Nobody Cares How Hard You Worked (And Why That's Okay)
A couple of years ago, I started working on a SaaS called Microinfluencer. Originally wanting to build a marketplace of brands <-> creators, I realised this was a non starter due to the cold start problem as an indie dev who'd never grown a marketplace before. Eventually, it morphed into a discovery and analytics platform to discover manually vetted (by yours truly) creators for your brand. I had 12,000 creators indexed, all of whom I'd manually approved in a painstaking process.
The problem was, even at 12,000 creators, brands struggled to find the perfect creators. The world's a big place, right? I frequently had customers complain about irrelevant matches, even after I'd worked hard to try and cover themselves.
So, not wanting to give up, I pivoted. The same core offering, with an agentic flow, and having AI assess creators instead of me, with very tight parameters. It took me a few weeks, and I noticed that the agent almost always had good results, far better than the original product. Users were far happier, but it was a strange feeling, a simpler solution, with less manual intervention, was more useful.
A painful truth then hit me:
Nobody cares how hard you worked.
The only thing that matters is how useful the product is. It's hard to take emotion out of something like this - it's why gamblers chase losses. The sunk cost fallacy is well documented. At least users cared enough to tell me the old solution didn't work very well - a validation sign.
I'm not saying anything new here, but if you find yourself in this position, try to mentally frame it in a liberating way and to not get disheartened. Happy building!
