Arbital's initial goal was to create a centralized place for math explanations\. While it turns out there are not enough people who really need to explain math concepts, this path did leave us with pretty good wiki software\. It's flexible enough to support blog posts, claims, discussion, and other entities we might want the platform to have\. We've also gained experience building a product, nurturing a small community, quickly iterating, and generally thinking and acting like a good startup team\.
I'd tell this story fairly differently. This is not really how I saw math, and presenting it as not-a-failure is pretty important PR-wise. We do have a really good amount of math content, and want to talk about it as a place we got to test out our wiki features and get valuable feedback in a non-controversial domain before moving on to building other parts.