Bad timing, lack of persistence; We were working with a few app developers and had targeted releases scheduled for a month after launch day while we were trying to recruit new developers to keep the pipeline full for the next month. The day before we launched, Amazon released its Android market and started giving away one app for free a day.

Most of the developers we were scheduled to release ended up bailing to go to Amazon. I was the developer, and by launch day most of the heavy lifting was done (only took a couple weeks to build as I recall), but my partner was the marketing guy, and had all the relationships.

Right after we heard about Amazon's thing, he had some personal crises arise and ended up bailing. I don't fault him for it, as he had some decidedly real real-life family drama, but I wasn't even remotely equipped to handle the failure as I didn't know who had bailed or how to fix it.