Rant: My last startup got more useful after we ran out of money, the pivot came too late

We had $120k in the bank for 18 months and ignored every user request, then on day 2 of burn zero someone asked for a simple export button and we built it in 4 hours, so why did it take total failure to make us listen, has anyone else seen this flip happen with their own project?

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john_johnson7520d ago

Yeah, that flip is painfully common. I've been on a project where we spent months building features nobody asked for, then when the runway hit zero, we finally sat down and actually listened to the five people still using it. The first thing they wanted was a stupid CSV export with specific date ranges, took us an afternoon. We also had this issue where every request went into a "future roadmap" doc that we never touched until the crisis hit. The trick that ended up working for us, and it's dumb simple, we made a rule that any feature request from a paying user gets a decision within 48 hours, either build it, say no, or explain why not. That forced us to stop hiding behind "we'll get to it later" and actually treat user feedback like it mattered. Might be too late for your current thing, but for the next one, start with that rule on day one.