All in the same market/need/desire space:
First product: FAIL.
Second product: FAIL.
Third product: looks set for success
“Our last version was just Tian and I late at 3am practically crying that everything in the food world we were building sucked. So we asked ourselves what could we do well that would be fun and wouldn’t make us cry anymore. And we came up with this. And this version makes us happy.”
Particularly interesting to read how radically different the three *products* were, even though they were fundamentally selling into the same “space”, and there was a lot of crossover in the underlying technology.
This is one of the hardest real, day-to-day (and month-to-month) problems that startups face. Every case is unique, and I’ve seen lots of smart people crumble at that point – or just go round and round in circles till they run out of money, or give up.