Ask HN: Shall I continue or pivot?
The original idea of "TaggTo" is: a platform for people to create "picture product reviews" (tagging product pictures). In Jan. 2013, we released first version of our app. However, there were very little downloads even after weeks. I tried my best to market it, but none of them worked. Finally we did a survey among those users who were active but stopped coming. The survey showed they stopped coming because:
1. most of the users don't want to write anything;
2. not enough content to consume.
Eventually decided to drop the "review" feature and shifted our focus to "social commerce". To make content more interesting, we pre-seeded many products, and focused mainly on Fashion and Home categories. We re-launched "TaggTo v2" in late Oct. 2013. This time we got more users signed up, but it's still not significant enough to make a difference. And the worse news was, my co-founder had to quit due to family reasons. And since I had been out of job for two years, I also took a contract job since last Sept. So now I am the only person working on it, part time.
Now I am facing a difficult decision on whether I should continue on this project --
Reasons to continue:
1. One of the biggest problems for the current TaggTo app is it's not engaging enough. I already have some ideas to tackle that.
2. We already put in a lot in the app -- we have a very solid foundation thanks to over engineering, :-D
3. Many people (including some angels / VCs) are actually impressed with the quality of the app.
Biggest fear for continue:
After moving away from our "picture review" feature, TaggTo lost its uniqueness. I am afraid even if I am able to attract a good amount of users with the new features, TaggTo still cannot standout due to lack of uniqueness.
Please click here to continue (sorry can't squeeze in 2k chars):
http://www.taggto.com/ask_hn.htm