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Founder Reality with George Pu. Real talk from a technical founder building AI-powered businesses in the trenches. No highlight reel, no startup theater – just honest insights from someone who codes, ships, and scales.
Every week, George breaks down the messy, unfiltered decisions behind building a bootstrap software company. From saying yes to projects you don't know how to build, to navigating AI hype vs. reality, to the mental models that actually matter for technical founders.
Whether you're a developer thinking about starting a company, a founder scaling your first product, or a technical leader building AI features, this show gives you the frameworks and hard-won lessons you won't find in the startup content circus.
George Pu is a software engineer turned founder building multiple AI-powered businesses. He's bootstrapped companies, shipped products that matter, and learned the hard way what works and what's just noise.
Follow along as he builds in public and shares what's really happening behind the scenes.
New episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
George Pu (00:00)
Hello and welcome back to another episode of founder reality podcast. I'm your host George pu Today I want to share a little bit of my personal story of just actually happened in the past week about how I almost sunset it and press the kill button for one of our products called simple like financing and how I changed my mind on the very last minute and how it's a huge struggle as a founder navigating those decisions. I want to give you the insider look about what is it like to be a founder? How hard is it to be on this journey?
as well as like the different stakeholders that you have to manage. If you have never done it before, it's probably a good experience just walking through and then I'll put my lessons at the end. And if you're already a founder, you probably understand the pain. But also I think this will be a very valuable experience for you to understand what is it actually to pull the trigger, when's a good time to pull the trigger and when is the time to actually keep going, right? Or pivot. So without further ado, let's get into it.
So the story was, you know, pretty crazy. can summarize it as, you know, the 8 a.m. text that saved my company, which is like pretty crazy. So as you know, I almost shut down my company, simple direct financing, I think, you know, last week. And I have actually already drafted and published the blog post on simple direct blog So if you go to blog.getsimpledirect.com you'll see that I have made an announcement that we're sunsetting simple direct and it gave the reasons directly. And I think the stakeholders, our customers, partners, everyone.
And that just happened last week, right? And then I think a day after I drafted the blog announcement, I actually planned to launch an email campaign to our customers, giving them the announcement that we're actually shutting down the product as well, right? I understand it will be frustrating for our customers. That's why I have not informed them fast enough because it was a very emotional decision of whether to inform our customers, many of whom still rely on us for us to deliver the solutions to our customers. So...
We are not shutting it down because it's not working, right? We're shutting it down because the unit economics does not work. So I'll talk about that later in a bit. And that morning I was scheduling the email to go out around 12 PM because obviously we have customers in three U S time zones or maybe even four U S time zones. Um, so it's, it's obviously important to not tell our customers at 3 AM or 6 AM in the morning. So we were being very selected 12, 12 PM Eastern time.
which is like nine, nine a.m. in the Pacific coast. you know, at eight, eight a.m. Eastern time, I was, you know, I was on a subway to work and then I got a text from one of our customers. Surprisingly, he was praising our product. He was praising the company, was praising our customer responses. So I was pretty surprised ⁓ because first of all, this is a very big customer that we have got over the past year. So we, we signed this huge customer in Florida. They are a franchise business. They bring a million of dollars per month for the operations.
And they have Dish, one of our largest competitor, in exchange to use us. So it's a trust that our customers have put into us. And then I have personally tried to lend this customer pretty well so that a few months ago we have landed the deal, we signed the deal and we brought them on board. Right. And then their volume on the financing side in terms of like, you know, their volume for us is pretty good. They send all our customers and then we sometimes have to scramble for support.
