I Shut Down My Startup After 100 Waitlist Signups. Here's What I Learned

I am shutting down Ravah, a startup I spent months designing, building, and trying to grow.

About 100 people joined the waitlist. Founders understood the problem. The product kept improving, and the vision became more ambitious.

But the evidence did not grow with it.

I had validated interest. I had not validated repeated use, willingness to pay, or product-market fit.

That distinction is the main reason I am closing Ravah.

TL;DR

• A waitlist proves that your promise is interesting, not that your product is needed.
• Shipping more features can look like progress while customer evidence remains unchanged.
• Define the behavior that will validate a feature before building it.
• Startups need explicit co-founder responsibilities and decision rights early.
• When the roadmap grows faster than customer evidence, it is time to narrow, pivot, pause, or stop.

What I was trying to build

Ravah began with a focused idea.

Founders constantly create material worth sharing: product releases, customer lessons, pricing decisions, onboarding changes, mistakes, and milestones. Most of it never becomes useful content because converting product work into posts takes time and context.

I wanted Ravah to understand a product once, remember its audience and voice, and turn real product activity into useful content for channels such as LinkedIn and X.

The early response was encouraging. Around 100 people joined the waitlist, many after I shared the idea on Reddit. People requested access and told me they understood the problem.

At the time, that felt like validation.

It was—but only of the top of the funnel.

How a focused product became a platform

The first version generated content for founders.

Then the scope started expanding:

content generation
  -> coordinated campaigns
  -> product-aware growth
  -> Reddit and community distribution
  -> website, changelog, docs, and GitHub integrations
  -> scheduling and analytics

Each step made sense on its own.

If Ravah understood a product, why shouldn't it create a campaign? If it could create the content, why shouldn't it distribute it? If it distributed the content, why shouldn't it measure the results?

On paper, every version sounded better than the previous one.

That was the trap.

I kept asking:

What could Ravah become?

I should have been asking:

What narrow part of Ravah do people need badly enough to use repeatedly and pay for?

The first question creates a roadmap. The second creates evidence.

Building became a comfortable place to hide

As a developer, I know how to make progress visible.

I can improve onboarding, redesign a dashboard, tune a prompt, change a model, fix an edge case, or add an integration. Code gets committed. Screens change. Tasks move to “done.”

Customer validation is less comfortable.

It can produce ambiguous feedback. It can show that the feature you want to build is not important. It can force you to challenge the story you have been telling yourself about the product.

So I kept building.

The work was real, but I was using it to delay the harder business question:

Do enough people care enough to keep using this?

This is a dangerous failure mode for technical founders. Because we can build the next feature, building it feels like the responsible next step.

Sometimes it is just the most familiar next step.

The validation ladder I use now

Not all positive signals mean the same thing.

A waitlist is useful. It gives you a group of people to interview and observe.

It does not complete product validation.

Ravah’s 100 signups told me to investigate further. I treated them as permission to expand.

A practical rule before building the next feature

I now want every meaningful feature to begin with five written fields:

Hypothesis: What do I believe users need?
Behavior: What will users do if I am right?
Threshold: How much of that behavior is enough?
Deadline: When will I evaluate the result?
Decision: What will I do if the evidence is weak?

For example:

Hypothesis: Founders need product updates converted into social posts.
Behavior: They return after the first output and generate from a second update.
Threshold: 5 of 10 active testers return within 14 days.
Deadline: Two weeks after onboarding.
Decision: Interview non-returning users before expanding the workflow.

This does not make product decisions perfectly objective. It makes it harder to redefine success after seeing the results.

Without a predefined signal, almost any feedback can become a reason to keep building.

The co-founder lesson

I started Ravah with a co-founder. We later disagreed and went our separate ways.

The important lesson is not that co-founders should never disagree. The mistake was that we did not define enough at the beginning.

Before building together, co-founders should explicitly answer:

• Who owns product, engineering, growth, and operations?
• What result is each person accountable for?
• What level of contribution is expected?
• How will disagreements be resolved?
• Who has the final decision in each area?

These conversations can feel overly formal when everyone is excited.

That is exactly when they are easiest to have.

Clear roles do not make one founder more important. They prevent ambiguity from becoming an invisible third founder.

How I knew it was time to shut down

There is no universal metric that tells you when to shut down a startup.

For me, the clearest signal was the pattern of work:

• I could explain the next feature more clearly than the retention behavior that justified it.
• The product kept generating new versions of the vision, but not stronger evidence of recurring need.
• Building another version was easier than staying with one narrow customer problem.

I still believe several ideas inside Ravah are valuable. AI products improve when they understand real product context. Founders do have useful stories hidden in their everyday work. Distribution is still difficult for small teams.

But believing in a thesis is not the same as having a product people need.

I could rebuild Ravah for another year and always imagine that the next version would be the one.

Closing it means choosing the available evidence over the imagined version.

The operating rules I am taking forward

Ravah changed how I intend to build future products:

1. Start with a narrower promise. Prove one recurring need before designing the platform around it.
2. Define evidence before features. Decide which user behavior would justify more investment.
3. Treat interest as the beginning of validation. A signup creates an opportunity to learn, not proof of product-market fit.
4. Stay with the problem longer. Understand its frequency, alternatives, and consequences before expanding the solution.
5. Make ownership explicit. Important areas need a responsible person and a decision process.
6. Schedule reassessment points. Regularly ask whether evidence or only the roadmap is growing.

The lesson is not to stop building ambitious products.

It is to make ambition earn its way into the product.

Frequently asked questions

Does a waitlist prove product-market fit?

No. A waitlist validates interest in a problem or promise. Product-market fit requires stronger behavior, including activation, repeated use, recommendations, and sustained willingness to pay.

How do you know when to shut down a startup?

There is no universal threshold. In my case, continued development was producing a larger vision without stronger evidence of recurring customer need. That pattern told me it was time to stop and redirect my effort.

Should technical founders stop building features?

No. Building is necessary, but every major feature should test a specific assumption. If you cannot describe the behavior that would validate the feature, more customer research may be a better next step than more code.

What I am building now

Closing Ravah does not mean I am done building.

I am currently working on focused products including CookThis, an AI cooking app that turns food photos and ingredients into practical recipes, and ScrollStop, an Android app blocker for protecting study, work, exam, and sleep sessions.

I am also open to selected contract work involving product engineering, frontend development, UX-focused implementation, and practical AI integrations.

Ravah failed to become the business I wanted it to become.

But it taught me the difference between shipping software and proving a business.

It also made me a better founder.

What signal do you use to distinguish product progress from engineering progress?