First I'll explain what I mean by "failed". I'm not shutting down or ceasing development. But since I have a previous side project that never became profitable, I made an agreement with my wife that if I didn't get 10 paid users in February, I'd de-emphasize this project and focus on other things.

So far I have 2 paid users, and they're both people I know. It's pretty obvious February won't see 10 paid users. Now the project moves to the back burner; fail.

What is the project? I hesitate to describe it. One person I described it to said, "Nobody will ever pay for that." When I finally developed it and showed her the intro video, she clapped and later paid for it herself.

HN readers might understand it as a personal Kialo or an Evernote/Keep for trees of reasoning. You write pro and con statements under a main statement, evaluate their truthfulness, then evaluate the main statement. Click into a pro and con to explore its pros and cons. Here's the introductory video: https://youtu.be/PXvU1h44jVw

OK, so why did it not succeed in the allotted time? There are many possible explanations.

It could be that people are not feeling the pain of how difficult it is to explain your reasoning to yourself and others. Sure, there's a lot of useless arguing online that could turn more useful with this tool, but perhaps at this point people who are frustrated with this have given up arguing online, and the only people left are ones who have adapted and gotten really good at prose, or who like useless arguing.

Perhaps the problem is that, even when you have a tool that makes it easier, exploring the reasons for why something is true or false is still work, and people aren't inclined to do that work. Maybe there's a chicken-and-egg problem here, where people will only find the tool useful after other people put good content in it that they can copy/use.

Perhaps this is a tool that people are mainly going to use for their own personal decision making, so there's no motivation to use the paid version, and worse, no viral coefficient.

Perhaps I'm just a tweak or two away from making it take off. I'm excited about the core functionality that's there now, but maybe others will only be excited about when some tweak makes that core functionality appeal to them more. I really wanted this to be the kind of thing that people want so badly that they'd put up with it not working exactly how they want, but I guess that's not the case.

Perhaps the simple design I use that's supposed to look neutral and be the opposite of flashy, is just too bland.

Perhaps if I had spent money on marketing I would have encountered that first really enthusiastic user who would have made it go viral.

Perhaps there's a niche where this thing could have a strong start, and I just haven't discovered it yet.

I know the goal of this Ask HN post was to gain some lessons about things that cause side projects to fail, but unfortunately I don't know. I suspect in most cases people don't know. I'm open to suggestions.

You'll still see comments from me on HN that include links to https://en.howtruthful.com/ whenever I think a prose comment isn't enough to explain my reasoning, but I'm not expecting that to be a successful marketing campaign.