[nikisweeting]

Maybe this isn't helpful advice, but don't take product failures so personally. They are experiments and learning exercises, and most companies fail by default. Of course it depends greatly on your life situation, i.e. do you have a job that can support you while working on stuff as a side-project? Or are you attempting to launch something as your full-time day job with limited savings or income? (10x more stressful)

People don't have personal investment or insight into your particular project. Most people assume there is a huge company behind every product they use, and wont hesitate to bash it on social media not realizing it may be a solo founder or tiny team with limited resources. Extreme reactions also get faster responses from big companies, so people have been trained to viscerally bash apps when reviewing them rather than posting more measured empathetic feedback. I think you will find that chatting with users 1:1 yields much higher quality feedback than reading reviews.

3-4 months also strikes me as a very short time to build, launch, monetize, and then declare a project a failure. In my experience, successful companies take years to build, or at least 5-6 months to start iterating on the initial feedback and building a reasonable userbase.

Just my 2c.

[j4yav]

I agree that perseverance is being ignored by the author. Not that he should keep throwing good money after bad, but keep costs low, keep talking to customers, don’t be afraid to throw things away, and you might be surprised where your product ends up.

[pototo666]

My first product takes 6 monthes to monetize. On hind sight I could have shortened 6 monthes to 4 monthes. Because users donated money from monthes 3 to support me. I postponed monetization for fear of user churn.

I would argue that it is possible, even necessary to try monetize early (but only after users acutually use the product). Maybe charge some small amount. PG may have written about it, I am not sure which essay.