It's strange because I have a very different takeaway than the author (or most people here).
It took him 1 month to build his entire product! And people say he should have talked to customers first. It takes some people 1 month to mock up their product and build a slide deck and business plan, etc.
His biggest failure was he couldn't market his product effectively. If you aren't funded by a big name VC and you're tackling a ho-hum problem. Chances are, you won't be featured on TechCrunch or the HN front page.
Some ideas are so innovative and awesome that they market themselves but my guess is that inventory management doesn't land in that category.