By: Senior staff writer – Easton Ellsworth

Annotation sharing service Fleck is up for sale. The owners blame a lack of time and investor funding.

Here are some ideas as to why Fleck failed to monetize – and why your tech startup needs to have a better plan:

1. Wrong Target Audience. Fleck’s intended users were the very sort of people who wouldn’t need it very much – techies with a strong command of online tools that, taken together, essentially replace Fleck. Why bother signing up for one more service when you can already share notes about Web pages through your Delicious (or Digg, or StumbleUpon, etc.) account?

2. Self-Limiting Features. The premise of Fleck is that if you have it, you can get more out of the browsing experience. Which means that in order to benefit from Fleck, you have to change the way you browse the Web. For instance, you will be tempted to visit only those pages that have already seen Fleck conversations grow around them … but soon you will find that many of the places you visit online either merit little or no conversation or have not caught on with Fleck users. So Fleck limits itself by putting a wall around its garden.

3. Too Complicated. Fleck reminds us of the Flip - because it’s the opposite, that is. When you look at Fleck’s website, you may feel confused. That’s because there is no crystal-clear call to action. And because Fleck tries to assert too many different possible uses and benefits. Better to just boil it down to the bare essentials – what should the user do? And command them to do it.

When you get the audience, the features and the simplicity factor wrong, you set yourself up for business failure.

What could Fleck do to improve? Do you think it still has a chance to succeed