Was the lack of enterprise sales, and being beaten out by competitors, the reason the product failed? From your story it sounds like you were on the brink of success relatively recently.
What are you working on now?
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I think there were two big mistakes we made (plus countless smaller ones):
- we didn't love the recruiting industry. We loved the idea of running a business and building stuff. That's not why people pay you.
- we didn't understand market segments. Valley startups are different from large traditional companies are different from small companies. We also had many MBA and law programs as either paid users or leads, but we also fundamentally misunderstood their core problems. The go-to market approach needs to be different for each of those segments.
I could write a book about the mistakes we made. In the end, it's lack of experience, lack of segmenting the market and fully understanding the core value prop for each segment, and too much focus on building the app. We had a lot of fun figuring out edge cases and working on the engineering side of things. We didn't enjoy the recruiting industry, and didn't want to take the time to really understand our customers. To really understand your customers, you have to know their industry like an insider; that's how you close sales. If you can't do that, you should hire sales people who can.
Or, like most programmers, work on a problem in which you are already a customer.
Such a book would be pretty useful. Please do it.