MBA1189 When & How to Kill a Product That’s Not Selling

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Hey O. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show Business truths you can rely on every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn when and how to kill a product that's not selling. Today's lesson is not based on theory, it's based on reality. I just killed a product of ours that was just not selling. And I'll give you the reasons why. I'll also show you how to do it as well as when to know it's a good time to kill it off. As they say in the tech world, sometimes you have to kill your darlings. One of the toughest things to do. Because you work so hard on building a product, your team works super hard and then you gotta make that decision to say, you know what, we need to stop doing this. We need to pivot, we need to change and we need to basically say this was a mistake. What can we learn from it? How can we take those learnings and implement it into our new efforts, our new business, our new product? I'll be sharing all that and more in today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. One of my favorite lines in one of my favorite books, the Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, is sometimes you have to create a bad product to create a good one. Sometimes you need just to get something out there so you can get a response from the world, from your audience and say, hey, is this something people want? It may crash and burn, but in the process you realize, oh, this is not what they want. This is what they want. And it's really hard to do that without actually having a product for them to play with, for them to use, for them to experience. And when I say product, this could be a service, this could be a coaching program, this could be a course. It doesn't matter. Trust me. I've launched a variety of things that did not work, that were bad products that did not sell. I mentioned this a few times on the show before, but before I started our software, Webinar Ninja, I actually created a course called the DIY Webinar Guide. Nicole and I created this course. We spent so many months working on it, perfecting it, marketing it, and it just fell flat on its face. It was a total disaster. And in that disaster, we learned what people don't want. They don't want a course on webinars or how to hodgepodge one with all the existing software. They want an easy tool. And that's why we created Webinar Ninja. And that business became our baby. It became a big part of what we do every day, and it grown to thousands of users, but it would never exist if we didn't fail, if we didn't create a bad product. So recently I launched a product called Anytime Webinar. It was a webinar software that was only for automated webinars, no live portion. And it had some really nifty features, some new things that people haven't seen before. And we went into beta for about eight weeks, and beta users were automatically sent a feedback form. And we got some feedback from people. And there was a way for people to upgrade from the free beta to. To a annual contract or a monthly contract to use the software. Now, mind you, we spent about four to five months working on this software. We wanted to create the software as quickly as possible, put it out in the world, and see if people actually wanted this. Now, mind you, our flagship product, Webinar Ninja, our webinar software offers live and automated webinars. All our plans come with both live and automated, but we thought, hey, let's create a product that's just automated, it'll be a lower price point. And if they just want to run automated webinars, they can use this product and it'll have a couple extra features that they can use that will make it more of a robust experience when it comes to automation. So we spent money, we spent time on building this product. We put it out in the world, and then we heard the feedback. And the feedback was a resounding, no, this is not what we want. And in fact, a lot of people love webinar ninja so much, they're like, I would rather pay more and just get the automated and live. Even though I don't use a live, we got feedback like, hey, I want to be able to run a live webinar once in a while and use that live recording in my automated webinar. But we also got feedback like, hey, this is a cool feature. We like this in anytime webinar, this new product. But it wasn't enough to sign up. Now, I'm a big believer in having profitable projects, profitable businesses. If it's not profitable, you're in trouble. You can't bleed money forever. If you can't stay profitable at the start, then you have a problem on your hands. So at the start, we were not profitable because, hey, we are spending money on developers and we're spending money on server costs. So we're looking at spending about 6 to $7,000 a month on this project to see if this thing has legs. When we launched it, we were paying six to $7,000 every month when it was in beta. So if we didn't get enough money, enough people to sign up, that was a clear sign. Hey, if I don't get 6 to $7,000 worth of customers, the potential is just not there. I should be able to cover my costs. I should be able to give myself two or three months of Runway to see if this is going to happen. And that did not happen. Sometimes at that point, our emotions get the best of us. We say, no, I love this project. It's going to be amazing. I put in so much time. Sun cost fallacy, right? I put all this effort and time and money. I got to see this through. But you also got to think, hey, if it's not getting traction, stop spending money. You're going to keep wasting more and more money and more time and more focus on something that's just not working. So when things like that happen, you have to pause. You got to stop. And that's what we did. We stopped and said, hey, what are the advantages of, you know, keeping this going, spending this money every month and seeing if this thing will continue to grow. What are the disadvantages? Right? Pros and cons list. Then you got to ask some really interesting questions like, is there a way for us to give people what they want with without having this product? We saw our feedback and people were saying, hey, we really like Webinar Ninja, but we like a few of these features as well. All you gotta do is really connect the dots and say, maybe I should just add these features into Webinar Ninja and maybe I can just offer a different plan on Webinar Ninja now. Currently Webinar Ninja offers live and automated with all our plans. But we can say, hey, we can just offer an automated option and then when you want to run a live webinar, you can Upgrade to the LivePlus automated and user recording from a past live webinar for an automated webinar. And I realized, I said, okay, we're spending money, we're spending a lot of time and focus and my energy. We really need to kill this project and see if we can implement the best ideas from this product and add it to Webinar Ninja and maybe just reshuffle the marketing and re change the plans like I mentioned, to give people what they want. Sometimes we have to put our egos aside and say, hey, I just made a mistake, I made the wrong choice. I made a choice, learned from it, and now I gotta, you know, capitalize on the feedback I got and that's what you have to do. Now you might be asking, when do I know when to make this choice to kill my project. Well, you gotta give yourself enough time. And I like to say eight to 12 weeks is a good enough time. Especially if your costs are low, that's pretty reasonable. But if your costs are pretty high, I mean, 6 to 7,000 is not a little bit of money.

