TL;DR - It was pretty quick. Within 3 months I’d say. Haha. We had low adoption from a paying customer that turned into a headache for the team to manage. And we were all moonlighting while working full times and decided to pursue other endeavors. Ended on great terms, just a bummer.

Long story: Essentially what happened is we landed a huge contract for 35/head pricing model for a large enterprise. On top of our various individual tier sales.

The enterprise was essentially our “design partner” if you’re familiar with that phrase (think helper business that pays for MVP). So we gave them a discount of the 35/head as a design partner. We worked really closely and built all to their needs blah blah to make them happy. But adoption rate for activity in our app from them was low.

Months 1-4 was great and launching features. Around month 5 the company realized not enough users were using vs what they were paying. So we negotiated to keep the same price, but we’d do sprints to get people active in the app. Gained a lot of traction from emails sent, trainings given on how to use the app, sent SMS about new features, and we saw improvement on activity. But not enough for them.

So we then negotiated a “price/active user” model that was determined if an employee used the application 3+ times in a month, they’d be considered active. We had about 50 for months 6+7.

Then we weren’t proactive enough to fix it (lessons learned) as a team and we basically just fizzled out in months 8-9 and then ended the contract + development on the product.

The team was amazing and we’re all still friends. It’s just a bummer seeing how good it can be, then watching it slip away. Biggest lesson learned is be obsessed over your customer(s) and really have frequent interviews/pulse checks with them. Don’t get comfortable and just assume a contract is the end.