What do you do when you miss targets for a new product?
Let's say that you set some targets for MRR, conversions, new users per month, etc. and decide that if you don't meet them, it means that your product is not successful and you shut it down. Then, you miss all targets after the first 3, 6, and 9 months from launching your product.
I see 3 options here:
- You actually shut down the product and try to pivot or build something else
- You decide that your targets were not realistic or you were not lucky but you see growth (just not as fast as expected) so you keep working on the product
- You are not yet good enough to develop and sell a product to make a living from it
What are your thoughts? Could you recommend any resources around this topic?
From my experience, most targets/KPIs at early stage aren't based on any evidence. You wish to have 10k MRR, but probbaly it will take 3x longer.
If that's the case, probably right option is 2 but think If there is real value for your customers in your product
I suggest to not see the word so black&white. Just because you missed a target does not mean that the entire product & business now needs to be shut down.
Instead, go deeper: what (exactly) were the reasons you missed your target? Maybe your UX is bad? Or some weird technical glitch (that you don't about yet) killed all trust of leads? Make sure you can exclude as many things as possible as reasons for failure.
If you don't have time, or no patience, try to work on smaller projects with more things under your control. Example: try to improve the search engine ranking of a blog post within 3 months first, before you decide to make a whole business successful within 3 months.
Remove complexity!
All the time is good to have something on the side, maybe you do something not right, maybe you choose the wrong channel, maybe you choose the wrong strategy, if you want you can reach us - unicamel.io, we provide product validation services, we can dive deep into your business idea and check all possibilities, which is missed.