&gt;The vendor abandoned their technology, and our generous free services attracted people who proved hard to convert to paying customers.<p>This line rings very true. At my company our first product was offered for free. We had thousands of users, but after months and months of work we realized only a small fraction of our user base was going to be converted into paying customers. (Like OP, I began to feel burnt out at this point)<p>When we launched our second product, we realized we needed to answer the question: &quot;Will people pay for what we build?&quot; as fast as possible. We charged users to pre-order our alpha and when we realized people were willing to pay for it, we poured ourselves into the product.<p>I think many founders are scared to ask for money (We were). But if you&#x27;re building a product that you would eventually like to charge people for, you really have to force yourself to ask those hard questions as soon as possible.