Weekly Update 🙏: A Hard Decision and What's Next
Hi Everyone,
Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. It's been a few weeks since my last post and I have a lot to catch you up on, but first I want to quickly reflect on the past year.
Looking Back
It's hard to believe it's been a year since I started these weekly updates. I started building an app (then called Matchbox) in my apartment to help my girlfriend and I actually go to the restaurants we were seeing on Instagram and TikTok. Your early engagement gave me the confidence to hire a dev team to turn the prototype into something real. By summer we had a fully functioning MVP with a few hundred of you using it.
Your testing was eye opening. While the MVP was interesting, it ended up being a glorified junk drawer, but there were some clear nuggets worth investing in. I built out a co-founding team to take those sparks and turn them into something that could get traction. We wanted to help you act on things in social posts by surfacing all the links within Instagram's messaging system. We built it and it worked. That's where I left you last.
Digging Into Product Market Fit
Between then and now, I started trying to understand how this was going to make money. It was clear we needed influencers on our side, but unclear whether they'd be our distribution channel or customer. So I set up a bunch of calls with influencers at different sizes, and what I learned was unexpected.
Turns out most influencers sit on a spectrum. Early-stage creators are open to any revenue opportunities but don't have budget for tools. More established influencers are laser-focused on driving followers to a singular outcome. The idea that we could give their users 5 other links to click on presented more of a risk than a benefit.
With this insight, it became clear that what we were building would actually cause a problem for influencers, not solve one. This stopped us in our tracks.
I realized that while we were solving a clear frustration (losing track of your favorite content) we weren't actually solving a problem. This frustration wasn't preventing people from buying things or going to restaurants. It was clearly "nice to have," not "need to have." And without influencers' support, distributing this product was going to be nearly impossible.
A Hard Decision
After sitting with all of this, I made the difficult decision to wind Nabb down. This year has been one of the greatest learning experiences of my career. I took an idea from my apartment to an app with hundreds of users and thousands of saves. Not every project is worth continuing, and sometimes the biggest learnings come from the things we decide to stop pursuing.
I'm so grateful for all the support this community has given me, from everyone who put up with the janky prototype to those who gave their time to help me understand the pain points. I cannot thank you all enough.
Sooo...What's Next
- Nabb: I am keeping the app alive through year-end so you can retrieve any important saves.
- Consulting: I'm refocusing on my consulting business in 2026: fractional executive, advising, and banking opportunities. Feel free to reach out if I can help!
- Building: I'm not done! I'm doubling down on social content, expanding into longer form content with a broader distribution strategy, and exploring new ideas. More to come early next year!
I'll be taking the rest of December to relax and prepare for an exciting 2026. Look for a deeper dive on my Nabb learnings after the new year.
Thank you all again for your support. None of this would have been possible without it.
Pat