"I spent most of my time on the SmallBusiness forum on Reddit." ... I'm not saying this is the cause for the failure, but imho, this is a terrible place to look for validation because its a breeding ground for people that have tons of opinions but don't really represent your end customer and at the ending of the day, have zero desire to buy your product, they just want to login in and have opinions. Its in a sense, similar to techcrunch.. a club for internal admiration. I see so many people fall for this sort of thing.. I personally just think its unfortunate.