In 2023 I built VivoGreen, a digital platform for residential photovoltaic quotes. I owned the product, brand and go-to-market, found a remote design and development team and got to a working MVP in roughly three to four months.
Building was the easy part. Distribution was where the idea met reality.
Four months of testing
I ran paid acquisition for around four months and spent a few thousand euros. The result that mattered was painfully simple: one meaningful call.
There are many ways to explain away weak demand. The landing page could be better. The ads could be better. The positioning could be sharper. Some of those things were probably true. But at some point iteration becomes a way of avoiding the answer.
The market did not care how much work had gone into the MVP.
Stopping was part of the work
I closed VivoGreen after failing to find product-market fit. I do not think that makes the project secretly successful. It did not work.
What was useful was everything that became reusable: shipping an MVP with a remote team, running acquisition, reading weak signals without romanticising them, and understanding much more about the underlying industry.
What happened next
The project later evolved into Domus Green, focused on digitising a real family business rather than trying to force the original marketplace model. The context changed. The skills and assets did not disappear.
That is the part of failed projects I find most interesting: not the inspirational quote afterwards, but what remains useful once you stop protecting the original idea.