A VC told me my startup's landing page was 'a menu with no kitchen' and I killed the whole product 3 weeks later | Deep Dive into Failed Startups - Guest Forum
A VC told me my startup's landing page was 'a menu with no kitchen' and I killed the whole product 3 weeks later
We had 2,400 signups on our meal prep app in Austin but only 31 people ever placed a second order, and I kept telling myself it was a pricing problem. A guy from a seed fund sat with me for an hour and said the page sold a fantasy but the app never delivered on step one, so I shut it down and rebuilt the whole onboarding around a single dish instead of a full menu. How do you know when feedback like that is worth blowing up your product for versus just nodding and doing your own thing anyway?
The "menu with no kitchen" line is brutal but it points at something you see everywhere, not just startups. People put up a website with 12 pages and no phone number, restaurants print a huge menu but the one thing you came for is always out, gyms sell memberships in January and the equipment is broken by March. The promise and the thing you actually get are two different products. 31 second orders out of 2,400 tells you the food was fine and the first five minutes were not, so yeah, that guy earned his hour.