Ouch. 3 years is a long time to go with nearly 0 revenue. If you're selling to businesses, the most important thing is you go talk to people who will be your customers. In person. Build it and they will come is a total myth, you need to actually get out there and sell! patio11 did the same with Appointment Reminder.
Yeah it's tough and if we didn't have the early small wins, we probably would have quit years ago.
In selling to businesses, I agree that we need to get out there and talk to businesses about what problems they need solved and are willing to pay for. I did a little bit of that before building v1 of Answer Customers, but we would have been better served by spending months interviewing business owners than by building software.
One thing I've learned is that being a builder is a bit of a curse. It's too easy to get excited about an idea, come up with reasons why it has to work, and then just build and ship. Fighting that urge is difficult, but necessary to find success.
Hopefully it doesn't take 3 years for other people to figure this out.
