Reflection 1: We sunsetted our 1st product

TLDR:

1. We spent a ton of cash building a web app in offshore markets which made it really hard to get a working MVP — it didn’t work bc we got there too slowly and had a ton of competitors
2. We should have played to our strengths instead of deviating too far
3. We got early traction in another part of our business and decided to focus on that area because it was bringing in cash and people kept buying

After we sold Flashstock to Shutterstock, the idea was for the executives and top employees to stay on for an additional 2 years as part of the agreement to make sure that there was a smooth transition. Some of us left, some of us stayed.

Grant and I decided to stay on. I had the incredible opportunity to move to London (to run our EMEA expansion), and eventually move back to Toronto to look after a product team and Shutterstock’s Customer Advisory Board.

In early 2020, we both left Shutterstock around the same time — both of us wanting to start something else. I think we both loved being in the creative phase of venture creation and that’s what drew us to need to work on something new.

We initially looked back on our experiences as a source of inspiration and one area that I thought we should double click into was how Product Management was run at a small company vs a large one. When we were less than 50 at Flashstock, it would be way easier to align the org on what priorities we needed to build for, but I found that larger organizations spent most of their time simply trying to get folks on the same page (internal problem), rather than sourcing the needs and wants of the customers (external validation).

So… we thought — why we don’t we go talk to a bunch of Heads of Product to see if this was a problem that they faced? We created a campaign tracker, outreach templates, target segment and list of contacts — all of the things you need to build a funnel of people to talk to.

Fast forward 9 months later (end of 2020) and we had spoken to 250 CPOs from B2B SaaS companies around the world.

• From these 250 CPOs, we had learned a tonne about the problems that they face and wrote a piece on the Evolution of the Product Org, where we focused on Customer Discovery as a major problem that PM teams did not have an answer for.
• We ran a CPO Roundtable Series where we benchmarked CPOs against each other on how they run their Customer Discovery Process.
• We ran a Customer Discovery Workshop to help CPOs figure out how to easily implement a framework with their teams and validate their ideas.

Out of all of this research, we started to build the first version of an MVP that would help product teams capture, analytics, and distribute bits of knowledge from customer conversations. We called this the LeapMotiv Discovery App. Having run a design sprint with various CPOs, it was an app that would take video recordings of customer interviews, help you time stamp and identify where you might hear something interesting, enable you to match those notes to the transcript, and finally allow you to create tag-able video snippets of customer articulations.

LeapMotiv v1:

• Outsourced development to a dev team in Romania
• Built on top of Twilio, whenever we fixed 1 thing, other bugs would pop up
• Built with PhP
• Was very difficult to get a working version into users’ hands, but when we did, we quickly learned that users will not switch video conference tools for different use cases (the difference is in the prep and storing of that knowledge)
• Total cost $15k over 2–3 mo

LeapMotiv v2:

• Attempt #2 with different outsourced development team in the Middle East, complete re-factor in ReactJS
• Built with Zoom integration in mind, put in TDD early on
• Very difficult to communicate culturally, always was a negotiation process, couldn’t really get MVP fully finished within the original estimate of 2 mo
• Insane AWS costs each month at $2.5–3k just to keep the lights
• Total cost $25k over 6 months

When we were building out the initial web app, there were not a ton of competitors going after this space. Particularly, we saw a bunch of apps very “horizontally focused” where the similar workflow and technologies would be used across every type of user. We wanted to tackle it from a very specific user’s perspective (the PM and CPO at a B2B SaaS company).

However, after the 2 attempts at an MVP taking something like 9 months, we didn’t have much to show for ourselves. We sunk a little over $40k in total across AWS services, development costs, maintenance costs. We were the primary users of our own application. We saw 10+ competitors pop up in the last 3 months. This was not a business we wanted to be in any more.

We saw more traction on the consulting side (larger deal sizes, contracts billed upfront, inbound/referral). This led us to decide that we should focus on the advisory side of our business and sunset the LeapMotiv web app for customer discovery. It was a decision that should have been made several months ago, but now that we’ve done it, it’s added a ton more focus and clarity towards the future vision of LeapMotiv — a think tank, a venture studio.