I keep seeing SaaS founders kill products way too early.
Not because the product was bad.
Mostly because they didn’t know what to do with it.
The pattern is always similar. There are users. Sometimes a lot of them. People sign up, use one or two things, and then disappear from the story because the founder is focused on something else. Revenue is low or zero, so the assumption is “this isn’t working”.
But usage doesn’t lie the way revenue can.
If people are finding a tool on their own and using it without hand-holding, that already puts it ahead of most ideas that never get past a landing page. The mistake is treating that as a dead end instead of a starting point.
Another thing that shows up a lot is founders guessing who the user is instead of checking. The product gets described as “for teams” or “for individuals” or “for startups” because that sounds reasonable. Then you actually look at who’s using it and it’s IT people, or ops people, or someone in legal who just needs something not to break.
Those users don’t talk loudly. They don’t tweet. They don’t care about roadmaps. They just need the thing to exist when they need it.
That kind of product always gets underpriced.
There’s also this belief that if a SaaS looks simple, it must be worth very little. But a lot of software that companies rely on is boring on the surface. It saves history. It keeps records. It makes sure something can be found later. No one is excited about it until it’s gone.
When founders finally realize this, they usually think the solution is to rebuild. New UI, more features, bigger vision. In most cases that’s unnecessary. The product already does the job. The issue is that no one ever said clearly what the job was.
This feels more important now because shipping software isn’t some rare skill anymore. Getting something live is easy. Figuring out why people keep using it without talking about it is the part most founders never really dig into.
If you have a SaaS that feels too small or not very exciting, it’s probably worth pausing before dropping it. Ask a simple question: who would actually be irritated if this stopped working tomorrow? That answer usually tells you more than another feature ever will.
Sometimes the product isn’t weak.
It’s just misunderstood.
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