What exactly went wrong? I might be being dumb, but from what I can gleam from the blog post, the main reason you shut down is that you didn't want to pursue the business, despite opportunity that was there. Was that the case? How can we learn from this?
From what I've heard, it really sounds like a simple case of not having enough money to sustain themselves. This coupled with the fact that there are lots of competitors out there in terms of building heroku for django.
That said, I know the founders and they're smart people who will do good things even though this didn't work out.
I'm interested to know this as well. With the success of Heroku for Rails deployment, there's definitely room for a parallel player in the Django market — and probably the opportunity to make a lot of money, too.
The post states, in a pretty clear manner, that nothing really went wrong, they'd just rather do something else than run with this for years and deal with the investment headaches it'd inevitably produce.
I think what they just did was awesome. Do what makes you happy, striving for money is utterly pointless in the end.
After spending enough time with a project you realize that you no longer interested in continuing the project. I think quitting is the best choice at that moment, rather than questioning oneself everyday.
I think you can learn that while there are many technically interesting projects to work on, seriously pursuing something as a business takes a lot of commitment.
