Kill Your Darlings

Hi, folks. This is all things product with Petra Ville And Theresa Schwartz. And we're so happy you're here. Theresa, you told me that you decided to kill some of the things in your business that you consider mediocre. I would love to hear more about that and why it is important to sometimes kill your darlings. Yeah. This is a big one. So I'm gonna start with, like, the general, and then I'll apply it to the specific. So we all hear things like you'll know you have product market fit when you have it. When people buy And I've heard this a million times in my career. I'm sorry? When people buy stuff. So you know you have product market fit when people are willing to pay for something. Yeah. But there I think there's this this is something I experienced working at start ups and even in my own business. You might get some people buying something, and it might even, like, be stable, but it's not growing or it's growing very slowly. Right? We have some of these terms like zombie companies where, like, they're stable enough. They have enough revenue to survive, but they're not really growing. Oh, cash cow. It's like you get product. Well, I would say a cash cow is probably fine because it's bringing in a lot of cash. Right? Okay. Fair enough. I think there's this idea of, we know that, like like, we can try to convince ourselves we have product market fit because people are buying our product and it is they may even really like our product. But maybe we've maybe there's just not enough people like that. So, like, the product is good. People are happy with the product, but it's just kinda limping along because our target market is too small or the people that it resonates with is too small. And I think, like, we start to get a signal that, like, oh, people are buying this. It looks positive. It may even grow for a little while, and then maybe something changes in the market and you lose that product market fit or you never quite had that product market fit. You had some early fans. And so, like, I think we all know this. Like, we all know intuitively in our head and, like, we read things like, you'll know you have product market fit when you have it. For anybody who's worked at a company that was like a rocket ship, like, you're growing so fast. Everything is breaking. You can barely keep up. Like, there's no question you have product market fit. I think a lot of us have worked in organizations where that's not what we experienced. We experienced this more like, it's a viable business. It's good news. Or not. Business. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you're surviving, but it's I think that's actually a harder situation where you have some success, but it's not necessarily meeting your goals or …