In July of 2023, I started building CodaCal, a web app to help music teachers manage their teaching studios. After steady development, month after month for roughly a year, the product failed to gain traction.
I thought I did everything right: user surveys, gathered feedback, researched competitors, added and improved features, etc. But people I surveyed who were interested didn't want to use it. Local teachers who I offered 100% free subscription wouldn't use it. Even after doing the SEO blog post thing, and getting thousands of hits to the website, not a single one of those visitors created an account to trial the service for free.
The reality was that folks just didn't want to use it. And that's alright.
So I've decided to cease development of the website and shut it down.
This was a project that I'd initially started because I saw a need, and thought that I could supplement my income fairly quickly by getting at least a few folks to start using it. This turned out not to be the case. Folks are reticent to change their studio workflows, or they've already found other solutions. And the more I worked on the site, the more competitors I found who'd been tackling the space for a while. Or the competitors that I did know about had been working to add features that were my points of initial differentiation.
By early summer I'd spent a month or two really polishing up some new features, to get the lesson scheduling and calendar integrations working how I envisioned. But I was getting burnt out, and the prospect of more grinding to finish the features and then even more grinding to try to get people to use it...well, I was getting exhausted just thinking about it. So here we are.
I still think that I had some unique ways of thinking about the problem. But the reality is that I'm just not passionate about it. What I am passionate about is helping people, especially musicians and creative folks. And sharing the business knowledge that I've picked up over my time working solo. So I've moved all of the CodaCal blog posts over to this blog. I'll be doing some work to clean up the cruft and leave the stuff that's worthwhile.
What I'm also passionate about is what I'm building over at Handcrafted. So that's my main focus now, again, aside from the day job.
Maybe I'll expand on this in the future, but that's it for now. Cheers!