Original Post: https://x.com/arampell/status/1772734627410571443?s=20

Before you launch a new product, one of the most counterintuitively important things to do is to plan for how to kill or exit the product. FAST.

This isn’t as simple as it sounds…and it’s crucial for companies with multiple products or consulting work.

My company, TrialPay, was the leading company doing “offers” en lieu of payment. I realized we strategically needed to be in the more commodity payment processing space, more background here: http://www.arampell.org/2015/11/04/distribution-v-innovation/

We built this payment business to 9 figures of payment volume, but didn’t have sufficient focus to make it our top priority, and we were nowhere close to being #1 in the space. (Most value accrues to the #1 or MAYBE top 2-3 players).
But our core clients were using it!

This is why a pre-mortem is so important. We used our goodwill and “bundle economics” to cross-sell current customers on what had become a 2nd rate product. If we shut it down, they’d be PISSED and would potentially dump us for our core product!

So what to do? We were honestly stuck. Against the backdrop of massive pressure against our core business, per thread below. We needed to focus on what we were great at.
https://x.com/arampell/status/1562557849128931328?s=20

Our only answer was to find a home / new product for our customers. I called the then CEO of Braintree and basically offered our customers and product for free — he said “what’s the catch?” It’s not every day that a competitor (us) voluntarily capitulates…

But our real competition was FOCUS. It was clear we had lost the battle to be #1 in raw payment processing. Dedicating resources to be a distant #8 was more expensive than getting nothing for this asset.

The next step was to gingerly mention this to our clients without having them ditch us for our core, profitable offers product. This was hard. But we made it work.

Being an entrepreneur means being able to make the best of the hand you are dealt but also knowing when and how to switch tables. And switching tables dispassionately — when you have teams and customers “stuck” to the old table — is hard

This is one of the reasons to be VERY cautious about doing consulting work. Building a custom product for a marquee client sounds great to make ends meet, but you can’t kill it! You’ve just added a liability to your balance sheet. You have to support it…forever!

Theoretically you could kill it, but then good luck selling another product to that company. If you need to do a RIF, and you’ve gotten pre-paid for this software, how do you cut the team supporting this product that represents 0% of your future…?

So always, always think about this hidden “liability” on your business. Before you customize, contract, or test something…have a well thought through plan to KILL your new thing. Bake it into all your processes, contracts, code, culture, etc.