Thanks for sharing. Sounds like what was lacking was customer development (term recently in vogue, but basically represents some solid, time-honored principles of makign sure people are willing to pay for whatever you'd liek to build... before you build it. :)

I'm guilty of not following this process as well. In my case, I stuck with the product anyway, and over a very long haul (about 3 years, and $500k) we've finally hit product/market fit. An expensive lesson to learn.

http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development/

Best of luck next time!

There's a similar free service for online writing: http://timecert.org/

It's by http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pelle