It's a lot of money.

So for us, we kind of cut it short and we had enough on audience to get enough feedback. But the answer to the question is, is that you need to give the time, but at the same time you can't. Dill Italy, you can't delay. The longer you wait, the more costs it's going to pile up and the more time you're spending on something that's not going to work out and less time on things that can work out an alternative product, an alternative direction. So once we made our decision, how did we do this? Well, we simply just scrubbed our whole user list that we're Using Anytime Webinar. We emailed them and said, hey guys, this, this is what happened. This is the feedback we got, full transparency. This is in beta. You know that it was in beta and we're going to try out and get feedback and this is what we're deciding to do. We're going to take the best features of Anytime Webinar, add it to Webinar Ninja, just like what people are saying, and make it part of our flagship product. Thanks for your participation. If you have anybody that has paid money, you can refund them or you can obviously let them see out the rest of the month that they paid for. If they paid for a year, you're going to have to refund them, which is, you know, kind of tough. But hey, it's gonna cost you a whole lot more to sustain the system for a year. And it's just an honest, transparent email. You send it out and then you do what you gotta do. You're gonna have to put a new message on your website saying that, you know, this is no longer available or forward the website to the new products landing page. Let me tell you, when we did this, it was such a tough decision. I had to email our users. I had to also, you know, communicate this to our team beforehand and say, hey, we're killing this project. I'm really sorry because you guys put so much effort into it in testing the product and making sure it works, making sure everything looks great, writing support tutorials, literally hundreds of support tutorials written for this product before launch. And you have to communicate what I'm saying right now. Sometimes you gotta create a bad product to make a good one, to create a great one. And this is what business is all about. Taking some risks and experimenting, trying things out. And you don't want these experiments to be too expensive. So don't delay once you have enough evidence to say, hey, this is what we want and what they want is not what you have. Stop change. Do something different. You can't continue to do the same thing and expect a different result.

Dear McDonald's, your breakfast menu fire tens across the board. I could be happy with anything even though I order the same thing every time. Thanks for not judging me. I'll try something new next time.

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To wrap up today's lesson, I want to leave you some final advice. When it comes to killing projects, number one, this is not easy, hard stuff to do. But I got to tell you, after we did this, after we communicated this to our team, our audience, our members, I felt a huge sense of relief, a huge burden off my shoulders. I felt a new sense of energy and focus onto what I have to do now. I have direction now. I know what to do and I know how to implement it. I have other feedback. I know what I need to focus on. All green lights. That's fantastic. And once you get over that initial, like, you know, feel ashamed that, you know, that things didn't work out, you're totally fine. You're like, okay, cool, let's move on. Let's build something great. And one of the reasons why I highly suggest that you kill the project as soon as you get the feedback, to know that it's time to kill it, is that the longer you're around, the more you're going to get users that are going to get adopted to the software that are just not going to be enough for you to be sustainable. But at the same time, it'll be, you know, disappointing for them because they got used to the software. They're like, hey, I want to use this thing. You know, I got used to it, and you're going to disappoint them. And unfortunately, sometimes people don't take that disappointment quite well to the Internet. You know, they start talking about it on social, and it's just sometimes you have to do that. So the sooner the better. We were lucky enough that we did a staggered approach where we were in beta, no promises made, where we're just testing things out. They understood when they signed up that they're, you know, giving feedback and they're getting access for free because, hey, they're getting the chance to give feedback, and then they had the chance to upgrade if they wanted, but they understand that this was still in beta. So I highly recommend that when you start a project, you do that so the expectations are set. So just in case you need to kill a project, it's. It's not so painful for you or the users. All right, thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. Don't forget to hit subscribe on whatever you're listening to this podcast right now. Whether you're using Spotify, Apple Podcast, Stitcher Radio, Overcast, Castbox, we're on everything. By hitting subscribe, you get all our episodes automatically and you never miss a beat. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Sometimes when you kill a project, you're also going to have to say goodbye to somebody who's worked on it. Maybe you outsource the project to a firm. Maybe you were working with a partner. Maybe you hired somebody to write certain copy or create the materials or edit your videos or whatever it is. They may have thought this is a promising future and a promising project. They're excited. But when you kill it, it's saying goodbye to people that help build it. Now, if you have a new project that's going to be replacing it, you can obviously ask them to move over to that project. But sometimes that's not the case. Sometimes a new project is totally different and their skill set won't be needed. So just be prepared to have those conversations. It's tough. I had to do that with this project, and it was really tough because the people we worked with, I've been working with them for years. And it's totally okay to keep the communication going and make sure that, hey, if I ever need your help, I'd love to reach out to you and make it happen and we can work together again and again. When you're in beta, people understand that this is still not permanent. May work, may not. And when you communicate to the people that work with you that as well, they understand that. So it makes that conversation a little bit easier. All right, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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