⁓ but you know, I genuinely thought maybe our customer wasn't that happy with us because our customer support wasn't being that good, right? Just being honest. But he was basically telling me how much he relies on us, you know, at AM in the morning, telling us how much he needed us. And we are really solving a huge problem for him. How am I really genuine and authentic and good founder? That's the exact word that he said. And then he asked me a few questions about how we can, how he can position some of our.
products better on his website and social media so he can promote it more. Right. And honestly, I was texting him on a subway, just going to work, right. And then in a few hours, obviously the sunset emails going to go out to, companies like him. So to be quite honest, it was a very genuinely emotional period. I think, I think time I was sitting there thinking, well, I do know customers do want to use us, but I didn't know we have customers that are this dependent on us. Right. And then.
you know, shutting down the right call because in that email, I've also admitted the reasons for shutting down and I give them a few alternatives to use, are they using us? So, you know, obviously it's a heartfelt goodbye and then we'll be letting our customers know that we'll be turning off their renewals on Stripe so they don't have to worry about not being renewed. We will also be responding to customers who are angry about us shutting down and then we'll be offering them a partial refund for the money that I've already paid for this year's subscription.
so we have got, got that ready in the email. So, but that moment when he wrote me that tech, those texts, I was genuinely thinking is shutting down, really the right call. Right. And then two hours later, of course, I'm at the office and then I'm, I have a call with one of our major learning partners, one of our major major learning partners who control, ⁓ close to a hundred percent of our volume. Right. And, and I wasn't sure what to expect of his, you know, like reactions of our, our volumes because
Obviously, just to recap, we run a essentially a personal marketplace business, right? On the one side, we have home improvement businesses or home services businesses. You can think of them as like the roofers, you know, they do the roofs, they come to your house, do the roof and they fix your garages, they do your kitchen renovations. So they do everything for your house. And so they are the ones are bringing us their customers and their customers were in need of financing to pay for the businesses services, right? They come to us to get financing and then we fund them.
through our learning partners and then they paid the businesses. So it's a very simple model. Sometimes it takes a while to explain, right? So you can see why learning partners are so important in this case because we do not lend our own money because we don't want to take the risk. We want to be a technology provider, right? Not the money provider. And it requires essentially additional regulatory licenses, additional capital that is not possible for a bootstrap company to do.
So long story short, that's, that's what we do as a business. Right. And I was expecting our lending partner to be extremely disappointed in us because we haven't redelivered the volume that we promised. We have only got around 254 active contractors, sorry, signed up contractors who are active the past year when we probably should have doubled that. Right. When we should have brought more volume to the customer, to the lending partner. And I was.
Even mentally I was illiterate. I was thinking maybe he's going to tell me that the partnership is over. Although I was thinking like, why wouldn't he just tell me email, right? Rather than a call about that. So that was some of the conflicts, but instead our learning partner praised us. He tells us that we actually have very, very good conversion rates in terms of how much loans were able to convert. And he's saying basically like the, the only issue that we have is that we need to have more signups.
Right. So from signups to conversion, he sees our race is probably one of the best that we have seen. However, we just need to have more volume. So I was entirely shocked about that. And I have to be honest, I turn off, I turn off the call. I, I was just like, kind of just standing there for a few minutes. ⁓ maybe like even more than a few minutes, maybe 10 minutes, 20 minutes. I just didn't know what to really think about. And I kind of froze a little bit as well. I walk out a meeting. was really confused. I was.
being very emotional, I think internally. And if I'm being honest, I was also like burnt out, know, like completely emotionally drained. And that was after when I was going on a walk, I realized something. I wasn't actually evaluating whether or not to shut down some product financing because of like the data makes sense or not. I was making that decision because I was mentally exhausted, right? I was just too tired and exhausted because
the owner economics and the customers I was picking just wasn't working out. I've tried for several, several years. Of course we have a portfolio of businesses. So obviously cashflow is not the problem here, right? It's just about internal emotional exhaustion and tiredness because it doesn't make sense to keep going anymore. So today I'm going to share with you the full story and also the framework they helped me actually decide. Um, and essentially get out of that burnout, right? Separate burnout from bad business because, also choose which one's the way.
because we also hear, we always hear about founder burnouts. We don't know when that's going to hit us. And I think as I mentioned, many, many times on the pot, if you're working on a business that you don't actually enjoy, if you're doing something that you have to actually enjoy, you're very close to burning out. And I think that's what happened to me, you know, just a few days ago on a partner call, I think I was burning out just because the exhaustions of about expectations from different partners and not because of their expectations, but also because internally how hard it will be to move it, to do it.
