Editor’s note: Mark Hendrickson is the founder and CEO of Plancast, a social site for planning events, which he has decided to stop working on full-time. In this guest post, Hendrickson takes us through a detailed analysis of why it never took off and what he learned. He is also a former TechCrunch writer.

Nearly three years ago, I left my position at TechCrunch to start my own Internet business, with the idea of creating a web application that’d help people get together in real-life rather than simply helping them connect online as most social networking applications had done.

Plancast was the service conceived a few months later from that basic inclination. Its approach was to provide a really easy way for people to take whatever interesting plans they had in their calendars and share them openly with friends, with the rationale that greater social transparency for this particular type of personal information would facilitate serendipitous get-togethers and enable a greater awareness of relevant events. Personally, I figured that knowing more about the events my friends and peers were attending would lead to a more fulfilling social and professional life because I could join them or at least learn about how they spent their time around town.

Along the way my team built a minimum viable product, launched from obscurity here on TechCrunch, raised a seed round of funding from local venture capitalists and angel investors, and worked like mad to translate our initial success into long-term growth, engagement and monetization.

Alas, our efforts began to stall after several months post-launch, and we were never able to scale beyond a small early adopter community and into critical, mainstream usage. While the initial launch and traction proved extremely exciting, it misled us into believing there