Chris at Blackthorn.io

And over four years, from about mid 2015 till early 2019, I just one by one made products and killed them.

And we initially had a form builder, which we called Blackthorn Documents, which had a lot of competition from Conga and DrawLoop.

And it turns out that this just didn't work.

We had a big customer portal, where if you're familiar with Google App Maker before they killed it, it was a multi-tenant data normalizing portal where you could build stuff like contextual declarative.

This is too many words, and no one understood what the heck we were doing, and it wasn't solving any problems.

Then there was our billing app, where Salesforce had Steelbrick, which had to invoice it or invoice IT.

And then that thing got really popular.

Stripe released Stripe billing.

And we're like, OK, we need to kill this thing.

And then we were going to do an e-commerce app.

And Salesforce bought Cloud Craze.

So all these things didn't work.

So what we did is we wound it down.

So we initially were funding a lot of the business from professional services.

You can see over the first few years, we were doing about a million a year of pro-serve.

That was paying for about 10 of us to work there.

And we had a few apps that we later killed.

A lot of our payments customers were nonprofits.

They said, hey, give us a donations app.

This thing doesn't work for us.