Shut it down!

On Oct 1, 2022, I made the decision to shut down SiteArcade. It was bringing in $1k MRR, but growth had been completely flat since launch. I found the following issues:

• The author market should be B2B, but it behaves like B2C. It doesn't think professionally. It balks at even very, very cheap price points.
• The feature requests were all over the place. They wanted Wordpress + SiteArcade's unique functionality. And I wasn't going to rebuild Wordpress just for authors.
• Authors saw a pro website as a vitamin, not a pain killer. Even though a website is how you sell direct, own your own audience, and convince others to take you seriously.
• Authors are too non-technical. Many are old. Technical support cost more time than I was getting paid for a yearly subscription.

All these things together persuaded me it was time to quit. So I gave every author on the platform a full year to migrate, even extending some authors plans to my kill date.

I decided not to sell because:

• Because of the problems, the valuation was going to be very low.
• I didn't think it would be worth the time to sell.
• If a buyer actually made the product succeed, I'd be pissed.

Instead, I focused on researching my next project. I tried to put everything I learned into making better decisions, and for the most part, I nailed it. (Not that I didn't hit other pitfalls!).

That product is BrowserCat. It's a hosting platform for headless browsers. Check it out.