Lost Momentum
I’ve launched a lot of projects, but many immediately lost their momentum.
I launched a project called Worthio years ago. It was Reddit for stock picking. You voted on stocks, and if they increased in value from the time of your up-vote, you got more karma.
Worthio had a ton of traffic, signups and great feedback on launch day from popular sites like Hacker News. But quickly, I stopped putting out improvements, I quit using it, and so did everyone else. What happened?
In a well cited Harvard Business School case study and in the book The Innovator’s Guide to Growth, you can read about Medtronic, a Fortune 500 company that makes medical devices and basically invented the pacemaker industry.
Being the market leader, Medtronic invested significant money in product development, but then newer, smaller, nimbler competitors would beat them at launching similar, slightly more advanced...