I promised in the welcome post that I would write this properly. It is long.
Parcelo was delivery tracking pages for small online shops in Romania and Hungary. Two founders, two and a half years, 11 paying customers at the end, about €600 a month.
What I got wrong, in the order it mattered:
1. I built for the shop I used to work with, not the shops that existed. I had been a product manager at a logistics company. I knew what a shop with 5,000 orders a month needed. The shops who would actually talk to me had 200 orders a month and tracked parcels by forwarding the courier's email.
2. We integrated with nine couriers before we had nine customers. Each integration took three weeks. Each one felt like progress.
3. I never said the real number out loud. For two years, when anyone asked how it was going, I said "growing". It was growing. From 4 to 11.
4. My co-founder and I never wrote down what "stop" looked like. So we stopped the worst way, slowly, each waiting for the other to say it.
What I would do again: the customer calls. I did about two hundred. That habit is the only asset I took out of the company, and it is why this forum exists.
Stefan, who is on this forum, built almost the same product a year later for smaller shops, charges less, and it works. I am genuinely glad. Somebody should have.