Use your own product or die

Don’t hide behind the bravado of being an entrepreneur, fess up and admit that you don’t use your own product or face destruction.

5 years ago I was working inside a very large corporation on a product that operated like a startup but from within corporate walls. The product was a location based mobile social network. We had grown the user base to a couple of million users and things were fine.

But after a while growth stagnated and I noticed that I wasn’t using it as regularly as I wanted our users to. Statistically I would have been classified as a Monthly Active User but only just. We kept building and marketing the product while trying to solve the stickiness problem by adding features and complicated solutions to simple problems. The truth that no one wanted to point out was that most of the core product team didn’t use the product at all, let alone every day.

In the end I left and started up my own mobile social networking company, Motribe.

The business was simple; a platform that allows anyone using any mobile device to create their own social network. I had a great technical cofounder and we raised funding, hired staff, gathered users and found clients.

But early on there was something deeply wrong with what we were doing and I just couldn’t put my finger on it. We had growth but nothing explosive. We had usage but sustained usage wasn’t where it should be. We had…