Falling in love with problems

This is a sad outcome for Station. I was an early user and excited about the product, but ultimately I stopped using it.

I think the blog post is pretty insightful about their failure, but it's also missing a couple things.

First, I think a lot of pain could have been avoided if they had charged for the product on day one. Because it was free, they got a lot of users which gave the false sense of being on the right track.

On a related note, I don't think the problem that Station was trying to solve was super important to people. For me, the convenience of having all my apps in one was "nice-to-have" but not "need-to-have". Again, if they had charged, they would have figured this out sooner.

Finally, the reason why I stopped using Station was that it was actually worse than using the browser. They mention performance issues with Electron, and I certainly felt those. Station was slower than the browser, buggier than the browser, app integrations would sometimes fail, and the UI was sometimes confusing. I think in theory if Station had executed on its promise, there might still be a viable business there. But they set out to make a better browser/app experience but instead made a worse one.

whats the problem?

We basically listed... what's actual added value for our users.

This stands out to me most. "What's your value add?" should be one of the first questions you ask.

Great article! Thanks for sharing. :)

After nearly 3 years, we are throwing away 99% of the code we ever wrote, and we are launching an entirely new product. In other words, we are breaking up with our solution to fall in love with the problem again.

It took us 4 steps to get to that epiphany:

1. Confronting ambiguity and facing reality
2. Avoiding the "solution trap"
3. Picking the right problem
4. Choosing the path of least resistance