When a business fails, it usually dies quietly in the night. The founder takes down the website and sweeps the ashes away, pretending like it never existed in the first place. When questioned about it, he’ll say, “What? I’ve never heard of it.”
Well, I don’t like that. I’m opening up the floodgates to all forms of criticism, derision, and insults.
Review My Post has failed, folks. I failed.
I tried. It didn’t work. I poured hours of possible-Deep-Existence time into it. Daaang it. The problem I have is that I’m supposed to learn from this, and I’m struggling to find the answers. Will you take a look at it and help me out? (Update: The site is down)
A while back, I wrote about why people have a tough time cutting their losses. Now I can say that I was absolutely on the money. You don’t feel the full weight of failure until you let go, and cut the rope. It hurts.
The Original Idea
I thought I saw an opportunity in the blogosphere. People NEVER get real feedback on their blog posts. So I had the idea that people would want to share their blog posts to get quality, real feedback on them. Then they’d know exactly where to improve their writing and could keep from making the same mistakes over and over again.
I’m an editor and I also coordinated with Carolyn Roark, a brilliant editor, to help out. I had plans for a book club, where we’d all go through books on writing together. But instead, here we are.
Zero people have bought a post review. ZERO.
The review you can see here (site down!) was a giveaway. But I felt like a had to do a triple backflip to even give away this post review. The author of the post I reviewed (from the giveaway) found the review very helpful, for the record.
If I cried much, I would because of how much effort I put in to make the site and prepare everything. I suppose it’s smart to have guests before you prepare dinner. So anyway, here is the RMP promotional video, to show you a bit more about the site and what it was aiming to do.
Marketing Plan
I planned to write guest posts to get the word out, and I wrote guest posts for two big blogs – Write To Done and Firepole Marketing. They both brought some traffic and members, but no sales. Maybe I’m just delusional about how much effort it takes to get a site off the ground?
I don’t know. I’m just disappointed. Sometimes I hate the world because it seems to reject innovative ideas. Or maybe I just hate that it rejects my flavor of innovation. Or maybe I just hate that I failed. Yeah, that’s probably it. Entrepreneurship is hard, but it still beats school if you ask me.
So now, I hope to get some insight about where I went wrong. Prices too high? They’re in line with the editing industry.
Why did my business fail? I don’t know!
Why do you think it did? Leave a comment. There is no need to hold anything back or be nice here. This site is DEAD, so I’m all ears and eager to learn from my mistakes, and hopefully some others can learn from my mistakes too.
