I launched ByteVitae (https://bytevitae.com/) a couple of years ago, got a decent launch here and in Product Hunt, a bunch of users the first days ~3500 and a steady influx of users over the following months. I didn't know how to convert most of those users to clients, didn't talk to them, lost all interest after the initial launch and moved on after an amazing -26€ in benefits :P
I learned so many things and was such a fruitful ride that for me it is far from a failure. But on the business side, definetly a complete failure!
Lesson learned: Talk to your users. Don't neglect the business/marketing side, specially if you are a techie who loves to code. Talk to your users. It is a marathon run, forget about the overnight millionare launchs, the launch is the "easy" part, growing steady from there is the real challenge. Talk to your users!!
Right!. But did you inform your customers that You were shutting down, what did you do with all the Datum that you collected(User Auth). Did You give them the opportunity for them to properly delete their account data stored on some DO droplet VPC waiting to be harvested?
Great questions! I thought a lot about those at the time, I didn't felt comfortable sitting on a pile of data waiting for an attacker to try get it. So this is what I did:
Once I decided I was going to kill the project, I removed the option to become a paying customer to not get more, waited for the last of my paying customers period to finish (it was a yearly subscription). And released an update that made the app work strictly locally, user data does not reach my server (edit: there is no server anymore) and stays in the user's browser (it works like that now).
Kept the data for a couple of weeks in case anyone wanted to recover it to help them use it with in the new "local" version, but enventually no one did, so finally I deleted my db. So right now I have no access whatsoever to that data.
I learned so many things and was such a fruitful ride that for me it is far from a failure. But on the business side, definetly a complete failure!
Even wrote a little post mortem at the time: https://vilva.io/blog/1-year-of-building-reflections.
Lesson learned: Talk to your users. Don't neglect the business/marketing side, specially if you are a techie who loves to code. Talk to your users. It is a marathon run, forget about the overnight millionare launchs, the launch is the "easy" part, growing steady from there is the real challenge. Talk to your users!!