It seems like the validation step was flawed, here are some hypothesis:
- they didn’t validate enough to understand the real requirements
- they misinterpreted the segment
- they charge too late
- they hit a behavior wall
The biggest takeaway I get from this reading is that it’s really easy to fool yourself with customer feedback (even if you are a serial entrepreneur - Josh has founded so many businesses before!). Even when your customers say that your idea is fantastic it doesn’t mean that it’s true or that you should build it. i.e. Reading the customers, thus the market is the hardest part of our job.
I've had a launch like this. Universal praise for the idea, barely any adoption or willingness to pay. It was also around analytics and the feedback was similar too.
The issue is that "fun" data or "cool" data doesn't translate to "valuable" data.
It's possible that their paywall from day 1 was also an issue. If they could point to some deals that were made via Intros, perhaps other VC's would have jumped in.
Unless I'm wrong, Mattermark began as a sort of "Intros" product for investors but pivoted away from that to sales and biz dev.
It seems like the validation step was flawed, here are some hypothesis:
- they didn’t validate enough to understand the real requirements - they misinterpreted the segment - they charge too late - they hit a behavior wall
The biggest takeaway I get from this reading is that it’s really easy to fool yourself with customer feedback (even if you are a serial entrepreneur - Josh has founded so many businesses before!). Even when your customers say that your idea is fantastic it doesn’t mean that it’s true or that you should build it. i.e. Reading the customers, thus the market is the hardest part of our job.