We Launched Our Startup, Then Questioned Everything

Introduction

This is How We Grow, where Jim and I write up what we're doing to grow Kai. We recorded #019 at Jim's place on Friday 30 October, with a new setup: a camera on each of us and a GoPro above the table. It was my turn to lead, and I wanted Jim on the record about the 3 weeks since our Product Hunt launch, because they changed how the whole team works.

Where things stand: launch week brought 182 sign-ups, and most of those people didn't stay. Jim describes the mood as "lost and confused, but also excited". We're back in founders' shoes, looking for the people Kai is really for.

Prefer to watch or listen? Here's the full episode

The 3 weeks after the launch.

The launch brought sign-ups, not users

182 sign-ups in a week, 18 people using Kai every week

We finished 5th on Product Hunt on 13 October. Around it we ran everything we could: the launch itself, emails to Morgen's users, posts on our social accounts, and a lot of work on onboarding and on the paid plans. Launch week brought 182 sign-ups, about 4 times a normal week.

The number we care about didn't follow. People who used Kai on 3 or more days of the week were 17 on 2 September and 18 on the day we recorded.

Sign-ups per week, and people using Kai 3 days a week.

No single job people came for

Jim had been talking to users for weeks before the launch, and the launch made the pattern hard to miss. Everyone used Kai for something different. Kai can do a lot, and that's the problem: there was no one job we could take to the next 1,000 people and say "do this with Kai". No use case, so no persona, so no message that works.

Why we're back to discovery.

So the team is starting again from the market: who exactly Kai is for, what those people are trying to do, where their current tools fall short, and why Kai would be the obvious fix. Jim expects the product to change a lot once we know.

Why Jim stopped our ads

4 positions, €2,772, 0 active users

Over the summer we tested positions with ads on Google and Meta. Each one was a guess about who Kai is for: people with ADHD, AI-native builders, people who need an assistant and can't justify hiring one. On Google alone, from August to October, 4 positions cost €2,772 and brought 36 sign-ups. 3 of those people got value from Kai on their first day. None became active.

Our Google ads, August to October.

Jim stopped all 4 on 26 October. He gave 2 reasons on the episode.

The guesses were too broad. "You have ADHD" isn't a use case. "When you don't know what to do next, Kai tells you right away because it's connected to everything" is one, and we never got that precise.

Ads are too far from people. Every step of the funnel can fail: the creative, the landing page, the targeting, the message, whether people are ready to buy. Jim's math: test 3 angles at 200 sign-ups each and you have 600 sign-ups, about 60 people who stay and maybe 1 or 2 who pay. Without a huge budget, that teaches you nothing you can trust.

Why an ad test teaches so little.

5 calls per group, before anything else

Who we're calling

The clearest group among the people who stayed after the launch isn't tech founders, the persona we went after first. It's founders of small agencies, or people running 3 or 4 small businesses at once. Students, PhD students and people with ADHD stayed too, but there's not enough volume to read anything into it. As Jim put it, if we had to bet our life on one group, it would be those founders.

Who stayed after the launch.

So he's calling 3 groups: real estate agents, starting in California, fractional executives and agency owners. The calls aren't about Kai. They're about anything these people struggle with, emails and meetings first, but anything goes. If real estate agents turn out to be drowning in legal paperwork, that's worth knowing too.

The plan: 5 calls per group, selling nothing.

How Jim runs the outreach

From a list to a call, in 7 steps.

1. Build the list with Claude. Jim uses MoltSets, an API he connected to Claude, and asks in plain words: fractional CFOs in Europe holding 3 jobs at once, find 500. It comes back with names, emails and LinkedIn profiles.
2. Reach out in steps. Visit their LinkedIn profile, send an invite, send an email, send a LinkedIn message, send another email.
3. Sell nothing. The message is "we're founders building something for people like you, want to hop on a call?"
4. Stop at 5 calls. 5 conversations per group are enough to know whether there's something there. If not, he moves to the next group.
5. Build for whoever leans in. When someone says "wait, you can solve that?", the team builds it and goes back to them within days.

Calls with our own users run in parallel, but Jim noticed a bias: those people signed up for a reason, and they're a narrow slice of the market. The cold groups are there to correct for it. When we recorded, the first internal calls were done and the cold campaigns had gone out less than 24 hours before. From experience, Jim expects a week before the first call and 2 or 3 calls per 100 people reached.

I asked whether Kai should stay a tool for one person or become one for a team, since an accountant with the problem likely has colleagues with the same one. Jim's answer: it depends on the use case, and the calls will tell us.

Our new North Star: the value day

Same users, different answers

After the launch, several of us analysed who was getting value from Kai and came back with different answers. David counted 15 people getting value, Jim got a different number, because each of us defined value our own way.

The old North Star dated from before the product was finished. It counted agentic actions: any time Kai used one of its tools. The problem showed up fast. A lot of people connected their inbox and never came back, while Kai kept sorting their email in the background. Those runs counted as value, and we paid for them.

What our North Star counted, then and now.

One unit for everything

Jim rebuilt our metrics around one unit, the value day: a day Kai did something for you that you'd notice. A task, an event or an email Kai made because you asked, a meeting you recorded, an action on something Kai flagged or drafted. Kai working in the background doesn't count, and neither does chatting or reading a brief.

Everything else is built on it:

1. Active: 3 or more value days in the last 7 days. Our North Star is the number of people who are active this way.
2. Activated: 3 value days in your first 7 days.
3. Retained: a value day in your second week.

What counts as a value day, and what's built on it.

The bar is 3 because people who reach it keep coming back.

Back for value the next week, by value days this week.

What the new number showed us

Since August, 4.4% of sign-ups reached 3 value days in their first week. Split by where people came from, the difference is stark: 16% of people who used Morgen before trying Kai, against 2.5% of everyone else.

Active in their first week.

Paid traffic showed the gap best. Those people finished onboarding and connected their inbox, and never had a single value day. Jim's point: if Kai were built for the people we were reaching, activation would be 50% or 60%, not around 5%.

Where activation is, and where Jim wants it.

The honest caveats

• The numbers are small. At 18 people, 1 person is 6% of the North Star, so we read it over 4 weeks, never day to day.
• September reads low. Acting on an email Kai flagged went unlogged for part of September and October, so value days from that stretch undercount.
• Calls are slow. A week to the first call, 2 or 3 calls per 100 people, and 5 calls might show nothing.
• We're giving up volume. Product-led growth needs a lot of sign-ups to conclude anything. Moving to conversations means fewer, deeper signals, and slower sign-up growth while we look.

What's next

Jim runs the discovery calls, group by group, and the team builds for the first group that leans in.

On my side, our content moves from selling Kai's features to selling a workflow: one reel a day built around a single job, with the workflow sent to whoever comments.

Our content plan.

I also brought Jim an idea from another founder, a €0.99 trial instead of a free one. Fewer people tried the product, and the share who stayed and paid doubled. Jim likes it as a filter for the merely curious, but we haven't decided anything yet.

The trial idea, in that founder's numbers.

Our next hackathon is in about 3 weeks, and the next episode may be a special one with David.

If you want to follow along, the whole series lives at How We Grow, and the changelog shows what we ship week to week.