Right. Using the existing playbooks that we have. So long story short, um, you know, I was kind of burnt out and we have, I had made a decision by the end of that day. So I had to call 11 30 in the morning and by two, 3 PM, I've decided what to do. And then I announced it to the team and decision is to do that. We're not shutting down the product. So we're like financing and instead we're pivoting to B2C in the next 90 days. And if we don't work it out in that next 90 days, we'll be sunsetting the product on schedule on December, 2025.
And if it works out, we'll keep going and we'll make it work. And if you're a founder, we have, or you have thought about building a technology product, you might eventually come to a decision similar to this about whether or not to kill your product. Right. And I think this framework might save you from making the wrong decision for the wrong reasons. ⁓ such as, you know, burnout, which is not a rational decision. Right. So. All right. So here, let me give you the full context of what happened with simple direct.
right, because it's far more nuanced than just like, oh, startup is a product. So I've been building SimpleDirect since my second year, sophomore year at University of Waterloo. So it's been almost five years. And as you know, we've got this embedded financing platform for businesses and then they bring us your customers. So you have all the big names as our learning partners, some of them product public companies like SoFi, Upstart and Twistbank, which is also a public company and also all the other big names like Wells Fargo, et cetera.
We have built a really beautiful mobile app. have built a really beautiful web dashboard. Right. And in fact, if you're listening, you can check out our product at financing.getsimpledirect.com. So it has a really beautiful analytics. And I was really proud for the product that we have built. Coming from a product background myself, right. Coming from a product manager myself at an undertak company five years ago, I basically, you know, finished my internship there and I started building some product financing. So of course I'm a product oriented person.
And I believe I built one of the best experiences that we can for this type of target audiences for borrowers as well as for businesses. Right. But the major problem that I've been facing, you know, for the past, like, you know, a few years, it's basically our customers, right. The home improvement businesses, the contractors, so to speak, they don't really want sophisticated software or even simple software. They want a phone support, right. They'd call our customer success person, right. Let's call the name like Scott.
for everything. they will tell Scott, can you just call this customer for me? Can you check the loan status? Right, Scott. And they had Scott's personal phone number, which is the most difficult thing. Right. And Scott lives in California. So, you know, sometimes it will be nine AM at a West coast, eight, eight, eight AM, you know, in the East coast, sorry. And then it will be, you know, five, five AM on the West coast. And he's phone will be ringing. So it's difficult for him. It's difficult for us. So it's the same thing across the board.
then they will also text him at 8pm, 9pm. And, you know, recent months that call has been spill over to my personal time because Scott is a little bit away and also there's some other things going on that he's working on. So the calls and the messages are going to me as a CEO, it's not going to our support person. So the contractors in essence, they have barely touched the apps that we have spent years building and maintaining.
Right. So obviously for borrowers, they have to use the app because that's how they are able to get a decision on their lending decisions. However, the B2B side of the business that we have built, it's very, very manual till this date, right. And the usage of our applications really low. That's the main question. That's the main, I guess, first issue of why this business is not working out is because our primary target customer group doesn't really use us that much. Right. And yes, it's possible for me to call them one by one for my team to call them one by one.
And give them a zoom demo, give them a Google map, Google meet demo. And we have done that ⁓ multiple times as well. So it's not like you haven't done it. ⁓ And even if we could do, and they get used to it, it's still difficult to complete the process every single time. And also we're not just training the businesses themselves. The business is just a business. It has owners, it has managers, it has decision makers, it has salespeople, it has office workers. So it's a huge organization, right? And to make it, make them all understand how to use it, we had to make the interface really simple, but still.
We're not able to get a lot of usage. So that's the main issue about usage. The second issue I think for the business was that the unit, the unit economics is not checking out. Right. And what I mean by that is like we charge businesses $1,500 USD a single year. Right. And think about like a 15,000, $1,500 annual subscription is actually a good number in a SaaS world. Right. If you think about it, like companies, like I pay a lot of businesses that pay probably like a hundred, 200, $300 per year.
on an annual basis. So it's definitely a good business. If you think about just a number, right? You know, $1,500. However, the problem comes with a level of support our customers expected the hand holding, you know, from onboarding until, you know, everything else, we have salespeople calling us, expecting us to call their, their customers, give them a sales pitch, right? Or, or at least to give them like a pitch about what we do, complete disregard of how we are operating a software business and having a help center.
