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Comment by praveenster | Hacker News Reader

Can you also share insights on how/why the startup failed? Also, do you plan to keep the site operational for the free customers or completely shut it down?

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The plan was just to take down the site completely and redirect the domain to the project page for now, but if there's a demand for the free version, then I could be convinced to keep it up. Right now, I'm not seeing that demand though.

because developer.

I should be a target customer, since I periodically interview candidates for programming positions. However, landing page and screenshots failed to explain to me what the unique selling point was. How many people here know what "Feedback-Driven Interview" is?

Whole product seems to be about providing an online testing tool ala topcoder.com. But coding tasks are usually only a small part of the interview process (not that I agree with that, but that's what happens at 90% of companies I've applied for).

I think you've hit the nail on the head here. For one thing, I didn't put enough energy into any of the non-dev aspects of the project. Also, I started writing the code before I had really validated the product properly. I had some recruiters which were interested, but most eventually turned out to dislike the idea of scaring away their prospects with tests, and didn't see it adding enough value. It was even harder to market to individual companies looking to hire.

Yep, it's easy to spot those mistakes in others', when you look from a side. It's much harder for me to do boring work myself, instead of playing with new frontend libs and writing code. At least you'll be more self-aware next time, few people have this luxury.

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