We had a lot going for us.
An MVP with thousands of users, dozens of committed customers, and even the mentorship of a $300M-startup CEO.
But within 14 months we were out of business.
The root of our downfall lies in the way we validated our idea. To grow quickly, we made our MVP free.
After we had a solid userbase, all attention turned towards a separate, paid feature-set.
Build, gather feedback, repeat. That’s the process.
While gathering feedback, we even talked pricing. No chance we were going to be misled by our leads.
But when launch day rolled around, our “totally sold” leads were nowhere to be found. Everything changed when we asked for their credit card.
Things didn’t get better. We tried to improve features and pricing, but we never closed the gap.
Looking back, we should have had some premium features within the MVP. That would have given us time to learn and iterate. Instead, we were caught off guard with no runway to respond.
I’ve moved on to other things now, but I wanted to share my learnings and hear your take.
Now I’m building my next product in public on Twitter. If you want to see a product being built day by day, join along for the ride.
