We killed our flagship product on a Sunday. Monday revenue 3x'd.

The hardest part wasn't the money. It was the team meeting where I tried to explain that the dashboard half of us had spent four months on was probably going to be deleted.

One of my engineers — someone who'd left a senior role at Datadog to join us — asked, calmly, whether we even had a strategy or whether I just changed my mind every time I read a Substack post. I didn't have a clean answer. I went home and cried in my car for forty minutes in the parking garage.

The fundraising conversations were worse. Every existing investor wanted us to "lean into the platform." Two new investors had passed the week before specifically because we weren't enough of a platform. Our advisor told me, gently, that I was about to commit the most expensive form of cowardice: doing the thing the room expected.

I spent the next three weekends running a quiet audit. Every feature. Every customer. Every dollar.

On a Sunday in February I opened a fresh repo and started porting just the email-routing workflow back to the simple version. By midnight it ran. By 4am I'd deleted the rest of the product from a staging branch and rewritten the homepage to say one sentence: "Halt turns your messiest inbound emails into structured records. Nothing else."

Monday morning I sent the team a Loom explaining the change. Three people quit by Friday — fairly, I think. The remaining four shipped the new version to production by the following Tuesday.

Within a week, three customers who'd been on free trials upgraded to a new $1,200/month plan we'd posted on the pricing page. Within a month, a logistics company we'd never heard of paid us $36,000 upfront for a year. By the end of Q2, MRR had 3x'd from the prior quarter and gross margin had jumped from 41% to 78%.

The "platform" had been hiding the actual business inside it.

1. 1
   Default to subtraction.

   Every feature you ship is a tax you'll pay forever. We deleted 80% of the product and the remaining 20% paid for the company.

2. 2
   The investors who like your deck don't run your P&L.

   "Platform" is a fundraising word. It is rarely a customer word. Build for the second one.

3. 3
   Listen to who already pays you, not who might.

   Our four happiest customers were all using one feature. We were building five more for prospects we hadn't even met.

4. 4
   The cowardice tax is real.

   The thing you're scared to do — kill the product, fire the wrong hire, ship the smaller version — usually carries the highest expected return. The expected cost of waiting is invisible until it isn't.

5. 5
   Three days of focus beats three months of optionality.

   We rebuilt the company in a weekend. The previous fourteen months had been an elaborate way to avoid that weekend.