articles and having, ⁓ you know, basically a messenger is having different ways of doing business. They expect us to be their sales front to call their customers on their behalf, to help them lend the deal. then oftentimes we're caught in between. Now their fault, necessarily it's just like how the industry reality is. Right. And the real time updates becomes a call to Scott calls to me. So obviously, as you understand, right, if we do put in, in a numerical perspective,
It actually costs us like, you know, just about, I think $2,000 per customer just to deliver. Right. So our margins are basically close to zero and sometimes even negative, right? If you're counting our time of taking those customer calls and doing the customer support, it is absolutely negative, right? Even though on the cashflow perspective balance, it looks positive. But as I said, counting the time that you have to spend, it becomes negative because that time could have been spent on something else, you know, of improving other lines of products that we have. So.
We try to work and on the backend with lender lending partners, right? Who pays us a percentage, usually 1 % for payouts when loan funded, right? And that is the real revenue where the lending partner is supposed to come from. However, that is also something that we don't control the end to end experience, which comes back to the third big reason why the B2B Bounders work. We have became entirely reliant on our lending partners, right? Because we don't want to lend ourselves. So.
Earlier this year, one of our bigger learning partners, one of them has cut commissions by more than 50 % overnight without, know, we just like a midnight notice, minimum notice and our unit economics without learning partner collapsed right away. So that was a third problem. So that's when I started thinking, okay, this model it's broken. And also because of the calls I've taken, I was on a trip to Europe on a personal trip and I have been getting those like customer support calls here and there. And it just like excruciating.
It was supposed to be my off time and Scott was not there supporting me. He is not taking the calls for some reason. So I was just like exhausted. And this happened the same thing, the previous trip as well, Midnight I was as all the way in South Asia and some people are calling me for customer support. So I was just like, so after all this, I just feel like in emotion, I was broken. I'm saying I didn't sign up for this. Our other preferred businesses are doing 10 times, 50 times more revenue than SimpleDirect and we're doing just fine. You know, and,
It's okay in my mind just to shut it down because I cannot handle those customer support anymore. And all those three reasons, I think compounded and added up to why, you know, I made a decision of putting the shutdown. So the shutdown blog is still on the blog you know, like you can still check it out there. And I basically set the date. I am prepared to announce it.
You know, so a lot of emotional stuff, a lot of difficult decisions to make. And obviously, as you can see, we're not just a company that just about, you know, myself and it's not shutting down sunsetting because we failed in the, the other hand, it did work. People are using it every day. However, I think it's, it's, you know, it's a, it's an emotional decision. It's a very difficult decision. And then the 8 a.m. text happened and then customers were praising us. And then, you know, and that's when I really hesitated, right? Emotionally drained, I hesitated.
And after the partner call, I went out for a walk, like I said, and what happened is like I stopped for two hours. basically just like on my phone, I was going for a walk and I opened Claude on my phone on the way when I was walking. Um, and then I basically just talked to it a little bit. It has the context about the business. So I was very candid about the problem that I was facing, um, with the business. So I just talked, I typed those things into Claude and Claude was actually very honest and upfront. So because I told her to be honest upfront, but
But it is anyways, and it told me basically to analyze my blind spot. told it to, you analyze my blind spot? What are the things I did not see, right? Or did not want to see that you could tell me right now so I can actually make an informed decision. Right. So that can actually turn out to be a good problem. But, you know, but Claude analyzed it and it was giving me something that basically struck me in the head like a truck. Right. It basically said that your business model is not broken. Your distribution channel is broken.
You're trying to serve customers who don't want what you're selling, but your product, your IP and the actual financing infrastructure that works. People are using it. You just need to find the right audience. So a little bit back and forth. think the summary was basically, yes, identify the problem about businesses not adopting and that we have to actually rely on a few customers out of all the businesses just deliver the volume. So we're very reliant on each one of them. And we have to do in-person like, you know, on the phone support here and there.
