It's not about the best tech. We seemed (well no one knows for sure) to have the best data available (it was an analytics product) over our competitors, but di

It's not about the best tech. We seemed (well no one knows for sure) to have the best data available (it was an analytics product) over our competitors, but didn't earn enough money with it. I can't blame our sales department as I have zero ideas how to even sell sliced bread, but our customers regularly said they liked our data better than what they got from the competition. We did spend months improving our tech and even had stuff like geo-based load balancing, multi-DC failover, and a lot more. We prepared for a lot more customers and traffic than we needed to handle in the end. Some of it was warranted, but especially improving our data/algorithms even further was absolutely wasted time. We went from like 90% professional setup to 95%, and went from 99% good algorithms to 99.5% good algorithms, but we should have added more fancy dashboards and better UX. Admittedly, many customers just logged in and grabbed a CSV export, they paid for the data. But a not insignicant amount of customers also said the competition's presentation was a lot better. We never had a dedicated front end person with real design chops (not just being a JS developer), we should have hired one or two. We also held on too long to old features/products that weren't the current focus but spread our resources too thin. We weren't enough developers/SREs for the workload, that means we either moved too slow or stuff got postponed. I think we also never fully made the switch from "we'll do some customizations for customers to get them to fully make a commitment" to "this is the SaaS offering, take it or leave", but maybe the market space was also too small for that. It was B2B and the customers weren't something like Small businesses, where you have thousands. Things that 100% did not matter: permanent overtime, too much vacation time We were a German startup acting within German work conditions, e.g. 40h were the norm (sure there were exceptions when something exploded), we had paid oncall and if you didn't sleep the whole night then you just handed over in the morning and went to sleep. TLDR: Lack of focus on a single product, not selling to enough customers, did not perform step to lower-maintenance SaaS (worked too much like an agency)