A few months ago we announced Citrus, a suite of tools we'd been developing for estate agents. Despite our bullish attitude to building and selling the application we've taken a step back over recent weeks and taken a long hard look at what it is we're doing. The result of the look is a change of direction, back to some ideas we've had in the past about personal search, bookmarking and some location based services. It's a bit too early to get into too much detail about what we're planing but I wanted to take the time to give a bit of an explanation of why we've changed our minds.
The market has changed, there is no doubt, but we know that. On reflection though we decided our assumptions were probably wrong. We knew there were not going to be a lot of new players entering the market but existing businesses probably aren't going to want to change, software tools and they're not going to want to part with money especially if they had already paid to have a site developed and especially if they're being forced to lose people.
Then came the next blow to the project, we were asked to shut down the only current user of our software. They'd decided to put their business on hold because of changes to the Spanish regulations and the current state of the market. So now we were facing selling a product, in an unfriendly market without our evangelist.
I'd also be lying if I said that we had generated the interest we'd hoped to generate, we didn't. It goes without saying that had we generated that interest, or close to that interest we wouldn't have had the moment of introspection and we wouldn't have needed to take this difficult decision.