A few days ago, I officially retired my scrappy little web app, Tablescraps. I’d been pushing on it for a couple of years. Some of that push was technical. I added features, improved data collection, tweaked the user experience… stuff like that. I also put a fair amount of effort into marketing with SEO refinements, tabling at live events, and paid ads on social media. Sadly, Tablescraps never quite gained the traction that I believed it could have.
The obvious next question (to me, at least): Why?
What went wrong? #
I found the tool useful when I first built it for myself. And I commercialized it because other writers and self-publishers who I spoke to said that they wanted a tool like that. The price point for the service was a reasonable cost for anyone selling even a just handful of books each month. I got favorable feedback from just about everyone who beta tested the service. So what gives?
Ultimately, I think it comes down to the fact that Tablescraps was a poor fit for its intended market. If you’re just starting out in book publishing, it’s unlikely that you’re in a position to make good use of the data that Tablescraps was collecting and sharing. So for those people, it’s difficult to justify the cost, even if it’s just $4 a month. And if you’re the sort of person who’s already established and experienced with publishing and selling, then it’s likely that you’ve moved beyond the need to track every change to your books’ ratings, rank, and price. The cost may make sense and be perfectly acceptable, but the data simply isn’t what you’re focused on at that level.
Those are my guesses, at least. Actually, it’s not fair to say they’re just guesses. It’s inference based on reading between the lines in feedback I’ve received, coupled with a bit of investigation into some of the similar tools on the market. Nothing out there was quite like Tablescraps. It was unique. Sometimes uniqueness is the core of what makes a service or tool special and appealing. I mean, it’s the U in USP. However, it’s equally valid that uniqueness can be a signal that something is amiss. If no one else is doing it, maybe there’s a good reason for that.
But how can you tell whether that unique thing is a feature or a liability? I suspect that you can’t. This is why market research exists… and even then, that’s often not much better than licking your finger and putting it up in the wind.
At the end of the day, you’ve gotta try it. Do the thing. Experiment. And you need to be able (and willing) to recognize when it’s one or the other. Then, if it turns out that the uniqueness isn’t the appealing kind, you need to be willing to pull the plug quickly.
I’m still working on that. By all accounts, I’m probably a bit late when it comes to pulling the plug on Tablescraps. But better late than never, right? Otherwise, I could be continuing to accumulate the costs of running this thing into perpetuity… with not enough revenue to cover those costs.
Could I do better? #
Of course, it doesn’t do much good to point out an error or a failure without considering what could’ve been done differently. So let’s look into that. It’s these sort of things that will better inform what I do in future situations. And because I love my bullet points, let’s list them out:
- Shut it down sooner. I already said this, but it’s worth repeating, if only to make this list complete.
- Consider costs more deeply when setting pricing. I almost made a big mistake early on by choosing a pricing model that wasn’t sustainable relative to my costs.
- Pick an audience. This one is a bit mixed. I did pick an audience, but the niche was too narrow and possibly too price sensitive. If I’d focused exclusively on experienced self-publishers or even small publishing houses, Tablescraps would have a different UI and probably a slightly different feature set.
- Get help. I do a lot of things. Because of that, I end up being the bottleneck on any project that I’m the sole contributor to. It’s easy for long-term projects like Tablescraps to suffer from neglect, with marketing and development stalled out as my attention is elsewhere. I’m not sure how I could’ve afforded the help that Tablescraps would’ve deserved, but maybe that should’ve gone into the planning of the thing overall.
So yeah… I definitely could’ve done better. Fortunately, one of the nice things about putting a project to bed is that doing so affords me the time and bandwidth do actually do better on whatever the next thing is.
And what is that next thing? Well… that’s probably best for a future blog post. 😉