Your Original Idea May Be Holding Your Business Back

Your Original Idea May Be Holding Your Business Back

In 2012, a team shut down an online game they had spent years building.

People played it. Some cared deeply about it. But the game had not attracted enough players to cover the cost of building and operating it.

The team had tried new features, changes to the new-player experience, and campaigns to bring more people in. Eventually, they decided to stop.

Years of work. A functioning product. A community that would miss it.

Still, the business could not continue on that basis.

But while building the game, the team had developed something else: an internal system for communicating, sharing files, and finding past conversations. It helped them do their own work.

When the game closed, a smaller team began turning what they had learned from those internal tools into a product for other organisations.

In December 2020, Salesforce agreed to acquire the resulting company in a deal with an announced enterprise value of approximately $27.7 billion.

Can you guess the company? Hold your answer in your mind.

Then consider the decision behind the story: what happens when the evidence points away from the idea you have spent years defending?

A product can have users and still struggle as a business

As a founder, getting people to use your product can feel like the hardest part.

So when users arrive, it is tempting to treat their presence as confirmation that the business is working.

But having users leaves several questions unanswered.

Are enough of the right people finding the product? Are they reaching something valuable? Do they return? Will they pay where the business model requires it? Can the business serve them sustainably?

A small group of enthusiastic customers deserves attention. You still need to understand what their behaviour means for the business you are trying to build.

This connects to a principle in Stop Building, Start Validating: product-market fit should be assessed through a body of evidence.

Pain, usage, retention, payment, and organic pull each tell you something different. Together, they help you examine whether your product is becoming valuable to a defined group of customers.

Your product may work exactly as designed while the business still needs a different direction.

That possibility belongs in your product validation process.

Pay attention to the problems you keep solving

The internal communication system in this story existed because the team needed a practical way to work together.

That makes it an interesting starting point for customer discovery.

A recurring workaround can reveal a problem people care enough to spend time and effort solving. In my book, those existing behaviours matter when investigating customer pain.

Think about your own operation.

Perhaps your team maintains a complicated spreadsheet because existing tools miss something important. Perhaps customers keep asking for help with the same task. Perhaps you built a small script that saves someone hours every week.

These are opportunities to investigate.

Start with what happens today. Identify who experiences the problem, how frequently it occurs, what the consequences are, and how people currently manage it.

Your own experience gives you access to the problem. You still need to discover whether other people experience it strongly enough to change their behaviour.

An internal success still needs external validation

It would be easy to read this story and decide that your most useful internal tool should become your next product.

That conclusion would skip an essential step.

Something that works for your team may depend on your processes, technical knowledge, or willingness to tolerate awkward setup. Other customers may have different needs and better alternatives.

Treat the new direction as a hypothesis.

Choose a specific customer segment and investigate its recent experiences. Look for workarounds, spending, repeated frustration, and attempts to solve the problem.

Then test a focused version of the proposed solution.

Watch whether people use it in real work. Observe where they struggle and whether they return without constant personal encouragement. If customers are expected to pay, make a clear offer and examine their actual decisions.

This is where product-market fit validation becomes practical: each experiment should reduce uncertainty about the next decision.

An internal tool can give you a promising starting point. External customer behaviour helps you assess whether it can support a wider business.

Diagnose weak traction before changing direction

A difficult month does not automatically justify a startup pivot.

Weak traction can leave several explanations open. You may be reaching the wrong audience. Your positioning may be unclear. Onboarding may prevent people from experiencing value. Customers may try the product and find too little reason to return.

Those situations call for different responses.

Before replacing the idea, trace what happens between discovery and repeat use.

If people never reach the product’s useful moment, investigate the path to that moment. If they reach it and leave, study what they expected and what happened. If one customer segment stays while others disappear, examine that difference.

This reflects the evidence-led approach in Stop Building, Start Validating: understand what customer behaviour is telling you before committing to more building.

A change of direction becomes easier to evaluate when you can explain what you learned, what remains uncertain, and why the next experiment is worth running.

Another year will not recover the last one

Walking away from an original plan can feel personal.

You may have introduced yourself through that idea, persuaded people to join you, and imagined the future around its success.

Changing direction means revisiting those commitments.

But the time already spent cannot tell you whether the next year is a good investment.

For that decision, return to the evidence available now.

Which customers continue to experience a meaningful problem? What are they doing to solve it? Where are you seeing repeat value? What have recent experiments taught you? What would justify another commitment of time and money?

You can respect the work already done while deciding that the next stage should look different.

Skills, relationships, customer knowledge, and technical learning may remain useful even when the original product closes.

Give yourself permission to follow what you learn

The acquisition figure makes this story memorable. It does not make changing direction a guarantee of success.

My takeaway is more practical: leave room for your understanding of the opportunity to change.

Keep examining the product you intended to build. Pay equal attention to the problems, behaviours, and unmet needs you discover along the way.

Some findings may justify improving your existing product. Others may suggest a narrower audience, a different offer, or a new direction.

Before defending another year of the same plan, make sure you can explain what the evidence supports.

You started with an idea.

Give yourself permission to learn your way beyond it.

For a practical approach to investigating weak traction and making better product decisions, explore Stop Building, Start Validating at www.joshuaajieh.com.

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Historical sources: A team member’s firsthand account and Salesforce’s December 2020 acquisition announcement.