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I spent 9 years on a groupware crm. Made $5,000 total on it mostly begging for users to make a "donation". Drove myself and my family into the poor house for s
by gscott 6y ago
I spent 9 years on a groupware crm. Made $5,000 total on it mostly begging for users to make a "donation".
Drove myself and my family into the poor house for something people enjoyed using for free but wouldn't pay for... made plenty of mistakes.
I thought if I didn't quit on it I wouldn't fail, but looking back it started failing the second I launched it as a generic product... you need a big marketing budget to launch i ended up giving it away free just to see people use it.
- nullsense 6y agoHow did you stick with that for 9 years? That's a pretty solid effort, but that just sounds soul crushing. I tried and didn't succeed at a product where I spent my savings too. It's just the reality of a lot of startups. It's unsexy, but it's the reality.
- gscott 6y agoI had this crazy idea I would go it alone and that if I would just keep working on it until it was a success regardless of how long it took. I spent 3 years on programming it to get it the way I wanted it, starting development in 2001... I still have it set up and one day I plan to convert the design into Bootstrap and try again but going after niches this time. But at this point I am not stable enough financially to work on it the way I want to just getting it all into Bootstrap would take months.
- nullsense 6y agoI have a repo I hack on from time to time that purposely isn't in a domain I would ever try to sell as a commercial product. I sort of use it as a way to build up to eventually having a full blown commercial grade piece of software that I can then just pivot the domain into one I want to compete in and launch a product again. By that time it really would be a good few years working on it. Software really is a team sport. It's crazy how much effort it is to go it alone.