Shutting down rentobase.com

I have always been infatuated by the idea of shipping software products, writing code and people actually using the creations of my mind.

I never really stopped to think about the “what ifs” — marketing, passion beyond code, scalability, competition. All that has always mattered to me was moving from idea to ship, shipping and finally shipped.

What happens when the issues you ignored come running to you asking for a solution? What happens when the product asks for more than you are willing to give?

Well, that’s what happened to me after I got rentobase.com up and running.

I discovered pretty early on that if I was to really build a company around the product — beyond the code; I would have to learn a set of complementary skills if I was going to see an iota of success.

Technical excellence alone is not enough. This gets obscenely magnified when you are a solopreneur.

Beyond writing code, I had to send cold emails, cold call, network, market like a delusional lunatic whilst justifying pricing to a market that’s not known for paying for software.

I quickly realized that the product was demanding more than I could give, much more than I could stomach, let alone wake up looking forward to another day of cold sales calls (they’re truly cold).

To make it worse, it’s a problem space I did not really care about.

Rather than pushing on, I decided to put rentobase.com offline. I believe it’s a better decision for myself and the customers.

Overtime, I have grown to believe in failing early, failing loudly and moving on. It’s not shamefully to fail at something (consolation, huh).

What truly should matter are the lessons picked from the failure.

What next?

For the past few days, I have been focusing on gogen — a tool for creating starter fullstack Go applications with a frontend framework of choice in a single command.

The reason for choosing to work on gogen is because I write a lot of Go code in my daily work and almost everytime, I have to perform the same repetitive tasks, e.g pick a router, choose a frontend lib while worrying about the project structure.

Furthermore, I am excited about building an audit trail SaaS for enterprise business. I will send an update once I am done with settling some knowledge gaps.

Lessons

• Work on what energizes you.
• Fail early, fail loudly and move on.
• There’s more to a product than just code.
• Prepare to do things that do not scale. Here’s a famous post by Paul Graham

In any case, if you would like to buy the IP for rentobase.com or build your product, reach out via hi[@]luigimorel[.]com.