3-Month Side Project Retrospective (Failure Story)
I decided to build a service in January, and shut it down three months later. Looking back, I learned a lot, but there's nothing to show for it.
What I built was a service that crawls developer job postings and provides personalized matching. I built all the features.
There were three main reasons it failed.
1. I tried to solve a problem no one had asked about. It bothered me, but everyone else just ignored it.
2. I launched too late. For three months, I was fixated on 'finishing' it and never once showed it to users.
3. I had no marketing plan. Not even a little.
The takeaway is that I felt the truth of "sell before you build" in my bones. Next time, I'll start with a landing page, gauge the response, and then begin.
3 answers
Agreed, especially #3 lol. If you launch without a marketing plan, you're just playing by yourself.
I've built something similar, and with crawling services, the real problem isn't the tech—it's everything after. Once the site structure changes, all your matching breaks. And calling it "personalized recommendations" for job seekers doesn't matter; in the end, people just look at salary and company name. For your next project, keep just one feature and put a single form on the landing page asking, "Would you use this if it existed?" Then see if you can collect 30 emails first. If you can't even do that, writing code is a waste of time. Shutting it down after 3 months was the right call. The real problem is that next time you'll start by building again—so let's just be careful about that.