It was an easy decision, no one was doing any real use with the app. Money was running out and so I tried to contact a couple of portuguese tile brands to sell a more specialized version of it. Nothing good came out of it. We don't have enough market for specialized/customized tiles/ceramics to move the industry players into it. Also the construction world is crippled by a different logic and mechanics. Free market ? yeah right... :/
Still in spite of all of these I do believe that there is a lot more this tool can give. My plans for it in the near future (early 2019) are:
- Present it in a slightly different way (remove landing page and instantly start playing a dumbed down version of it that introduces the current features as a 'initialization/introductory process')
- Improve the mobile experience (by default shape creation must be done by choosing which areas to paint instead of the current approach of connecting points, this is a small fix that makes using it in mobile a much better experience)
- Allow anonymous export and sharing of works. Remove the login until it is absolutely needed.
- Create thematic portfolios with it and share them with current graphical artists that work with grids
- Restart instagram marketing
If you have any other ideas that don't fit the traditional "startup book" approach I will gladly do them or try to incorporate them in the reboot.
I wouldn't take this as the path to success. You are in a very different industry than I have ever worked in. I do have some ideas for you to consider.
- Add a share button. Freeware gets a watermark, paid gets the clean image. Integrate with twitter, facebook, and instagram to make posts.
- Rebrand the application to something more artsy sounding. I now have three tabs open that say "Grid Generator" and it sounds like an engineer tool, while the application runs like an art tool.
- Hows the tablet experience? I would focus on desktop and tablets more than mobile. I think this application would lend itself to larger screens than cell phones have.
- Run a subreddit for people to share their work.
- Server costs for the export engine can be lowered by using AWS lambda to provide on demand computing. Implementing this can range from easy to difficult depending on which language the engine is written in.
If you want to reach out to me more about this subject you can find an email address in my profile. Good luck to you!
I'm really interested in your decision to move away from a consumer model to a b2b model.