It was basically saying that George, you're building a service business, disguise a SaaS. You're not building a SaaS business. This is a service business. And if you can, you should raise your price to $15,000 per year. And that might fix it. Right. But your, but your companies are not going to pay for that. So your entire business model is broken. So that was one of the feedback. And then we also have learned about a few other things about the business. went back and forth a few times. The recommendation was changed a few times as well, based on your context.
So of course we were very close to like shutting down according to that. Um, and I basically, we eventually realized that, you know, I'm a 27 year old technical founder. Um, I enjoy building products that works. built AI, I built AI powered products that I think will help companies save a lot of time and make more money. And, but I'm spending my time, you know, on the phone, helping customers who don't want software, who doesn't know what's going on and refuses to learn.
And no wonder, you know, why I've had to burn out. that was burnout is a thing, right. And then I think the most beautiful thing that happened afterwards was that I actually learned about, you know, how I can actually fix the business. And we have a few more rounds of back and forth while I was on my run. And basically I realized, you know, we have a good business. We have the good IP. We just failed on a picking the customers. have the wrong customer segment.
It's not scalable. We're entirely reliant on those customers. And yes, even though we're not spending any dollar on marketing, it is a lost cause, right? It is heavily reliant on sales. So I should shut that down right away. The B2B side. And a second thing is that there might be a chance of B2C side, but in reality, I think that the question eventually became George, like what do you want? What is the thing that you want to build, right? To actually make a difference. And I think that's like the founder product, product market fit, a founder solution fit, I guess that would say.
It's basically like as a founder, you must be good at something that you really enjoy doing. Can you keep doing the things that you do enjoy doing? Because if you do, you're on the right track. If you don't, you're going to burn out eventually, or, or you can find someone else to do that for you. And you can focus on doing the things that you do enjoy it. For example, Mark Zuckerberg and Charles Sandberg, that is one dual that it's basically encompassing that. So for me, obviously I don't want to just delegate for the delegate sake. I also wear very early for some product financing. We still haven't breakthrough a huge number of revenue.
So obviously, ⁓ I eventually told, I told Claude the following. said, I'm a technical founder. I enjoy building products. So that is what I do enjoy. I enjoy being authentic. I don't want to force myself to be, ⁓ telling something to contractors that a person don't do not believe in. And I don't want to be a salesman that just sells things as generic. I want to be a disruptor. want to be innovative. I want to be different, right? I want to build something that can make a difference. That's what I truly enjoy. And that's why I told Claude and to my credit, ⁓ Claude.
gave back and told me that, you know, why don't you actually take a look at the B2C model with not just the customers are you serving now you're serving bloomers, right? Which is are not tech savvy. Why don't you focus on Gen Z and millennials, which are similar to your age right now, who might have problems and want to one don't want to talk to you on the phone. And they prefer something that's simple and direct like a company's name. And that's something that can solve their problems. And if you can create content that's related to home technologies,
and using spreadsheets and tools to make their homes more enjoyable and making their finances better. Maybe that's something they will be looking for. Right. So I think that struck me. And I think it did create a possible path for the company to be working out because we do have that. Like I said, we do have the IP. We don't have to change a single line of code. The product works perfectly as it is. It can handle thousands, tens of thousands of people using at the same time. So it's not a product issue. The issue is distribution. The issue is the ICP, ideal customer.
profile. So after fixing those, you know, I might be able to actually give it a shot. So the decision I made at the end is actually to give it 90 more days, right from today, basically 90 more days. And we'll do the BTC pivot. We'll let our B2B customers know that we'll be actually shutting, we will be shutting down the paid version. We'll convert them to the free version, right? Very soon. And then if they want to send us customers, watch, we'll be paying them for sending us customers.
