A Postmortem of Failed Products

losingfight.com

40 points·nickm12··7 comments

A really candid view to the travails of making a product a "success".

I think the following quote sums up pretty much everything:

> OK, how about this: most of my failures seem to be marketing failures. This includes misjudging if there is a market for a product or how big that market even is.

Perhaps the point in all of this is that it's almost all a clear case of technology-push as opposed to market-pull. Your chances are a whole lot better when you've got the product-market fit sorted. It's almost always more difficult than the technical side of things when it comes to success at the end game.

Choice quote:

> I got a call from Developer Relations saying they didn’t allow “that kind of app” in the store.

That made me really sad.

Odd. It made me ... content, is perhaps the closest word. It's hard to make a product. I've had several attempts of mine fail, while I make a living as a consultant. In fact, I wouldn't say that I've had a success yet. So it's nice to hear someone else talk about the ongoing difficulties in software product development, rather than only from the occasional software successes.

You're right. Negative experience is valuable as well. I mysefl is now in a somewhat similar situation: I convinced my wife and my friends to try to implement a web-service I had in mind with a small working prototype. They agreed to suppor me financially and I quit my day job and took a year for now to finish it and have at least beta version running.

I should say that I feel really grateful and really appreciate this opportunity and what my friends are doing for me.

What did you build?

It's not working yet, sorry.

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