Declaring the death of your site
Hi all,
Just announced the death of the site I’ve been building for the past 3 years.
That was difficult.
Now would be a tremendous time for the universe to send me some freelancing work.
Anyone else had to declare death recently?
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I had to declare death of my last startup recently. Took me far too long to do, should have done it much sooner. I feel ya, but letting go creates space for the next thing by removing the dead weight of the last project, and that dead weight is heavy.
Commiserations to you. Yep it does a bit, there’s a sort of freshness to having a project in the past.
However...
It’s like spending several years building a custom sports car only to finish it and have to take it straight to the junkyard to get it crushed.
"Never say about anything, I have lost it, but say I have restored it. Is your child dead? It has been restored. Is your wife dead? She has been restored. Has your estate been taken from you? Has not then this also been restored? But he who has taken it from me is a bad man. But what is it to you, by whose hands the giver demanded it back? So long as he may allow you, take care of it as a thing which belongs to another, as travelers do with their inn." - Epictetus, Enchiridion 11
If you view it as a race car you built headed to the junkyard, yeah you're going to feel like shit about it. If you view it as metal going to be repurposed, to be made something new by someone else, it's a lot easier to move on and focus on things within your control. If someone paid for your old domain and doing something with it, congratulations to them. Continuing to watch the uptime monitor any longer is just needlessly subjecting yourself to more pain. Let's shift that energy to a new project, or at least openness to figuring out what the new project is. That helped me a lot during my death declaration process.
Yes you’re right in some ways, and that’s exactly what I’ve done.
But when you are moving on, restoring the bad situation is precisely what you don’t want.
My uptime monitor just started responding again a few minutes ago, turns out someone has bought the domain. There’s a landing page, the domain is for sale for $1000.
These is an adage to "fail fast" but sometimes growth is really slow. Fast only works if you have a ton of money to throw at something. I feel like it's a VC thing, we'll give you a bunch of money go at this hard and fast ... if you don't hit the numbers then you'll just be wasting their time so they'll chalk it up as a failure and move on to the next hopeful unicorn.
But in reality, growing a stable business can be a long process.
Especially if you don't have the advertising money or are learning the sales and marketing tactics you need along the way.
Hopefully you've learned some things you can use in your next venture.
There were just too many set backs, hosting providers going out of business, EU regulations being introduced that meant having to completely re-write the entire billing system, and so many more things.
There was always one more crucial thing that popped up.
It wasn’t that I was being a perfectionist, each one of these things were show stoppers.
I eventually got through all the setbacks, the site worked like a charm, really robust but the growth and marketing phase was going to take far too long. There was no gas left in the tank.
I gave it literally everything I had.
It just wasn’t meant to be.
Bleeding out 👋
Sorry for your loss. ⚰️
Now I want to know what it is about! Do you have any screenshots?
As promised here’s a short writeup including screenshots:
Looking back at linkblog.io
Honestly thank you, that’s appreciated, also I didn’t realise there was a coffin emoji lol :)
I’m actually preparing another blog post that describes what it looked like at the time of passing, I have all the screenshots. I’ll post a link when that’s published.
I also wonder whether there should be a 'Fail' or 'RIP' group, so we can put together a collection of these kind of stories.
Good idea I suppose, though RIP is better imo.
Probably won’t have time to write that blog post today.
The screenshots are on my upwork profile portfolio section:
https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/users/~010a3dee1544ac8cbd/?s=1110580755107926016
Yea I second that I saw the blog.markjgsmith... but still dont know what linkblogging is. :-/
It’s a bit like blogging, but the unit of content is a single link rather than a whole blog post. Like blogs there is an RSS feed.
There’s a bookmarklet that makes it easy to post a link when you are reading a webpage.
Here’s my linkblog to give you an example:
https://links.markjgsmith.com
It’s a great accompaniment to having a blog.
I like the idea it reminds me of myspace and when I used to post status updates every day. So what is your ideal customer?
I listened to a podcast last week that interviewed one of the writers of subversion, which was the version control tool everyone used before git got popular.
He said that he got an email from a customer one day and the customer said that he used subversion everyday to get stuff done and it doesn’t suck. Seems a bit negative but the software author in the interview was like “what more do you want?”, and I think he’s right.
Check out the podcast section of my latest newsletter for the interview with Jim Brandy.
An ideal customer would use the product everyday because it enabled them to get stuff done that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to do easily.
Here’s the announcement, the new post form wouldn’t let me include a URL:
https://blog.markjgsmith.com/2020/11/25/linkblogdotio-is-dead-long-live-linkblogging.html
I did say it was difficult. It will no doubt be easier tomorrow.
Today was even more difficult!
The good news is that I still managed to publish a writeup:
Looking back at linkblog.io
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