[jseifer]

Thanks a lot for the thoughtful response. I do have some questions for you.

- How did you market it?

- You said you talked to local businesses and chains. What did you do to get to them? What was most effective?

- Are there any marketing avenues you think should be avoided?

- Are there any features which you found to be not worth it? I'm keeping it simple for now but would appreciate knowing where not to take it.

- What finally made you decide to abandon it? What did you do with your customers?

[pedalpete]

As I mentioned, I was in closed beta. I never did a full release, my marketing was limited to people I spoke with, people I know who own/manage businesses with scheduling needs.

The number of people I spoke to who said 'that's GREAT!!! I want that for my company' was probably 20. Of course, I had mentioned it to probably 100 people but most aren't in a position where they really care or do staff scheduling. About 5 people who manage staff said they had no interest, reasons they gave where that they don't like/trust/need computers to do it, or that there schedules were so simple it wasn't necessary.

I did an initial slow beta release to 5 companies, 3 tried the service. After three weeks 0 were making schedules. I spoke to them about the changes that needed to be made, what they would like to see, and got a bunch of feedback, but nothing really actionable, as I had mentioned (or nothing that would actually have made a difference I believe).

I then sent emails inviting other businesses to use the service. I can't remember the exact numbers or responses. It wasn't high. They looked, a few signed-up and said they'd get there supervisors to look at it. A few weeks later, again, nobody was using it to build their schedules. Another round of calls, coffees to discuss what was needed, etc. lots of responses like 'when this supervisor gets back we'll start using it', 'we're just changing this', 'we need time to do x', etc. etc. It took a bit of time on my part to realize these were just excuses to not use the service. If I'd filled the need, they'd have used it.

Of course, you could say 'well maybe your product sucked'. Fair enough. Maybe it did, but I'll tell you that it was a whole lot better than most of the stuff out there. As I'm sure you know, there are lots of scheduling sites that are almost impossible to make heads or tails of due to poor UI and design. I'm not a great designer and a friend did a bit of design for me, but I'm pretty good at UI, and this was pretty simple to use. It worked, just nobody cared.

Speaking to local businesses I found was easy, and in my research, I had spoken to a bunch of businesses about how they do their scheduling so I understood their needs before I started building. Then I figured it was just a matter of getting a product out there and tweaking it and adding features based on feedback.

I know a few people who work for large chains in IT or other management capacity, so that was my in with the chains.

I would say in the end I found all features not worth it ;) but I too started fairly slowly. I'm trying to remember all the features it had. It wasn't SUPER feature heavy. The feature list that I remember was

1) add employees

2) employee types (manager, scheduler, staff)

3) create template shifts (one click to add a shift to the schedule instead of selecting start/end-times each time.

4) add shift to schedule

5) add shift request

6) request time off

7) employee payroll accounting

8) calculate over-time

9) publish schedule/send-emails, etc. etc.

10) holiday planning (as requested by a business)

The decision to abandon it was mostly made for me. 0 for 25 is not a good record, particularly when you have a personal relationship with most of those businesses.

I actually made a little test to see what would happen. I made sure that no schedules had been made for the upcoming week, and I just shutdown the site.

I figured if people noticed and wanted to know what happened to the site and wanted the service, they would ask. Of course, I mean the people who had already seen it and new about it. Nobody asked, nobody knew it went away, nobody cared.

I contrast that with another site I shutdown late last year, and I still get emails from people asking me to bring it back, or what happened to it, thanking me for building it, etc. etc.

I know I'm quick to make decisions on these sorts of things, but as I mentioned before, my heart wasn't in it, and it seemed that customers weren't passionate and didn't feel the pain.

The decision to abandon ship was made when I considered the alternatives businesses had (including a free competitor in the space with a decent product), and the impact I felt my product could make.

I didn't do anything with my customers. I hadn't charged them (actually I didn't build a billing system as that would have been an extra charge up front that I wasn't willing to invest in until I had enough paying customers to make it profitable). The businesses are all still doing there schedules as they always had I assume.

I've worked for a few start-ups now both as a programmer and in other biz-dev, product management capacities, etc. etc. along with my own personal projects. There is a certain feeling I think you get when launching a product that has some traction, even if only minor. There is a buzz about it, and people get talking about it. So I guess in the end, a big part of my abandon decision was that this just didn't have that 'GO!' energy to it and I didn't have the rocketfuel for the project.

The great thing I take away from these sorts of projects is that there is no shortage of great things to be done, problems to be solved and opportunities.