[joering2]

I still don't like what you did and I am sure you made plenty of developer/startup enthusiasts angry and that they would love to be in your shoes profitable. If it was profitable, it means it was sustainable, at least in short period of time. You didnt have to spend your time on it, you could hire a team and literally outsource entire project. You could easily sell it for 10x fold and score $1MM to use for you current or future projects. I assume your team worked hard on this, they should be rewarded monetary-wise as well. Not to mention if you had coming back customers, it means they liked or loved your service. Now you left them pissed. If you were concerned about lists (which is nice thing of you not just selling to spammers), and if a "large companies" truly approached you, I dont see a problem putting a statement in your sell paper how the new company will treat existing database of leads. I am sure if you would sell to Google, they wouldnt go wild and spam the heck out of each lead you had.

[rapind]

Funny thing is, selling to Google often also means shutting the product down anyways. For a product of this size, if Google had interest it would most likely be a talent acquisition more than product.

Outsourcing an entire product like this is a pipe dream. It would also likely screw over their customers, who may then pass word around that they were douchebags for doing it.

I think they handled it well, and very morally.

[joering2]

closing down (killing) a self running, profit-generating, sustainable business (even if its MVP) that customers love and recurringly use is a good moral decision?

[rhizome]

Whenever I have the same question as you, I stop and remember that a lot of people use "ethics" and "morality" interchangeably. If it doesn't make much sense with one word, try the other. :)

[ahoyhere]

Do you think it's a good moral decision to continue taking your customers' money for something you will never improve much at all, because your heart's just not in it? I certainly don't think so.

[badclient]

you could hire a team and literally outsource entire project. You could easily sell it for 10x fold and score $1MM to use for you current or future projects.

Way easier said than done.

[ahoyhere]

Especially easily said by someone who has never hired a team, or sold a product to a bigco.