Why do software products fail even when the product is good?

I've been through it. After my insurance software stalled, my co-founder and I did the post-mortem, and the answer wasn't the product. It was sales. As he put it, we solved every other problem except the one that mattered most.

What actually went wrong?

• Nobody was selling full time. No one was putting in 20 to 30 hours a week in front of buyers.
• The market was mature. In a mature market an incomplete product loses, because buyers expect every feature the competitors already have.
• "No competitors" can be a warning. My co-founder's point: it can mean there's no proven market.

What do I do differently now?

Define the sales motion before building more features. For my newsletter software that means three things: something exists, it's sitting in front of a buyer, and there's a defined price.

When should I shut a product down?

When the math has changed and won't change back. I officially shut down that insurance software after we'd put a lot of money and effort into it.

"We started it pre-AI, so it went after a small market, which at the time made sense, and everything that made sense then makes the opposite of sense now."

AI collapsed the cost of building competitors. The target audience was too small and the legacy players had a 10-year head start. The workload versus the opportunity was too small, and the opportunity cost for all of us was too high.

Why fall for the sunk cost fallacy? I would never start that product today. That settles it.

Should I wait for one big app or ship small pieces?

Ship the pieces. I gained roughly three to four months by keeping my website, lightbreak and greetform as separate products that integrate, instead of waiting until lightbreak could control the website. The website already worked.

Integration isn't the same as reliable end-to-end publishing, though. The demos at the time still had incomplete social visuals and no social scheduler.

For what to build instead, see niche versions of old software.