And then we'll be killing phone support starting today. And we'll be only doing email support moving forward with a response time of at least 20, 40, 48 hours. Right. So as you can see founders, this is how I made the business work for me instead of the other way around. I do understand like I can probably make more money by forcing the other way around being very proactive and giving in to basically what my customers want. And, and while I do respect my customers, I've been doing this with them for so many years. I don't want to.
do this anymore, right? I want to, as I said, build on the products. I want to focus on the products. I do not want to focus on, you know, on the phone with customers and spending an hour getting them the best personal options. It's helpful. Yes, but it's not my role. And I think if that's the business that I'm building, then I'd rather shut it down and build something more that's more suitable for my skills. So that's my personal belief. And I think that's why the decision I made, I share this with my team and my team is fully supportive as well. So
The good thing is yes, we're not shutting down simple type financing. We're pivoting to B2C. We're targeting younger homeowners and we're going to make a few big changes in the very next coming days. And you're hearing this probably first, right? So I'll be posting this on the blog in a couple of days. So you might see this as well. And for the framework I use, it's basically, think, you know, sound setting sometimes I call it sunset versus pivot decision framework. So if you're ever thinking about, and it might come sometime in the future.
If you ever think about shutting, shutting down your products, you have to run those four questions that I wrote before you make the call because burnout and bad businesses are not the same thing. I experienced burnout. I thought the product is failing. I thought I want to kill it, but a text from my customer in the morning and a learning partner's comment changed everything for me. I was so tired. I was still burned out, but I was able to make a decision about saving the product. Right. So let's go through the four questions together. The first question is basically like.
is the business model broken or is the distribution channel broken? Right? This is the most important question. ⁓ broken business model typically means that, you know, nobody actually wants a product that you're selling. The economic doesn't work, right? The revenue model is broken and the value proposition is fundamentally flawed. So this is like probably the most seen scenarios of companies shutting down because they could not find an ideal customer profile or their ISP does not want the products. So for simple records, the other way around.
Companies, once they do know about our products, use us a lot, a lot, lot, right? But our problem is basically on the distribution side. I learned that the business model works, lenders love us, customers want us, but distribution is broken because we cannot hold every customer's hand. And they want high touch services and we cannot afford it at a very discounted price of $1,500 per year. So for you founders, if you test this,
If you remove the broken channel, does revenue still exist? Are there any alternative customer segments that could work better for your business? For us, obviously we asked that question and the answer is yes. B2C, Millennials, Gen Zs, same product, different customers, better fit. And that was the decision that we had made. If your distribution is broken, but your model works, so you probably don't need to shut it down. I'd recommend against shutting down. Try to have a pivot, give yourself some time. Right? So that's the first question. So what's broken? Second question is.
Are you burned out by the work itself or are you burned out by the customers who are serving or something else? Right. So this one's very subtle, but I think it's huge for me. I was burned out. It was real. Um, I recovered pretty quickly though. I was, I'm glad about that, but the burnout itself is definitely not experienced. want any founder to have. So when I dug into why I realized I was not burned out by building the infrastructure and the IP of the business. I wasn't burned out by API integrations or technical challenges. I wasn't burned out by the product. I was burned out.
by serving 60 year old customers who are not using the software, refusing to use the software and expect me and my team to be their personal assistant. And again, nothing wrong with that, that's their habit, but I've realized that's what I was burning out. So Claude was asking me, who are you glad to serve? And basically that question changed everything. It's the founder solution fit. You have to be solving the problems and you have to provide a solution to solve the problem for the people who you care about, who you can relate about.
who can talk to them easily on the phone or otherwise, right? And that's the people that you enjoy talking to. have to actually have that experience. So I'm not saying I do not enjoy talking to businesses and blue collar businesses. I just definitely feel like there's a mismatch between the level of like energy we have towards using technologies in businesses. So that is the one, the main issue of why I didn't feel energized. And when I actually had the experience of basically potentially working with companies,
sorry, working with individuals who are tech savvy millennials and Gen Z who wants self-service, who value software, who doesn't need phone support and doesn't prefer it. I feel energized again. So here's your test, right? Describe your ideal customers. Who are you currently serving them? So you probably have multiple ICPs. So my question is, if you can only serve one customer segment, which one will make you excited to wake up and work on this every day? If the customer you're excited working on is not there, you're not.
excited working for any customer, that's probably you have a customer mismatch and you need to dive deeper into whether that is a problem about your business and how can you change it to serve the customers that actually enjoy working for it. The third question I have is like, what would you have to change for make it work? Right? So that's, that gets a little bit more specific. So, and it's not just like answering, we need to, we need to fix our economics. You had to be more specific on that. You have to say exactly break it down. Why exactly it's broken.
