Thomas and Amy speak a lot on never accepting outside investment. So this was probably their own money. ("Bootstrapped," if you want)

Given Amy's modus operandi, I believe it's probably mostly their own money.

I'm pretty sure it's their own money.

Yes, the other gentlemen are correct. This was all our own money. Which we earned from scratch from our other products (all doing very well, thank you). And, perhaps more galling, VCs approach us every month to try to invest (but we're against it).

I'm sure shutting down a perfectly good and potentially very profitable product will make lots of wannabes and aspiring entrepreneurs jealous. Luckily I don't make my life decisions based on what other people would do in my situation.

When you run a real business, with real customers, you quickly discover that what sounds good, isn't, and what looks bad, is often the absolutely right thing to do. Luckily, our early access customers for Charm heard & understood & appreciated my email.

I'm sorry I jumped to the wrong conclusion. Not very sorry, but a little bit.

FWIW, it deserve respect to shut down something you built with your own money.

In hindsight, I think you would have gotten an entirely different response had you said "We can't run Charm with the team we currently have, there are technical challenges we can't solve". Understandable and believable. But for all the people dealing with problems like the one you blamed on a regular basis, saying what you did just sounds like:

"We spent or life-savings building this great house! But it keeps running out of toilet-paper, so we burned that s"#¤ down!!"

When running out of toilet paper causes your house to fall down and people to lose money, your metaphor will actually make sense.