Today we shut down a long term project. We were forced to conclude that it failed. We fired the last customer, turned off the servers, turned out the lights…
Was it a good day? No. It was actually one of the hardest days of my life.
The toughest part: Letting down customers that put their trust in us.
The biggest lesson we got from all this is that we have to think harder on the next idea. Is this new idea so good that we won't ever have to fire a single customer again? If not, we need to find a better idea.
Realizing this, we might be too insecure to ever start a project again. But the better alternative is to do less and to "overdeliver" on one thing.