By heading in the right direction, I mean that I've built the 'minimum viable product' entirely in one year. Now it was time to go after putting it in the market somehow, search for a venture capitalist or anything like that. But, no, we didn't even try.

We had many features that other sites didn't have back then. Such as the 'Google-like' search with auto-complete, auto-refresh appeal, etc. not so common back then, but we never went out after a single potential consumer or investor.

I was in a situation that I had to stop developing on my own and focus on other things in my life. However, my business partner didn't want to stop adding new features. He wanted a few more things that I could achieve in a month or two to start looking for an investor, but I just didn't have the throughput (no time due to new endeavors + saturated), and things died off.

I blame him for chickening out when we had possibly a tremendous competitive advantage that might make it an easy sell. I blame myself for not doing my own research for investors once I noticed that we reached a point of stagnation.

Context: He had great designing ideas but was not technical. I wasn't good at communication back then and counted on him too much to make this happen. If this was today, it wouldn't happen again, thanks to my experience now.