Despite a lot of noise on HN, we had only a few hundred signups for our paid hosting service. We built super-scalable hosting tech but it turned out we could have hosted them on a single big VM all along... oops.

I think the problem is that the apps, while functional, weren't competitive with their SaaS competitors, and so the only reason to use the hosting service was if you really cared about the Open Source aspect. Maybe if we had a killer app that was actually better than any SaaS alternative, we could have gotten somewhere? But we never found that.

Meanwhile, we got a lot of feedback from people working at big orgs that were forced to self-host for regulatory reasons. Such orgs are terribly served by the current software market, since they can essentially only buy software from companies that specialize in building regulated software, and those companies generally build software that is expensive and terrible.

Real-time collaboration essentially didn't exist in this market, making our apps actually better than what these organizations had! But we had absolutely no expertise in selling to orgs like this, and we never really figured it out. We should have hired for it much earlier, or maybe even brought on another co-founder with enterprise sales experience.

So, we were unable to get anywhere before investors pulled the plug.

With that said, I always say you should not trust anyone's advice. Your story is different and you need to do what makes intuitive sense to you. If your intuition is right, you succeed. But you certainly can't succeed by going against your own intuition, so if someone says something that doesn't make intuitive sense to you, ignore it.