For each broken thing, can it be fixed by changing who we serve? If yes, who is the new customer? What's the new channel? If no, then maybe Sunsetting or Shining Down is the right call. For a simple drag, of course, we have to change in this direction. We have to target younger tech savvy customers instead of older customers. We have to go direct to consumer instead of going B2B. And we have to make B2B free and make B2B customers actually pay them to bring customers to us, which is giving our B2B customers actually more value
If they can tolerate killing phone support and doing email only. And you know, that's all the things that we have made. So we change your customer segment. Now we're serving customers who I can relate to who I should love serving and who I can love us back. Right. And that is a pivot decision I've made for the next 90 days. So that's the third question, you know, and the fourth question is like, can you give it 90 days with a clear success metrics? So I think yes, you cannot pivot forever. And
For me, it's 90 days for you. might be different. could be 120 days. You could be half a year. It could be a year. It could give, it could be any single time, but I think you cannot pivot forever, right? At some point you need to know if the model works. set a clear test about validating your hypothesis and have a matrix that you have in mind. And also one deadline for an honest evaluation, right? You have to write the matrix that you have for success ahead of time. So for me, it's basically how many loans are refunding? What's the conversion rate?
and water the cost internally for marketing. all that. So if I can prove it in 90 days, I'll make it work, right? So for us, you know, we've done all that. We have a revenue target. So if we hit it, we keep going. If not, we shut down with no regrets. So I'm not moving the GoPros saying, ⁓ just 90 more days. This time it's like concrete. It is 90 days. And it's an honest evaluation at the very end. So try to do this. And if you're listening,
And if you're thinking about shutting down a product or if you in the future, you have reached the decision point of whether or not you're shutting down a product or sunsetting it or just pivoting it or just exhausted and burning out. So please come back to this episode and listen to it. And I think it tells you exactly what to do. So my recommendation is like, try to separate emotions from data. So I almost shut down this product because of emotions, but try not to think about that. Try not to be emotional.
and try to look at the actual data or find someone you can actually talk to. could be AI, could be a person that really knows you who's not biased and let them do the heavy lifting and tell you exactly what you should be hearing. Not you want to hear, but what you should be hearing. Right. And do the blind spot audit. think personally, why I did really well in this situation is that I asked Claude, which is the AI about like, what am I missing? Right. What are the, my blind spots that I don't want to see. And I think that is very helpful because like we all have things that we don't have to see. We have confirmation bias.
And the bias is huge, right? And sometimes even AI lies to you want to make you feel happy. So tell it to be honest, tell your friends or AI to be honest, to not cover the blind spots and see what you do not see and really value that without taking it back. Right. And I think third is like, try to run a test that just mentioned, I think it's important test. ⁓ it's not, it's not going to be customer mismatch every time it's going to be something that you do burn out for one thing or the other, but you need to really understand the reason why you're burning out.
Identify the problem and try to solve that and you know, so I think those are all the things I think can be helpful And if you ever reach that decision yourself or you need some help in a decision I'm always here so you can email me at George at founder by comm I'll try to respond to anyone's question So if you are burning out if you are not looking at seeing the directions, maybe I can help right? So you can write an email to me and I'll reply to it. So So I hope this episode has been helpful to you as always
for the frameworks, for the resources, and for everything that you do not hear here on the podcast, that'll be too long to fit. I will be putting them, publishing them, you know, almost on databases on the blog, founderreality.com. And you can always check it out, founderreality.com, to check out the ⁓ free resources, including the free books I'll be launching. You'll see the first one there. And of course, you can also follow me on Twitter and X as the George pu. I do share a lot of my shorter thoughts there on Twitter. So you probably came from Twitter. That's fine. So keep following.
and then let me know what you think. I'm always here and as a community builder, I want to build this community where we can actually honestly all share some of the things that we're struggling and I think it's perfectly fine. So today, this is the framework, a little bit of real talk from me as a founder to let you know how difficult it is sometimes. But overall, at end of the day, think it's worth it. It's a worthwhile experience and having gone through this, understanding exactly what to do next, I hope you do as well. So I'll see you next time. Thank you so much for listening. See you soon.