--- title: "What Shutting Down SmmPres Taught Me" description: "SmmPres ran for two years, served thousands of users, and then I shut it down. This is what I learned from building and killing a product." date: 2025-09-14T00:00:00.000Z category: Startup readingTime: "3 min read" --- The decision took ten minutes. The fallout took two months. In early 2024, I sat at my desk, looked at SmmPres's revenue numbers (healthy), user count (growing), churn rate (low), and decided to shut the whole thing down. The team did not suggest it. The metrics did not demand it. By every standard measure, the product was working. I shut it down anyway. --- SmmPres was a social media marketing panel. If you are not familiar with the SMM world: it is a marketplace where people buy social media engagement. Followers, likes, views, comments. Influencers use these platforms. Small businesses use them. Marketing agencies use them. The product sits in a grey area of the internet, not quite illegal, not quite ethical, not something you would bring up at a dinner party unless you wanted the conversation to get uncomfortable. The team at HMD Developments built it. We integrated with upstream providers, launched into the Turkish market, and watched the numbers climb. Thousands of users. Consistent revenue. Low churn. By conventional metrics, SmmPres was a success. Conventional metrics do not ask what the product actually does. --- Here is what it actually did. Someone would buy ten thousand Instagram followers. Those followers were not real people who discovered an account and thought, "I enjoy this content." They were manufactured numbers. The account holder got to display a bigger figure. Brands looking at their profile saw the bigger figure and assumed organic popularity. Deals got signed on the basis of an audience that did not exist. The entire value chain rested on a fiction. I am not going to pretend I agonised about this from the start. When we launched SmmPres, I was fourteen. The market existed. The technology was straightforward. The revenue validated the decision. I did not spend long considering what the product meant in a broader sense. That changed over time. HMD Corporation was growing. The other products in our portfolio solved genuine problems. HMD Pay processes real money. Chat Guard protects real communities. Those products create value that exists whether or not you believe in it. SmmPres created the appearance of value. The longer I sat with that distinction, the more it bothered me. --- There was also a cold business argument, separate from the ethical question. SMM panels compete almost entirely on price. Upstream providers sell engagement in bulk. We add a margin. Users compare prices across panels and pick the cheapest option. A fraction of a percentage point in pricing is enough to lose a customer to a competitor. You cannot build a moat in that market. There is no proprietary technology, no switching cost, no brand loyalty. The only way to grow is to be cheaper, and the only way to be cheaper is to compress your margin until it barely exists. We could have invested in better features, reliability, customer support. The market would not have rewarded it. I have seen other panels with terrible interfaces and nonexistent support outperform better products because their prices were three percent lower. When the only thing your customers care about is cost, the only strategy is to cut. That is a game I did not want to play. --- Shutting down a live product with paying users is a specific kind of difficult. We gave sixty days' notice. Every active user received an email with the shutdown timeline and a full refund on unused credits. The API stayed running through the notice period so people who had built workflows around us had time to migrate. We open-sourced the non-proprietary components: the admin dashboard, the payment integration, the provider abstraction layer. If someone else wanted to run an SMM panel, our code was theirs. Some users were understanding. Some were angry. A few sent messages that questioned my intelligence, my parentage, and my business acumen, in that order. Fair enough. They had built processes around our product, and now it was disappearing. No user lost money. No data was lost. The product died cleanly. --- The thing nobody tells you about killing a product is how good it feels afterwards. Not immediately. Immediately it feels expensive and disruptive and mildly nauseating. But a week later, the engineering time that had been going to SmmPres was redirected to projects I actually cared about. The cognitive load of maintaining a product I was not proud of disappeared. The company felt lighter. Every product you maintain is a commitment. Code needs updating, servers need monitoring, users need supporting. When the product is something you believe in, that maintenance is fuel. When it is not, it is weight. SmmPres was weight. The best thing about having built and killed a product is that it permanently calibrates your instincts. Now, before starting anything new, I ask: would I be comfortable describing this product to a room full of people I respect? If the answer is not obviously yes, the project does not start. SmmPres is gone. I do not miss it. But I am glad it existed, because I would not have learned to ask that question without it.