Nikki

We are building FounderFlow around a painful founder experience.

I opened an important government-related email.

I completed one portion of the required survey.

We have been building since late 2024. In that time we were a gen AI agency, then a voice AI company, then a procurement tool, before landing on the thing that actually worked. Every one of those pivots was decided by the same wrong diagnosis. Something was not selling, we concluded the product was not good enough yet, and we went and built more. It is a very comfortable conclusion because building is the part you control and the part you enjoy. It also has a satisfying story attached: not there yet, nearly there, one more release. What was actually happening both times was that nobody knew we existed, and the people who did know had no reason to try it this week rather than some other week. That is not a capability problem and no amount of shipping fixes it. The way we eventually found the real thing was not analysis. We ran the catalogue on ourselves, and the one item we kept reaching for was the cheapest thing on the list, the one we had been treating as a feature to sell the expensive stuff around. Two things I would tell myself at the start. First, if a customer signs and then does not use it, that is not a customer, that is a very expensive compliment, and it should be counted as churn on the day it happens rather than revenue. Second, when something is not selling, force yourself to write down the distribution version of the explanation before you are allowed to write down the product version. The product version will still be there afterwards. It just should not get to go first. Curious how many people here have made the same call. When something stalled, did you build or did you go and find out why nobody came back?