The Survey That Ended GrooveShouter

After months of shipping features — voting, analytics, search, a redesigned host menu — I reached a fork: keep pouring evenings into GrooveShouter, or focus elsewhere. To decide honestly instead of guessing, I ran a public survey asking real users what they thought.

The feedback was devastating. It was clear that almost nobody outside my own circle of testers was genuinely interested in the app. That's a hard thing to read after a year of work, but it's exactly the kind of signal a survey is supposed to give you — even, maybe especially, when you don't want to hear it. I decided to put the project on hold. I don't regret a single evening spent on it: I learned more about self-hosting, Angular, CI/CD, and honest product decisions than any course could have taught me.