700 downloads sounds like traction until you count deliveries.
We built Trexity Go in six weeks because we thought there was a market for consumer-to-consumer delivery. You know — someone needs groceries picked up, someone else wants to make twenty bucks. Simple.
We spent $20,000 a month on search engine marketing. It worked. 700 downloads in 45 days. 199 accounts created. The metrics looked like progress.
Then we counted deliveries. Ten. Seven actual customers.
One of my cofounders asked the question: “When do we kill this product?”
My answer: “Not yet. We don’t have the data.”
Here’s the tension. Marketing did its job. People downloaded the app. They created accounts. Then they… didn’t use it. Was it the price? The product? The fact that nobody actually needs peer-to-peer delivery? We had speculation but no backing data.
The debate wasn’t really about killing the product. It was about how long you stay confused at scale while spending $20,000 a month to generate downloads that don’t convert to usage.
Most business advice assumes you know whether something is working. Kill fast or double down. Pivot or persevere. In reality, you’re often deciding how long to stay confused while the meter runs.
We compromised. January deadline. Price reduction to breakeven — no margin, just proof of concept. Real user feedback instead of download metrics. We structured the uncertainty instead of pretending we knew the answer.
The product will always be in the app store. But we’ll know by mid-January whether we’re throwing good money after bad marketing or whether we found a product that just needed time to find its people.
The real question isn’t when to kill a product. It’s how to buy time for real data without burning cash on false hope. We’re about to find out if we got that balance right.