Comment by mynewwork | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mynewwork | Hacker News Reader

This is fascinatingly baffling. I'd love to meet the author in person.

I don't know how much existing technology was used, but the feature set sounds quite expansive for 6 weeks of development. Seems like the guy must be a pretty good developer. Aside from the HN shilling, it sounds like the launch marketing was done well.

But then a few surprisingly bad bits: "we had a long heart to heart about 3 weeks after launch". 3 weeks? Just how quickly were they expecting success? Followed by "I assumed that the way I worked on projects (remotely over SSH or SFTP) was how everyone set up their projects" which suggests they did all this without even the slightest bit of market research.

I wish the team good luck in the future. It seems like some smart people made some strangely simple mistakes, but I bet they've got a great chance to be successful in the future.

3 weeks is indeed really quick to jump to conclusions in my opinion, and a lot of people just give up too quickly. In my case, it took around 10 /months/ to experiment and understand how to properly sell my Saas [1], and now we are starting to see a nice increase in sales.

Rob Walling cut a normal SaaS growth in 3 phases: build, learn and scale. The learning phase is about learning how to properly convey the value, tune your message, and find the right channels to sell your product - and it can take quite a bit of time.

Too bad a lot of technical people just stop too early (not assuming carrying on in that specific project would have been a good idea :-)

[1] https://www.wisecashhq.com

Thanks for the replies guys.

I definitely gave up too quickly I think (not saying that how it was would have turned out though, it definitely needs to be reworked).

I think just the sheer emotion behind the other people I was working with thinking I could shut it down, and other personal circumstances is what drove me to "abandon" it for 4 months.

Hopefully what I'm working on now will prove that there is still some substance behind this idea.

Emotionally this is a roller-coaster for sure. Just wanted to point out that your situation is not unusual and not necessarily a failure :-) Good luck with your current work!

You might want to seriously rethink re-working things without talk with your active users.

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