I had quite a lot of failures, but one of the most interesting was/is my software for managing wineries.
Go niche they said and I did. I also picked real pain point: doing compliance tracking in EU is ridiculous process and it is often called as a biggest burden of wineries.
It turned out that small to mid sized wineries really hate doing paperwork, but they dont like to do it on computer as well. So after four years I found being in limited marked with product that my customers seeing more like necessary evil and with high cost of getting new people converting to core users.
Once they did convert they tend to stay for years (zero churn for customers that make effort to start using it systematically).
I do have some customers and I do keep the doors open, I even do additional development as I see fit, but I dont see bright future for the product. Four years of fulltime work went into building it, but hey thats how it goes.
Go niche they said and I did. I also picked real pain point: doing compliance tracking in EU is ridiculous process and it is often called as a biggest burden of wineries.
It turned out that small to mid sized wineries really hate doing paperwork, but they dont like to do it on computer as well. So after four years I found being in limited marked with product that my customers seeing more like necessary evil and with high cost of getting new people converting to core users.
Once they did convert they tend to stay for years (zero churn for customers that make effort to start using it systematically).
I do have some customers and I do keep the doors open, I even do additional development as I see fit, but I dont see bright future for the product. Four years of fulltime work went into building it, but hey thats how it goes.