1. People hate downloading desktop apps and creating great cross platform experiences is hard

First, we should have spent much more time on some kind of web version, or focused solely on mobile. We spent too much time building a complicated, high-maintenance desktop application. It was always clunky and unreliable and never really encapsulated the experience I had envisioned.

2. Price volatility made people hesitant to accept Bitcoin as payment?

We should have also figured out a way to add stablecoin support for the marketplace. That would have created price stability and mitigated the volatility that inhibited people using the e-commerce platform.

3. Everything can't be free

From a business perspective, we never charged users a fee for using the platform, which limited our revenue options and made it hard to operate at a profit or raise additional venture capital.

4. Talk to your users

I think anyone interested in building a new decentralized P2P marketplace needs to think hard about who their end customers are. There’s a massive difference between a customer trying to send hard-to-find medicine across the world undetected to a loved one versus someone wanting to buy an inflatable pool for their kids. We didn’t make that distinction and fell into the trap of trying to out-engineer our problems. Sometimes listening to what your users need is what matters most.