Today, I killed my product. What it made me remember.

After working for 4 months on my first paid product, I'm killing it.

I carefully planned my market positioning, defined how I was entering this market, and built my product in a bit less than 3 weeks...

And then, not much happened.

In total, I sent hundreds of cold-reach emails to the CTOs and CPOs of my target companies. Some checked the landing page out, but none tried my product at scale.‌‌
I got it wrong.

The original idea behind the project was to quickly make a very opinionated product that would perfectly address the challenges earlier-stage companies often face with incident management.

I was confident in my opinionated vision. My last company had a very efficient incident management process, where I had myself directly managed hundreds of crises. Together with my personal learnings, and hours of market research, I was sure that I was on to something.
Yet in the end, and even though I knew the problem was real, these companies were just not feeling enough pain to start investing in a solution like mine.

I'm still convinced that there is a good opportunity to offer something different than what already exists in this space.

But I also know I won't be the guy bringing it.

To make it work now, I'd have to strongly pivot on the strategy and the product.‌‌
I actually started doing it, and then motivation just left me.‌‌

It made me understand something important about how motivation works.‌‌‌‌

I'm obsessed with the idea of having a strong, direct impact on people; to change their lives for the better. This project didn't do that – it was never meant to do that.
So, I had enough motivation to try to get it right from the start, but not enough to do the nitty-gritty job of iterating on it until it worked.

Motivation needs to be unconditional to successfully build an impactful company in the long run. That means motivation needs to be there not only when I'm riding high, but also, and maybe more importantly when I'm down in the pit.

Creation is an act of sheer will.

Willpower requires motives – WHYs.
WHY would you take all that time and effort to create something from scratch?‌‌

Only strong WHYs make it. I am convinced the strength of the WHY is the single greatest factor that decides what succeeds and what fails in this world.

My WHY has always been the same – solving the defining problems of our time so that people might live better lives.
CrisisNexus wasn't sustained by that WHY, and so it was bound to fail.

I'm glad this project made me remember why I'm even doing things in the first place.

Now, I'm more motivated than ever to start working on something that really matters to me.