Hacker News Reader

Growth as in $$$ or visitors of the site

To clarify, growth of users.

Why did you need to find this? Was this a pressure from investors, or did you determine internally that growth wouldn't eventually take off, ever?

(One of the things that worries me a lot about taking venture capital is the pressure to grow quickly over growing well / sustainably, so I'm pretty curious about this....)

Practically any monetization effort is a function of the number of users - a percent of users paying is still a percent.

If they're not seeing the demand it's smarter to cut losses than to continue on without a plan to make the site sustainable.

Sorry to hear about your experience. I had the pain of shutting down my business a few years ago. It completely sucks, but it is also a relief.

Did you focus on any cohort or did you just experiment with lots of cohorts hoping one would take off? If you did focus, what if anything did you learn?

Do you consider letting people actually see the site without login - it was a massive barrier to interest imho