Two weeks of legible progress

I spent two weeks putting a small tool in front of online communities, and this week I stopped.

The stopping point was a post that went badly. The top comment said the tool was useless. It collected upvotes, which is the part that mattered, because it meant the community agreed rather than one person being sour. I deleted the post and sat there for a while.

The post was not really the mistake. A few days earlier a different community had given the thing more reach than anything I have built has ever had, and I decided that meant I had found my audience. That conclusion is where it went wrong. Reach and fit are two separate measurements and I only took one of them. Those communities saw it because the topic matched. They disliked it because they already do by hand, carefully, the thing my tool does roughly. I measured the first and assumed the second.

The part I keep coming back to is smaller and worse than the bad post. There is one check that would have cost about five cents and five minutes, which is finding out how many people search for this problem at all. I never ran it. Two weeks of choosing communities, writing copy and reading responses, and the cheapest question in the whole thing sat unasked the entire time. I do not have a clean explanation for that. It was not ignorance. I knew the check existed.

The work is stopped rather than paused, and I do not have a replacement plan yet. What I have is the uncomfortable observation that everything I did for two weeks was legible as progress, and none of it required me to find out whether anyone wanted the thing.