*Stories of this kind are very valuable and very rare. It's like watching a guy in an SUV frankly admit to melting polar bears.
http://successfulsoftware.net/2010/05/27/learning-lessons-from-13-failed-software-products/
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Case #8: nBinder
Contributor
Boghiu Andrei.
The product
nBinder, packs multiple files into a stand alone executable with over 50 advanced output and file unpack options, conditional run and commands.
Why it was judged a commercial failure
It was the first product I began selling. It sold to 300+ customers in 4 years. But for about a year the sales began to go down and have finally stopped completely.
What went wrong
The biggest problem was that because it was a packer intended for people that wanted to pack their products (software or games) into a single package (compressed and encrypted) many have used it for creating malware by binding malware files to legit files and then distributing the output so it isn’t detected by antivrus software (although it would be detected at runtime). Because of this I had lots of problems with antivirus companies that flagged files create with nBinder as malware. This was of course affecting legit users as their files would be falsely marked as malware.
I used virustotal.com to see which antivirus detected it and contacted the antivirus manufacturer as soon as I detected the problem. In most cases they would remove it from their definitions. But it was an uphill battle because it would appear again in a matter of weeks. Some small AV companies didn’t event bother to reply to my emails to fix the problem. Others were using heuristics to flag files create with my applications and AV developers were reluctant to whitelist files created with nBinder. You can imagine it that it was enough for an AV such as Kaspersky or Norton to pick my files as malware for a day and customers would be affected and not use my product any more, especially that it took about 3 days for AVs to remove the false positive.
Infrequent updates. Due to lack of time I only updated the product once or twice a year and this affected the product a lot.
No marketing. I decided that I didn’t want to invest money in marketing so, except for a short AdWords campaign, I invested no money in marketing.
My decision to develop 3 products instead of concentrating on one or two affected development time and quality. I have worked on 3 products simultaneously instead of concentrating on making a single good one. The reason I worked on 3 is because I enjoyed developing different software in different categories. I didn’t start this for money but for the fun of development.
Time/money invested
I invested almost no money (except for hosting costs). Time invested I can’t really say exactly, but not too much as I only worked on nBinder in short bursts like 6 hours a day for a week or so before releases....
