Do not index
Do not index
Killing a product is never easy.
You spend countless hours on the development and trying to figure out growth, you think about the product for months. But deep inside, you know it isn’t working.
Not to mention that you acquired this product for multi 5 figures.
This has been my story with Typeframes.
And a few days ago, I finally decided it was time. I shut down Typeframes.
Doing this gave me a lot of learnings for my future projects. And I think the lessons might help you too.
- Story behind Typeframes
- Creation of Revid.ai
- The decision to let go
- And the transition between the 2 products
Let’s talk about it all 👇
Backstory
For those of you who don’t know — I acquired Typeframes from Lilian back in September’23
It was not a subscription-based product and the main use case was product launch videos. It was doing <$1k per month at that point.
And while I loved the tech, I was sure that this was not the business model that would get us the desired results.
Instead, we need:
- A product people use daily
- Recurring revenue to stack MRR
- Broader use case increasing our TAM (total addressable market)
My idea here was Tweet Hunter but for TikTok.
Get inspiration, and create new videos. With AI.
But since Typeframes wasn’t built for that - I quickly forked the product to create TokHunter which was later changed to Revid.ai.
Running 2 products in parallel
At that moment, Typeframes and Revid both shared the same code, the same database, and almost all the backend technicals.
So one might think running both together is a wise choice. You grow 2 products at once and the customer can choose what they need.
Right? No. That isn’t how it works.
For the last 6 months, I tried working on both Typeframes and Revid together. But it just isn’t sustainable.
You give 2x the effort to marketing, SEO, tech, and user feedback for both products, only to realize that one of them isn’t turning that effort into $$$.
Typeframes had 5x churn than Revid.
Revid has a 5x better conversion rate than Typeframes.
The math just doesn’t make sense.
The transition between the products
You might think it’s a lot of work transitioning all the work of Typeframes to Revid. But that’s not the case.
It was simpler than I expected.
I just redirected Typeframes.com to revid.ai and most of the task was done.
You see…when we share the same database between products, the accounts are common. That means if someone has a Typeframes subscription, they already have a Revid subscription (and account).
This means -
- They get instant access to a better product
- They get 3x more features to produce more content
And this does show in the numbers -
The combined churn is somewhere in the middle for now but I like the trend on the graph. More about this after a few months when I have enough data.
The SEO for Revid has grown a lot too. It would be super interesting to see how this pans out over the long term.
The lessons
All of this when thought about deeply reveals a lot of lessons for all the makers out there. Here are some of them -
1 - You should FORK more products
It’s a nice way to focus on new use cases without alienating the original product and stopping all momentum there.
People don’t do this often. Maybe not at all.
I have forked my products twice (this, and once when I created Taplio from Tweet Hunter) and both times it has helped me grow.
2 - A narrow use case gives you a solid PMF
If you aren’t sure if you have PMF yet, maybe you are doing too much with your product. Niche down.
1 use case.
1 customer persona.
And if you see growth - it’s working.
Don’t overcomplicate it.
3 - Sometimes, not working on the thing is the best
Shutting the work on something is more of an emotional challenge than a technical one.
But you should know in your heart that you tried everything you could and this product/biz model isn’t working.
So, what do you feel about this edition?
Leave your comments by replying to this email 👇
And if you like reading stories and insights like these - forward them to a maker friend who might enjoy them too!
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