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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

What I find interesting is how quickly they made the decision. It was launched less than 4 months ago.

It looked like a good service, I heard good reviews, and while I'm not against the "shut things down that don't get traction" idea, 4 months seems quite tight for something that was at least making some money. A lot of the most successful products take much longer to find their feet (although I appreciate this was just a side line and not the next Skype or Facebook).

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There's a game theory element to this as well. If customers know that the product is likely to get discontinued shortly unless the product reaches an arbitrary and invisible (to the user) goal, then only early adopters are going to use it because it's too risky to rely on something that might die in 4 months. Early adopters are a very small section of a large bell curve of potential users. This could lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy where their new products all die due to customer fear, not lack of customer interest.

I'm a bit confused about this as well. Was the expectation that they'd launch a paid version of an email distro, send a few tweets, and BOOM! they'd have a multimillion-dollar business? I understand that at their scale a few users paying a one-time $25 fee isn't going to register, but why launch a product as an experiment?

Customers are going to become less and less open to trying products from a company that uses them as guinea pigs to test out product-market fit.

Sounds like they may not have had a high enough viral coefficient as they would have wanted. So they felt like it was not worth investing more in product development or marketing.

Definitely impressed that they had the discipline to shut it down in 4 months.

I guess one difference between 37signals and many others who launch products is that they have a huge audience on which to promote the product out of the gate. It'd be crazy to tell someone with a small audience to quit on a product in 4 months but if you had 100,000 people hit a homepage and only 10 people buy.. maybe that's a clearer signal.

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