That’s a sad story. It sounds like a good utility, and the outcome too common.
Out critical blunder was hoping to crowdsource the generation of the dataset we’d use to provide scores.
What we should have done was find existing data about company ethics and just build the feature of scanning a UPC barcode to get the data.
We tried to be the app and the data source, and we had a huge two sided marketplace problem, and no incentive for the volunteers who would spend hours and hours doing research.
Another reason why I won’t do a startup under volunteer conditions again. We unconsciously modeled everyone else as like us: willing to donate copious time.
Definitely. It was during that project that I switched from subversion to git for the first time. I remember my coworker James showing me how files just changed when he checked out a branch. I started using git at his insistence (which I hated because I wanted to own the project and he was a more impressive dev than me), and I started to like it. Switched all my other projects to git as well.
