How my first startup failed - letter to the Co-Founders.

The document is what I've written to my Co-founders after I realized that our whole idea is just dumb. We spent about half a year developing software without even noticing many(!) elephants in the room and then shut it down.

https://www.indiehackers.com/product/novalux

---

Hello, my fellow comrades!

I am writing this document so you guys would know my thoughts about the project and have an overview of what we’ve done so far and what can possibly be done next.

Let’s start from the beginning.

The project started out as a dream. Dream of creating a place where people who love light novels could read them legally in any language and with that said eliminating places where Asian authors are literally ripped off of their author right and get no money or recognition whatsoever.

So as software developers what we did is we got straight to the business and started creating the dream.

Now, after 6 months of development and publishing of the project, we know that we’ve got nothing so far. (I mean, do not get pessimistic what I’m saying is that the interest is not as big as we would like it to be)

So what is the problem right now? Why don’t we have any active users?

Some might say that we are missing some functionalities, that the app is not ready yet. That may be true but most probably not.

The problem is that we should’ve thought about the marketing/business aspect sooner, even before development but it’s not the place to think about what we should’ve done but what we can do now.

Let’s describe the problem so we all clearly understand it. (This is crucial I think)

1. We are targeting Asian writers mostly. We are of course open for other nationalities and languages but we do not and probably shouldn’t focus on that.
2. We are not targeting the biggest writers, because of course, we wouldn’t be able to get them due to publishers, etc.
   We cannot rly contact even “middle-sized” writers, cause they also have their contracts.
3. Language barrier. We can send messages translated by google translate and I hope that would do the job. But to find more authors we need somebody who actually speaks the language.
4. We should actually get some info if it’s legally possible to translate stuff like that lol. (hopefully, it’s not a problem)
   Wuxiaworld and maybe some other websites are legal probably.

---

That said I have no regrets, the experience itself was fun and I learned much from it :)