My latest failure was Wize, a mobile app that let anyone share their skills. It was a great idea, a bit early for its times (live streaming app before Instagram Live and Tik Tok), and it had a great start--we were in the top 20 at the Launch Hackathon, won an award from Google, and we had grammy award music teachers teaching on the platform. It failed because we pivoted too early. Building the two sided market was challenging, but instead of narrowing our focus to one topic, we decided to pivot to a "professional 1-1 coffee chat platform", and then again to a networking app–"Tinder for professionals." After going to a lot of conferences and meetups and talking to professionals, the resounding message we heard was that this domain was tough to dominate and it was going to be an uphill battle for us.

The biggest lesson I learnt in this is take advice with a pinch of salt. There are many successful apps today that resemble v1 (Maven), v2 (Intro), and v3 of Wize, and I think we would have been fine if we had persisted.

A more detailed write up of Wize, if you're interested: https://swamiphoto.com/wize