A founder who shut down his product shared his journey.
He wanted to modernize how spas were run. He had a compelling vision. He wanted every appointment, payment, customer record and business report connected in one place. This solves the problem of scattered notebooks, manual reconciliation etc. All data flowing through a single source of truth.
He spent weeks talking to spa owners and built the product carefully. Got the first few customers to try. Then… growth stagnated.
Like many founders, he looked at the product and came to a familiar conclusion – “Maybe we need more features.”.
So the team built more – Inventory management, marketing tools, customer loyalty, more reports and automation one after another. Still no real growth.
Almost a year later, he accepted the inevitable.
The problem wasn’t missing features but of missing ‘value’ to customers.
When he went back to prospects with fresh eyes, he noticed something obvious that he had earlier ignored.
Actually, spa owners were not struggling with technology.
In fact, they were happily running appointments in a notebook, payments tracked via a payment app, excel solved their accounting needs and email/phone was good enough for customer communication.
Their existing setup was not cool or sophisticated, but it worked well enough.
His software was technically far better. But it wasn’t solving a problem important enough for customers to change the way they worked.
Over the last several years, I’ve met many founders who fall into the same trap.
When growth slows, they build more. When customers don’t adopt, they build even more hoping that the next release is a killer feature.
Before building any feature, the first question I find useful to ask is :
What value does this create for the customer?
For B2B products, does it help them make more money? Or reduce meaningful costs? Or save enough time or effort that changing their habits actually feels worthwhile?
Customers are honestly looking for a reason to change and not more features.
Have you ever built something that was technically impressive, but later realised customers simply didn’t need it enough?
