Why we failed – Good product, not enough waves
In this postmortem from 2013, @esher candidly breaks down the dissolution of their startup, examining the fatal assumptions, misallocated resources, and market dynamics that led to its shutdown.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Early signals were often rationalized away instead of prompting an immediate pivot in distribution or pricing.
The psychological toll of running out of capital compounds operational friction in a solo or small team setup.
Key Antidote: Validate paying willingness before committing months to building sophisticated product features.
Community Debate Themes:
Community discussions on HN centered on identifying product-market fit early, avoiding vanity metrics, and the emotional recovery process after shutting down.
CATEGORY Postmortems & Failures →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 17 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 8 comments
These two paragraphs hold a secret :
"Our main problem with WebRechnung is that it doesn’t fit our standards any more – software, as everything, degrades over time. The interwebs is moving fastly forward, everything is evolving. Adapt or die. We don’t want to see this old piece of software (base core is 3 years old now) out there into the wild much longer.
We would love to publish it on GitHub. Unfortunately this software is not really a modern ninja style stand alone application. It is tightly integrated into our monolithic MISH system – mostly written in Perl and impossible to understand for an outsider anyways. And it’s really old: dependencies are outdated, large parts of the code are in need of major re-factoring. We would rather rewrite everything before touching this code again."
One of the challenges of building software on open source frameworks is building durable software. I have been playing with thttpd recently on the Rpi and amazed at how durable this software is. It hasn't been changed a whole lot in years and years, and it just works. And it does that because everything it depends on is also not changing and just works.
The challenge for this new generation of programmers is to create a durable environment where folks could write invoicing software once and have it just work.
This highlights something that many start ups fail to properly understand - a good product is a tiny part of the challenge of succeeding with a business. Without some way of getting the word out there people won't find your product. It doesn't matter how good it is. And if people don't find you, you're dead.
Every start up needs a good understanding of tech to build something saleable, and a good understanding of marketing to bring people to the product. You can't survive without both (caveat: you can buy marketing).
Just because code is old and crappy is no reason not to open-source it. Many successful projects (e.g. firefox) started that way.
If it's running fine as a free product, why does it have to be end-of-lifed? Does it cost you anything?