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.
Yeah, a lot of lessons to learn from. And yes it seems like it is $2000, but then you have to substract running cost on Circle ($220), VAT and taxes, splitting it 50/50, fees and so on. So we had to push it further for it be a sustainable business. I hope the free version will be able to grow and maybe down the road it can open new doors.
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 :)
Thank you for the kind words. I'm sure I will get new ideas, but I have to be a bit better for estimating how much time I have in a day ;)
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.
Yeah, a lot of lessons to learn from. And yes it seems like it is $2000, but then you have to substract running cost on Circle ($220), VAT and taxes, splitting it 50/50, fees and so on. So we had to push it further for it be a sustainable business. I hope the free version will be able to grow and maybe down the road it can open new doors.
Makes sense for sure. I can see a free version getting really big, hope it does lead to more opportunities for you guys.
Thank you, Marcus! :)