Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
In this postmortem from 2013, @zrail 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 ★ 141 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 84 comments
I looked at the original announcement and looked specifically at the technical details list. If I didn't have the stuff on the tech details list available, and had to accomplish roughly the same non-technical task, there are a lot of ways to take notes more or less for free. I can't operate without gmail and I guess google drive so I need not worry about an app built on them.
Dropbox is not a negation of my argument, in that they handle the annoyance of keeping a storage service up.
In my cartoon mind if gmail is down, then storing notes in gmail doesn't work, but the bigger headache is gmail is down not that I can't access some minor notes. So just use gmail for free. Or github. Or a browser extension to "save email to dropbox or google drive"
The other problem is you have a very narrow window of opportunity for a programmers note taker because of habits. The concept of writing README and TODO files and inserting source comments or placeholders, perhaps with tags to search for and ASCII art for markup, has been a part of programming education and tradition for a long time. Could you sell a note taker app to noobs who don't already have a github / text editor habit? Well, maybe, but it'll be harder.
So in my cartoon mind I have an idea it gets entered into TODO or perhaps as a TODO flagged comment in the appropriate spot and its done. You need a wedge to fit your process into it. Like if PUSHes to github regularly failed or github filtered out source code comments to "save disk space" or something. But if it works great, something new is going to be a hard sell.
Now if you did something unusual once you got the data that might sell. Here's a nice web front end that uses GIT and/or github and/or dropbox and/or google drive and/or gmail as a backend.
Reasons why I would not pay for this (I'm a developer):
- I already keep notes in markdown using nValt. It's fast. And it's free.
- I sync these notes, which are just .markdown files in a directory on my machine, with Dropbox. Now I can edit these notes on my iDevices.
- Your service costs me money to do what I do for free.
- If I need more bells and whistles, I use Evernote. Evernote is also free for me.
- Emailing myself notes with tags in the subject in is also free.
Why should I spent $5/mo to use a digital journaling service, and then more time to make this service work with the rest of my workflow, when I already have things in place that take care of my note taking problem?
I would need a great incentive to switch how I take notes. I'm thinking a bunch of other developers thought the same thing.
Finally, at least you shipped something. Nice retrospective. Keep at it.
Edit: It's interesting seeing this post and "Ask HN: How do you store and organize your startup ideas?"[1] on the front page at the same time :)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6585375
Any service that is dependent on network effects needs a plan to cultivate activity before it launches. It's crucial to offer engagement to the Real People that are early adopters on your product, and the reality is that if you go hands-off and attempt to wait for the audience to self-materialize, you'll get a lot of people who drop by, make one post, and check for interaction a couple of times, and then never come back. It's a bad deal for everyone.
Get together a group of people -- pay them if you have to -- who are committed to using your product before you do a real public launch, and then new users will immediately be engaged and it will grow from there. Launching without this spells disaster.
If you are launching SaaS that doesn't depend on other parties' involvement, you should still gauge interest, but it's OK to start small.
Just as an aside, if you have a project that you're not sure is going to take off, there is no reason to shell out $29/month for it. Shared hosting will do the job for $5 - $10 a month. No its not super reliable, but if you have no users, who cares? And if you do get popular, my experience has been that they can handle bursts of traffic surprisingly well, until you can move to proper hosting.
The Idea is nice but I wouldn't pay for it mainly because of the reasons stated by Pete Keen and another reason: When I have free tools to be doing the exact same things, why would I want to pay? If I had to launch a SaaS product, I would definitely create a buzz about it amongst my peers and give free subscription for a limited period enough to get the user used to the new idea.