Stop before it breaks
Learn to read the signs that tell you it’s time to let go.
Are you really investing in the right direction, or are you wasting your time and resources swinging at the air?
Here’s how to read the signs.
Users understand what you offer, but they’re indifferent
There’s no confusion. Your funnel looks clean.
You watch users flow through the product just fine, yet they never return.
Not because they don’t understand. Because they don’t care.
If people don’t care now, more onboarding, more tutorials, or more features won’t suddenly make them care.
Indifference is more dangerous than negative feedback. Negative feedback at least gives you some direction.
Take Google+. People already understood social networks. They knew exactly what the product did. They just didn’t want it. Google forced integrations instead of admitting misalignment.
Google can afford a multi-year delay. You and I probably can’t.
Low engagement despite multiple attempts
Users try it once and don’t come back. There’s nothing wrong with the UI. It’s a value problem.
If you have to force engagement through artificial rewards or notifications, you’re trying to revive something that never had life.
LinkedIn copied a mechanic that works beautifully on Instagram and Snapchat: Stories. But it failed on their platform because the behavior didn’t match the context. People weren’t coming to LinkedIn to casually post disappearing video snippets. They tried it, ignored it, and LinkedIn quietly killed the feature.
You can’t copy the mechanism without the motivation.
Sunk cost fallacy
The silent death.
When “We’ve already spent so much time on this” starts entering meetings, you’re no longer evaluating the idea, you’re defending the investment.
Ask yourself: am I attached to this idea because of the value it brings, or simply because of the effort I put in?
The more you invest, the harder it becomes to walk away, even when evidence says you should.
You start justifying past decisions instead of making the right next one. “We’ve come too far to stop” is how you waste the next two quarters.
BlackBerry is the classic example. They dismissed touchscreen phones and refused to pivot even when the market’s direction was painfully obvious. Instead, they doubled down on physical keyboards. We all know how that story ended.
You keep adding on top instead of breaking down to validate
Instead of simplifying to test the assumption, you add more features. Things get bigger and harder to validate. You stop learning and start decorating.
“Maybe people will use it if we also add…” Output increases, but clarity decreases.
Remember Microsoft Windows Phone? They shipped a beautiful UI with animations and live tiles. But the core assumption, an app ecosystem users cared about, was never validated.
They kept polishing the interface instead of validating the one thing that mattered: would developers commit to building apps for Windows Phone?
It’s like building a castle on a foundation you never inspected. Beautiful walls, no foundation.