Hey Martin, sorry to hear it didn't work out as planned, but you guys should be proud of the endeavour, especially while having a full time job and family—you learnt a lot, gave value and community to many and you learnt a lot from this experience. I'm sure this won't be your last business idea :)
Dang, sorry to hear that. Chess Gym sounded like a really good idea, that I was excited to join when I started taking chess seriously again. Building a business in this space is tough. I’m surprised that your combined audience wasn’t enough to get past that 100-110 member ceiling, just goes to show how hard it is to promote stuff.
I’m not that familiar with the gym, but is it possible that the most time-consuming part (finding the positions), is not where people were finding the most value? Like maybe a dedicated community of serious chess players is still worth the price of admission, or the positions could be weekly? Or maybe you could find an FM/IM that you could offload the task of finding daily positions to? Just random ideas, seems a shame to shutter a $2000/mo business ($20 sub right?) if there’s a way to make it more of a passive income thing.
Hey Martin, sorry to hear it didn't work out as planned, but you guys should be proud of the endeavour, especially while having a full time job and family—you learnt a lot, gave value and community to many and you learnt a lot from this experience. I'm sure this won't be your last business idea :)
Dang, sorry to hear that. Chess Gym sounded like a really good idea, that I was excited to join when I started taking chess seriously again. Building a business in this space is tough. I’m surprised that your combined audience wasn’t enough to get past that 100-110 member ceiling, just goes to show how hard it is to promote stuff.
I’m not that familiar with the gym, but is it possible that the most time-consuming part (finding the positions), is not where people were finding the most value? Like maybe a dedicated community of serious chess players is still worth the price of admission, or the positions could be weekly? Or maybe you could find an FM/IM that you could offload the task of finding daily positions to? Just random ideas, seems a shame to shutter a $2000/mo business ($20 sub right?) if there’s a way to make it more of a passive income thing.