1. Our selling point was: "there's a bunch of others like MongoDB out there, but they're eventually consistent; if you really care about your data, use ScalienDB, it uses Paxos and there's no consistency issues". But, (i) EC/Mongo/etc were so hyped that our message wasn't heard, (ii) people didn't really understand what we're saying, (iii) others were making false claims in their marketing that their product can also be tuned to be consistent. We didn't really understand how to market this. Contrast this with the excellent execution of Mongo.

2. We got foobared by potential investors, we focused on one group but they eventually walked away, and by that time we ran out of money. The other side of this was long enterprise deal lifecycles. Trying to convince somebody who is big enough to pay for DB software to use your alpha thing is 6-12 months, that's the same timescale you run out of money.

3. We did have some bugs, so we were claiming consistency/reliability, but it was an alpha product with bugs. (Of course it was, it was just us, 2 guys writing it, we didn't even have money to buy testing infrastructure!)

In the end we quit after ~3.5 years, after we exhaused all options, at great personal (but not monetary) cost, eg. I got divorced shortly after. Fortunately we were able to exit gracefully from all business affairs.