We did an Escape the Room in San Francisco… we didn’t escape :(

What if we killed the idea prematurely? — Ep 6

From June 2016 — July 2016 I experimented and killed two ideas: Node and Strream.

Starting in August 2016, I began to experiment with a new idea called Brrief. The results from August — September were spectacular. I only had a prototype, but we were quickly gaining momentum and users, reaching 600 users by the end of September.

I was convinced that this was the opportunity I was looking for.

But today I’m writing to let you know that we killed the idea — Brrief is no more. Even though I believe it has wild potential, we had to make the tough choice of killing the idea to make room for something bigger and that is better aligned with the company objectives:

As part of the Torre Researrch team, my objective is to build a viral product that is used for work by 100 million users within 5 years.

So what happened? How could a product that showed such promise have been killed?

Check out the prototypes for Brrief that I used to validate the opportunity:

1. Bootstrapping Brrief (Alex Torrenegra): 57 attendees
2. Gamification Brrief (Yu-kai Chou): 56 attendees
3. Growth Hack Brrief (Neil Patel): 36 attendees
4. Hustlers Braintrust: 10 attendees
5. Grow your mobile app Brrief: 33 attendees
6. Bootstrapping Startups Brrief: 38 attendees
7. Octalysis Explorers Brrief: 41 attendees
8. Voice actors Brrief: 71 attendees

The most important lesson I learned

You don’t need to write code to test an opportunity.

I ran 8, fully functional prototypes without writing a single line of code: I simply used existing software to mimic the product: Eventbrite + Slack + Unbounce.

Instead of writing code, you can use your time and energy on customer development interviews. In this way, you can move faster and more efficiently to identify the right opportunity.

So why did we kill Brrief?

I believe Brrief has immense potential; however, Alex and I realized that it was missing two key factors:

1. A viable revenue model: by analyzing examples of businesses such as meetup.com, we realized that the opportunity to make money was limited.
2. A viral growth engine: Brrief was used to meet new people, not to meet with people you already know; therefore, users were not incentivized to share Brrief with their friends.

Killing an idea is hard because there is always a “what if?”

What if we killed the idea prematurely? How do we know if we made the right decision?

Unfortunately, we can never know a definitive answer to the “what if” question. All we can do is work hard, make informed, rational decisions, and put ourselves in a position to get lucky.

It’s back to the drawing board for me. I better validate a product opportunity soon because I’m running out of time to complete my objective.