[___start]

I was a partner in a startup a few years ago doing roughly the same thing. After working on an early prototype, the project fizzled out due to involvement in other projects, but a competitor launched with the same idea soon after that called shiftplanning.com. They did literally the exact same thing except they got to market before us and they (from what I can tell), made it big. The market for this type of software is massive but obviously you need to find some key business up front. Maybe you had the wrong investors? At the time we had an investor that wanted to put money in AND have his large restaurant chain start using it; a strategic partner... Something to think about...

[throwawaydbdksn]

What startup founders don't realise sometimes is that marketing is more important than having the best product.

I've had the luck of being on both development and marketing ends and high quality marketing can definitely sell a product that's slightly inferior to the competition 10:1

If you need big names attached to your product early the best way is to give it out for free to those first strategic customers. Why would anyone turn down something useful and free.

If you can't tell why another startup beat you out when you had a better product it's garaunteed to be marketing related.