We fucked up in 2018...Here's why

We fucked up in 2018...Here's why

Imagine spending an entire year building a product, only to delete the whole thing. For us, 2018 began with so much promise, but ended with us scrapping everything we’d worked on to start again.

Back in January last year, we were in a very good position and business was looking great! Quuu users connected to either their Buffer or HubSpot accounts to receive our daily suggestions, so the logical business move was for us to create our own scheduler. This would mean we were no longer entirely reliant on third party APIs.

It was a big step forward for Quuu. We knew all of our customers used a scheduler, we knew some users created Buffer or HubSpot accounts just so they could use Quuu, so it made total sense to build our own.

Little did we know that Twitter was planning some major policy changes that would seriously hinder our new scheduling tool. Literally one week before our new launch, Twitter changed the rules around its automation policy. This meant we suddenly needed to make some massive changes just before our big launch.

With all the new changes, the Quuu scheduler was nowhere near as powerful as it was, and therefore our launch was rather flat. Over time, though, people grew to like it and even pay for it; so we stuck with it, despite all the Twitter problems that were out of our control.

At this point (around July) things on the Twitter front were quiet, so at last we thought we’d made it through the bad times. Unfortunately, this was just the beginning and we found ourselves facing even more challenges:

Facebook removed API access to user profiles

Facebook restricted our access to Groups (this took 4 months to clear up)

A Buffer data migration caused all 35000+ Quuu users to lose authentication, so we were unable to send suggestions and lost $6k in MRR from Quuu Promote due to lack of shares. The team at Buffer were, as always, incredibly helpful and we worked together to fix the problem.

Twitter restricted posting access to 300 every 3 hours (we were sending much more than this from our scheduler, so this was a major issue).

All of these problems were, of course, out of our control. But our biggest problem, the competition, wasn’t. And this is where we fucked up.

We unwittingly entered Quuu into a HUGELY competitive market. While trying to sell our scheduling tool, we lost sight and focus on what Quuu does well: providing quality content suggestions. This diluted our marketing message, meaning it was harder for potential customers to understand how we could help them. It meant paid acquisition was more expensive, landing page conversions were much lower and, ultimately, we weren’t growing anywhere near as fast as the previous year.

Read more here -> https://blog.quuu.co/quuu-we-fed-up-in-2018-heres-why/

Check out our Product Hunt launch today here -> https://www.producthunt.com/posts/quuu-4-0