Product Breakup Period

I understand cognitively startups are in the business of testing out ideas as quickly and cheaply as possible; we prove and disprove ideas and iterate like a homing missile towards product-market fit. No attachment to any particular vision or idea, just cold execution and business decisions. But recently, Team Tandem has been running aggressive tests with some epic failures. To the point where a massive pivot is in the works.

Over the last couple weeks, my mood could best be described as going through a bad breakup. Definitely had trouble focusing, partied a ton, and some days I just sat around thinking. Give me a break! I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with this product and now it feels like I’m going back to the drawing board. Was hard to start working on new concepts I barely knew.

Depending on how drastically you intend to change the product, I think it’s fair and probably healthy to go through a breakup period. If I didn’t feel this way with such an utterly massive change where the name of the company may not even make sense anymore, then maybe I wasn’t that passionate about it to begin with. Then again I could just be a bit more emo than most.

Fortunately, I’m back and stoked about our new concepts that fully leverage the learnings from our epic fails. What brought me back was mostly just articulating the reasoning behind the change to others and letting those reasons sink in more within myself. It developed confidence in the decision and allowed me to commit wholeheartedly to the new direction. I find, as an entrepreneur, that most of the time, the most important person to convince is yourself and sometimes it takes a while to get yourself there. But the sooner you do, the sooner you can get back up.

Perhaps, a cofounder, mentor, or more time-pressure could have shortened this breakup period. Highlights my need to transition away from independence to interdependence. Independence was fun, but not the most effective methodology for more reasons than this. For those facing this, keep reviewing the reasoning for the change in your mind and conveying it to others. You’ll get back up in no time!