Thanks for sharing your experiences in such an open manner. It certainly takes much courage and bravery to shutting down your service and even more so, writing honestly about it.
Could I ask you a few questions:
- Is it true to say that if this product required less maintenance (in terms of uptime, server administration, future migration), you would not have abandoned it?
- Secondly, assuming that you are not against raising external funding (which you are not in favour of, as mentioned in your blog post) and hiring the right team for it, would it be fair to say that you would be willing to continue with Charm?
- Lastly, and hypothetically, if Freckle and your other opportunities were not around, would you have continued with Charm? Would it be fair to propose that because of the high maintenance required by Charm upon you and your team, the opportunity cost is simply too high, relative to the other options that you have?
1. I think we gotta talk about the word "abandoned," which to me involves letting something languish without attention, which is exactly what we didn't do. But aside from disagreeing with that word choice…
Would we not have carefully shut it down if it wasn't for the running-of-it issues… hard to say. Aside from the server problems, I described our staffing / resource problems. We didn't have enough staff to keep building Charm, adding features our users deserved. This is a probelm.
2. Not sure what the funding part has to do with willing to work on Charm. I will never, ever, ever take funding, unless it's to pull a 37signals or a Github — on completely my terms for a tiny sliver of the company — to get a personal advisor or a big "in." But that I doubt (doubt we'd ever get big enough for that to be attractive to an investor). So, assuming I wasn't against funding is too big an assumption to make.
3. Good question. If Charm were our only baby, it would have been much easier to keep going… though frankly I don't think we ever would have attempted Charm as a first product (that bit of sense we lost after the success of Freckle). The opportunity cost, as you say, was huge.
Thanks for sharing your experiences in such an open manner. It certainly takes much courage and bravery to shutting down your service and even more so, writing honestly about it.
Could I ask you a few questions:
- Is it true to say that if this product required less maintenance (in terms of uptime, server administration, future migration), you would not have abandoned it?
- Secondly, assuming that you are not against raising external funding (which you are not in favour of, as mentioned in your blog post) and hiring the right team for it, would it be fair to say that you would be willing to continue with Charm?
- Lastly, and hypothetically, if Freckle and your other opportunities were not around, would you have continued with Charm? Would it be fair to propose that because of the high maintenance required by Charm upon you and your team, the opportunity cost is simply too high, relative to the other options that you have?
Thank you, and hope to hear from you. :)