Back in January of this year, I took down the foto eBook site and stopped offering the software for sale. There are less than half a dozen copies of it floating around in the wild. As I read a post on A VC this morning about learning from your failures, I thought it would be important to finally be a little more self reflective on why foto eBook never took off and what I have learned.
There are a lot of reasons why foto eBook failed. For the last year or so, I have always tried to pin it on market conditions, but I think I’m finally ready to come clean. I think there are two reasons it failed: My heart really wasn’t in it and I wasn’t willing to let the software grow to meet the consumers needs. The idea of foto eBook was something that I found really cool right as I made my exit from Journalism and into Web Development, but it was mostly my back-burner, get rich plan, while I toiled at a major corporation.
That’s pretty much been the hardest thing to admit to myself, but without my heart really in it, foto eBook suffered from a lot of problems that could have been easily overcome. For instance, several potential clients passed on the product because it didn’t support video uploads. Something that wouldn’t have been overly difficult from a technical perspective to support. Also, several people wanted more custom control of the UI. Again, that wouldn’t have been impossible to support either.
Instead of addressing consumer needs, I was focusing on several other ideas, only putting about 100 hours in a year, hardly enough to grow a fledgling software product.
Ultimately, I have always wanted to build a product that has the chance to become viral. That’s what Digi Whack could be, though I’m not holding my breath and I think I understand what keeps it from having explosive success. I’ll keep trying my hand at different ideas until I either run out of time or money, or both. But I think I’ve learned two very important lessons from the failure of foto eBook. Build products you’re incredibly passionate about, and let your users help guide the way forward.
Check out the known copies of foto eBook:
