Yep. The late 90's and early 2000's was littered with people trying to make "light" copies of MS Word. The problem is that journalists need the wordcount feature, and teachers need the wordart feature. Remove either, you lose a demographic.
That having been said, there are a lot of products out there that made their product intending it to be free, and then when they hit 1m users they started thinking "hmmm, if I could get a dollar out of every user, I could buy a house". They try to stuff a monetization model in sideways and damage their product in the process. Taking a moderately successful product that's crippled by attempting to shoehorn in monetization and redesigning it to have reasonable monetization from the beginning might be a better strategy.
That having been said, there are a lot of products out there that made their product intending it to be free, and then when they hit 1m users they started thinking "hmmm, if I could get a dollar out of every user, I could buy a house". They try to stuff a monetization model in sideways and damage their product in the process. Taking a moderately successful product that's crippled by attempting to shoehorn in monetization and redesigning it to have reasonable monetization from the beginning might be a better strategy.