have to be very good at enterprise sales. My product was useful (not loved) to users, and I wasn't willing to properly do enterprise sales.
It is hard to have good retention when your product is supposed to be used every two weeks, or every month -- like mine that was supposed to be used only when the manager had a 1:1 meeting. Users just forget about.
When you have no idea how to transform your "useful, but not loved" product into something 10x better in some dimension -- not even talking to users -- it is time to shut down.
It's always hard to have to shut down a project. Good job working on it though! I'm sure you learned a lot in the process. Hope your new endeavor turns out better!
This comment was deleted 7 years ago