Sometimes your best customers barely use your product

I noticed something slightly uncomfortable in my product and customer data this week.

I have been auditing flights and speaking to existing customers nonstop whilst building out version three of Empty Leg Finder.

And this latest finding stopped me dead in my tracks.

In fact, I double and triple checked it because I wasn't entirely sure I believed what I was seeing: some of my best customers barely use the product.

At first, that sounds bad.

No, scratch that.

It sounds fucking terrible.

Surely the people getting the most value should be logging in, searching constantly and clicking around like maniacs?

Well, for a product in the empty leg space, apparently not.

Now, this would have caught me completely off guard had I not already been suspicious that search was the wrong front door, I may have even shed a few tears.

When I looked at members who had stayed subscribed for three months or more, a pattern jumped out.

These users were hardly ever searching.

Most of them signed up, told us where they fly from, set up alerts and then disappeared.

Meanwhile, many of the customers who joined, searched heavily, set no alerts and tried to find a specific flight churned within 30 days. In fact, they would often churn within the first week.

It's weird when you're effectively building a case against your own product after spending so much time building it.

But such is life.

I've been in business long enough to know that the market does not care how hard you worked on something.

It cares how valuable that thing is to them.

And perhaps, for this product, in this specific market, maybe, just maybe, I've been looking at engagement completely backwards.

If someone has to keep opening my product every day to get value from it, perhaps I haven't actually removed much work from their life? For some apps that is the correct shape, you want to create something sticky and engaging.

But it would seem my longest-standing members don't want another platform to browse.

They want me quietly watching thousands of flights and tapping them on the shoulder when something relevant appears.

The less they need to do, the better the product might actually be working.

Again, it's all so obvious in hindsight when you've got five or six months of data sitting in front of you.

I admit, that creates a strange problem for builders because we're conditioned to celebrate activity.

Sessions. Searches. Clicks. Time in product.

But those metrics only matter if activity is actually the thing the customer came for in the first place.

Sometimes the job of the product is to make the activity disappear.

I don't know yet if this observation leads to the right version of Empty Leg Finder.

But when the people who stay behave completely differently from the people who leave, you'd be an idiot not to pay attention.

So what am I going to do about it?

I've built a fresh concept on Replit that I'm deploying this week to test whether I can get 20 members paying for the service within the next 30 days.

No point burning down V2.

No point throwing away the progress we've made on V3.

And equally, no point defending either of them just because I've spent months working on them.

If this new concept runs and gains traction, it will give me a much stronger signal for how I approach finalising V3.

And that brings me to the lesson I think is probably more important than anything else in this essay.

Do not get emotionally attached to your effort.

That is how sunk cost starts creeping into your decisions.

You stop asking, is this still the right thing to build?

And start asking, how do I justify everything I've already built?

Those are very different questions.

When we start a new product, offer or concept, we have no choice but to work from assumptions.

We take risks.

We make bets.

We build things without knowing whether we're right.

That's the job.

But those assumptions should eventually be replaced by evidence, not by:

Well, I've already spent six months building this, so I might as well carry on.

I've built V2.

I'm building V3.

And now some of the data is challenging one of the assumptions sitting underneath both.

My options are pretty simple.

Ignore it and protect my ego.

Burn everything down and overreact.

Or run another small bet and let customers tell me whether there's something here.

I'm choosing the third one.

Yes, it sucks when the market challenges something you've put a huge amount of energy into.

But that's the cost of admission and, in my opinion, the privilege of getting to compete.

Your effort isn't the asset.

The learning is.

Another assumption challenged, another small bet going into the market.

We keep chipping away until we deliver something undeniably valuable for the people we're trying to serve.

Catch you in the next one.

Tariq