Why does building "for freelancers" fail?

Building "for freelancers" fails because the word describes a contract, and nobody gathers under it. You can't email freelancers, you can't find where they complain, and you can't notice when 3 of them say the same annoyed sentence in the same week, because there's no place where that happens.

The night before the launch

I opened a blank document and wrote at the top: who am I going to tell? I sat there for about 20 minutes and wrote 3 names. All 3 were friends who did occasional contract work. None of them would use it, and I knew that as I typed, because each already had an invoicing habit they were happy with.

I launched it the next morning anyway. The product turned timesheets into invoices. It took 2 weeks. It worked.

Who signed up

A trickle of people, and almost none were the freelancer I'd imagined. The treasurer of a small charity, invoicing a grant body. A student tracking hours on a group project. A woman running a cleaning business with 4 staff, who needed something quite different.

Each wrote with a reasonable question about something the product didn't do, and each question pulled in a different direction. I tried to answer all of them. It lived 5 months.

The same mistake with a number

I made it again later with "small teams", which is a size and has no members. 6 people paid. I rewrote the product twice in month 2 and never had one conversation with any of them. It lived 4 months.

Names before you build

A photographer, a copywriter, a developer and a cleaner have nothing in common except the absence of an employer. Narrow until you reach a group that talks to itself: a trade, a role, a place.

The test is simple. Write down 10 names of people who have the problem. People, with names. If you stop at 4, narrow the group until you can finish the list.

Nobody Bought It has both autopsies in Part III. Ship Alone has the filter that catches it.