Best Business Blogs

What It Looks Like When a Startup Lab Kills a Product Idea

What goes into a kill decision? Rigorous analysis of competition, audience, data, and product-market fit.

Photo: J J D/Getty Images

Best Business Blogs is a Marker column that scours the web for the most interesting posts on business, entrepreneurship, and product development. This post was originally published by Pioneer Square Labs.

At PSL, we kill nine out of 10 ideas that we test. We haven’t talked much about these publicly before, but we wanted to share what it looks like when we make a “kill” decision. Our goal in publishing this is to help other founders think about how to do early validation the way that we do inside the studio.

The idea we tested was Xylo, which solved a problem that millions of parents in the U.S. experience: finding great teachers for music lessons. Our proposed solution was an online platform to connect these teachers with students for remote (or in-person) lessons with a great user experience. Sounds like a great idea, right? Let’s dive in!

This email was sent by Peter Denton, our validation lead, to our whole team.

A section of the test site for Xylo. Note that we typically use very basic landing pages so that the quality of the design doesn’t affect results. Simple templates allow us to ensure our conversion data is attributable to resonance of the value propositions, not the site execution.‍ Image: Pioneer Square Labs

From: Peter Denton

Date: Friday, January 10, 2020

Subject: Xylo investigation

To: PSL Team

Hey everyone,

I have been looking into Xylo this week and wanted to share my findings with you. To cut to the chase, I am recommending we kill this idea, but of course, I want to share my methodology and see if anyone wants to keep going.

I am working under the assumption this is marketplace business where we take a cut of the revenue in a booking.

If we just start at the raw demand generation around this, according to Google, over the next quarter, for the entire United States, we could get 36,000 clicks for $84,591 in marketing spend. I would look at this as the entire world of actionable intent-driven demand.