Shipped is not the same as wanted
Why I shelved ClarityOS five days ago, and what I kept.
ClarityOS was a real product. Marketing site, working app, sign-in, payments. I built it at night, after a full shift, over a lot of nights.
It launched to zero traffic. Not low. Zero.
The easy story is that it wasn’t good enough, so you keep polishing. I don’t think that’s true. I think I spent almost all my hours on the product and almost none on the people it was for. The product was the part I knew how to do.
So on October 3 I stopped. I didn’t delete it. I took the parts that held up (the four gates, and the rule that attention is the user’s money, not mine to spend) and moved them into LOADLESS.
What changes now: finding the audience is part of the build. It goes on the list next to the features, and it gets hours too.
A person who has built nothing has nothing to shelve. I’ll take the lesson.
Matthew