We Built a Great Product. Only 3 Customers Bought It.

In product management, failure isn’t rare.

But the failures that teach you the most are the ones that looked like wins right until they weren’t.

A couple of years ago, I led the development of a SIM Analytics Tool - a data dashboard designed to give enterprise customers deep insights into their SIM usage, performance, and diagnostics.

We built it with conviction. Our users had asked for more visibility, better reporting, and proactive anomaly detection. We validated the problem, scoped the MVP, and started building.

Six months later, we launched.

And then, nothing much happened.Only three customers paid for it.

Where Things Went Wrong

Looking back, the mistake wasn’t in execution. The design was solid. The product worked. The UX was intuitive.

Our failure came from a strategic blind spot, we never validated willingness to pay.

We assumed that since customers wanted visibility, they would happily pay for a tool that offered it. What we didn’t test was whether they saw this capability as a separate, monetizable value-add.

When we went back to talk to customers, one response summed it up:

“This is great, but shouldn’t this be part of what we’re already paying for?”

That single question revealed the gap between what we thought was value and what they perceived as baseline.

The Lesson: Interest ≠ Intention

Early validation calls can be misleading.

• People will tell you your idea sounds useful. They’ll say they’d “definitely use it.”

• But there’s a world of difference between saying something is useful and being willing to pay for it.

In our case, the product solved a real pain point, but it didn’t create enough incremental value over what customers already had. We learned that the real question isn’t “Is this useful?” but rather

“Is this valuable enough for users to change behavior or open their wallets?”

Frameworks That Could’ve Helped

If I could rewind that project, I’d run three quick tests before build:

1. Value Framing Interviews: Ask customers to rank the new idea against existing capabilities.

   1. If they see it as an enhancement, bundle it.

   2. If they see it as distinct value, price it separately.

2. Willingness-to-Pay Surveys: Even a lightweight survey would have revealed pricing expectations early.

3. Fake Door Test: A quick A/B test where users “click to explore” about the new feature. This would have helped measure intent.

Each of these would’ve cost less than a week to run. Instead, we spent six months building a product that never reached scale.

Shutting It Down

When we finally decided to sunset the product, it was a hard conversation. No one likes closing something they’ve invested deeply in but that’s part of the craft.

The team learned a lot about market alignment, customer perception, and pricing psychology. And personally, I learned something even more important:

Failing fast isn’t about killing bad ideas. It’s about learning early enough to redirect your best ones.

Takeaways for PMs

• Validate willingness to pay, not just problem existence.

• Understand where your product sits in the value hierarchy - “baseline,” “enhancement,” or “transformative.”

• Use pricing validation as a form of discovery, not an afterthought.

• Killing a product doesn’t mean the idea failed, it means you learned what customers actually value.

Every PM carries a few scars from products that didn’t take off. The key is to wear them with pride, they’re proof that you were building, learning, and leading with curiosity.

If you’ve ever had to sunset a product, I’d love to hear what you learned from it. What did it teach you about value perception?