Shutting down LivePing

After deciding to publicly launch the product, a ton of engineering work suddenly showed up.

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etc.

So far in my career, I'm lucky to have been able to work with and learn from engineers that would try to do things "the right way". Which is extremely important when working with multiple engineering teams on an established product. However, that's not the right approach for a product in an early stage.

My mind has been so biased towards the "right engineering approaches" that I've been ignoring what actually matters.

Just get it out of the door, talk to people and iterate

As a result, it cost me months instead of weeks before putting the product before people's eyes, just because I wanted to do a fancy Typescript React Front-End with a Rails API and using Procotol Buffers for communication, because I don't want to maintain the API schema. I over engineered the infrastructure as well and while it can scale well, it has become a financial burden because doing things the right way is not cheap.

To be honest, it did help catch a lot of issues when doing some major schema changes. Oh, and did I mentioned that my colleague actually tried to DDoS the service and it withhold? Pretty impressive right? But it doesn't matter, it's still solving the wrong problems at the stage it was in.

Being an engineer and knowing engineers, we tend to think that building a good product will automatically get us customers and the rest will be history. While there are some portion of truth to it, having a good product will likely give you some advantages over your competitors, it's definitely not going to take over the world just like that.

After making LivePing public, I started looking into landing pages, marketing, SEOs, in-corporation, accounting, etc..

There's a lot of work besides just coding something out and throwing it on the internet, and I've seriously underestimated that. And critically enough, I've done it in the wrong order. Building a product, then market it was a complete waste of effort and time, especially when there's not even a close to guarantee that the product will be what you think it would become.

Positive side, while I've never really thought that other jobs would be easier than mine (maybe a little bit :P), I've learned to really appreciate the work of the people in marketing, sales and all the other departments that operates and runs a company. Experiences like this makes you more humble and I think I understand why a lot of successful CEOs have a humble mindset now.

Business is about people and solving their problems. Verifying the needs and pains your product solve is the first step which most people knows, clearly. However, another important portion that tends to get overlooked is the size of the market.

Sure, the product is solving a pain, I've conducted user interviews before deciding to make it an actual product, and there already are competitors in the field so that helps me verify that there are need for such a tool. But if the market is not big enough, it might not be worth the effort pursuing.

Trying to make $1000 in a $10,000 market vs a $1,000,000 market is a huge difference. Neither will be easy, but the effort required for the former could be way higher than the latter, resulting in the cost and effort of trying to grow the product becoming higher than the rewards.

In the past couple months, I've learned that the market LivePing is in are one of those markets that efforts can be greater than rewards, hence making it harder justifying the additional effort to be put into the service.

You might be thinking, "Clearly you're not doing a good enough job of researching the market beforehand, otherwise you've known".

While I do admit that I did ran with optimism, it's also hard to know when and what is "good enough". I've come to learn that, there's never going to be a "good enough" because at some point, you'll just have to run with it and learn while doing so. Knowing the border between research vs action is kind of an art, and it's different for everyone. On top of that, knowing when to withdraw is even harder because there will always be some level of emotional attachment to your product. Hence, knowing those borders requires experience, and LivePing had taught me that in the hard way.

In hindsight, even though I knew all these principles from reading famous startup books, I still committed the same mistakes that people tell you not to. And because of the mistakes, I've wasted a lot of time and money which otherwise, I didn't have to.

Another interesting aspect was that mistakes can have compounding effects on your motivation, and will put your passion to the test. Turns out, I don't have as much passion as I thought I had for developer tooling after all and it was a precious insight that I would not have known unless having been put on the spot.