The hardest product decision I ever made was deciding not to build the very features that could’ve saved me.
A few months ago, I wrote about MVPs - building narrow but deep instead of wide and shallow, and not asking “what’s the smallest complete solution we can build?” but rather “what’s the smallest increment that delivers meaningful value?”
In truth, that was a not-so-coy canary about my own company, Afterpath. And I was writing that post amidst one of the most brutal product cuts I’ve ever made.
The product I wanted to build was the one I could have used when I needed help the most. The one that could have told me to pay closer attention to the escalating health scares, the structure around my parents’ affairs, and the one I needed at 2am, staring at a stack of mail and hundreds of documents in a cardboard box (me, pictured).
Building for that guy would’ve felt like the best thing to do in the world. But the product guy in me said let’s take a closer look.
So, we started talking to both consumers and professional executors. Turns out, they’ve both been trudging through an unsupported system for decades.
But only one of them at scale. An estate attorney or a CPA already helps, on average, a dozen or so of those families every year.
The real discovery: they felt loss too. They knew these families. They’d helped them with tax preparation, or setting up their estate plans through retirement, and then took over the administration as their clients passed away.
Across dozens of sessions, I heard these attorneys and CPAs describe the hours their practices lose to tedious, un-billable administrative work that no one can attach a real value to - the work that quietly caps how many families they can help in a given year.
So we went narrow.
B2B. Estate settlement. One state only to start - my home state of North Carolina. We’re building for the attorneys and CPAs who sit across the table from families like mine on their hardest day.
For years, I’ve led teams to build as if it were their own product - their own capital. But I didn’t understand what I was asking until the thing on the line was the product I’d been burning to build.
Now, the discipline I’d been preaching told me to put the bigger vision down. If just for now.
We build for and with the professionals today, and that work is what I believe will earn us the right to build the consumer product later - the one for the families, the one I started all this for.