How We Shut Down Our Product (Accidentally)

Cofounder : “Let’s shut down Augment. We are launching Clusto and we cannot maintain two products”.

Me: “It has users - 3000 weekly active”*

Cofounder*: “Will they pay?”*

Me (downcast): “No, no one pays for stuff like this. I will send a goodbye mail to everyone”

To clarify - this story is from 2016. Right now I am working on LightCat - https://www.lightcat.io

I sent the mail to our customers that we were shutting down.

But there’s a twist...

In the goodbye email, I included a link to a survey, knowing fully well that no one takes surveys. By now you can tell that I “knew” everything - what people pay for and what they do.

People took that survey - we got about 250 responses.

One of the survey questions was “How much would you be willing to pay for something like this”. Of course, I knew people were going to say “nothing”.

Most people selected the option $3 per month.

Augment was just 8 months old with 3000 weekly actives. We could have taken it to a decent revenues in another year. But we “knew” people wouldn’t pay, so we had already pivoted - 3 months ago. Augment was no longer actively developed. We had already sent the goodbye mail.

We shut it down.

The pain of “what it could have been”, especially with some data to back it up, was immensely painful.

3 years later:

I started up again - this time with a wife and a baby in tow - as an individual - no team. Guess what I wanted to build ;-)

A tool that can stop such accidents from happening - LightCat.

Maybe this time some other mistake would kill me … ;-)

Epilogue - Lessons Learned

You never know anything - ALWAYS ask users to validate what you think you know.
People do take surveys.
Well done research can give tremendous direction and help take big decisions.
A simple product with real users is waaay more valuable than shiny tech under development (that includes "deep-tech").
Building a complete view of customers' psychology can uncover many blind spots. We had seen people being unwilling to pay for similar products in the reviews of those products. But our customers were mostly freelancers who were saving time - the exact commodity they sold. Thus they were more willing to pay than customers of competition we checked out.