Jason, It may sound harsh, but I'm pretty sure that you didn't learn any lesson from your failed startup - or learned the wrong ones.
1. Your target audience was not small.
2. Your lack of marketing had nothing to do with your failure.
3. There is nothing wrong with your technology choice.
4. Shared hosting wasn't the cause - you just chose a bad host.
5. It's possible to gain people's trust if you position yourself correctly, if your product looks legitimate enough, if you have enough word of mouth or buzz, and if your product is just plain good.
6. Gmail didn't kill Waifmail. There is plenty of room for competition in mail.
I may be completely wrong, but from reading your post, my guess is that:
1. You gave up too quickly.
2. You weren't able to estimate what users would want correctly or at all. Or, you weren't dedicated to figuring it out.
3. You couldn't execute the idea correctly, either with design and/or code.
4. As a result of not understanding your user, you weren't able to keep innovating.
4. You weren't able to understand your user because your vision wasn't exactly right
> 3. There is nothing wrong with your technology choice.
Exactly. LAMP is a good, safe choice. Many of the largest websites are LAMP (Slashdot, Wikipedia) and its the others that have the most scalability problems (EBay, Twitter).
From the article: I come from a Microsoft background, and you can say what you want about Microsoft, but their development tools and libraries are rock solid. If they have a library called System.Web.Mail, you can rest assured that it will actually send emails when you ask it to. Unfortunately, this is not the case with PHP.
I'm astounded by this comment. Some Hotmail's most spectacular outages were from failed attempts to migrate away from a Unix MTA.
I prefer this kind of failure chronicle to the ones usually listed here. It talks about specific, obvious problems encountered and doesn't try to extrapolate any huge overarching themes about startups in general, which are usually somewhat misleading.
Gmail lets you read other POP and IMAP accounts now, so it's most of the way to where we were 4 years ago. They don't yet offer support for Hotmail's wacky WEBDAV interface, but that's not really a problem since most everybody has abondoned Hotmail in the last few years.
1. Your target audience was not small.
2. Your lack of marketing had nothing to do with your failure.
3. There is nothing wrong with your technology choice.
4. Shared hosting wasn't the cause - you just chose a bad host.
5. It's possible to gain people's trust if you position yourself correctly, if your product looks legitimate enough, if you have enough word of mouth or buzz, and if your product is just plain good.
6. Gmail didn't kill Waifmail. There is plenty of room for competition in mail.
I may be completely wrong, but from reading your post, my guess is that:
1. You gave up too quickly. 2. You weren't able to estimate what users would want correctly or at all. Or, you weren't dedicated to figuring it out. 3. You couldn't execute the idea correctly, either with design and/or code. 4. As a result of not understanding your user, you weren't able to keep innovating. 4. You weren't able to understand your user because your vision wasn't exactly right