I Built It. It Worked. Nobody Bought It.
Nobody Said Take My Money — Part 1 of 7 On June 18, 2026, I wrote the decision record that shut down Mother Hen, a smart chicken-coop monitoring business I had spent more than a year building. At the moment I shut it down, the platform was running without a hitch at two beta sites — one in Tennessee, one in Colorado, about 1,500 miles from my desk. The firmware updated itself over the air. The devices provisioned themselves through the cloud with no field pairing. The alerts arrived on time, every time, including the ones that mattered at 3 a.m. In the entire life of the product, the technology never gave me a reason to quit. ...