Last week, we made the difficult decision to shut down our latest product, Churn360.
We invested a few million dollars over three years in the product and built a great product and team, but we felt the right decision was to wind down.
Well, though the leadership team collectively made the decision, I chose to say “I” because the buck stops with me as a CEO.
This is one of the biggest decisions in my 13-year-long entrepreneurial journey building Kovai.co.
It was a cautious decision. We looked deeply into various data points. We couldn’t see a road to break even and profitability for at least 18-24 months. Given that our other products, Document360 and Turbo360, are doing exceptionally well and scaling dramatically, it made our decision easier to focus our time, energy, and funds on our growing products.
I strongly believe that, as a Founder, you should have 10x more conviction to shut down something than to start something. Starting is always easy; everyone is in a positive mood, and the first few months/years are the honeymoon period, but shutting down takes courage and conviction. There is no way to come back.
I made the decision based on this one simple principle: “Invest based on Merit, not based on Affordability.” As a company, we can easily afford the burn and continue doing it for the foreseeable future, but I didn’t feel like it was the right thing in everyone’s best interest.
Now, we are doubling down on Document360 and Turbo360. We are going to scale faster, address customer-requested backlog items, develop our own product features/enhancements, and innovate our products, especially focusing on all the new AI enhancements on our roadmap.
I have covered some of what we learned and my views in the video; please take a look.
Read this story on LinkedIn.
