We started Kairn to create the app to accomplish your goals. We wanted to help users get organised with their daily to-dos lists, while connecting to the broader version - a project management app used by their team to coordinate all projects. As such, we would enable users to feel progress, while solving teams’ struggles to manage projects in real-time. We would solve that riddle of never updated project mgt tools. We were bridging between project and task management - individual and team - you and the group.

Close to 3 years in, we had built an amazing product, loved by its users, delightful to create as we crafted each part with great attention. I can’t explain how proud I am of our team, and will forever thank them - Xavier, Alex, Julien, Mathilde, Romain, Gov, Thomas, Lucas, Roby, Gus - all of you crafted something tremendously beautiful. We received great help from our friends at eFounders, Didier, Thibaut, Greg(s), Alexis, Alex, Martin, Sarah, Joseph, Ben, Juliette, and so many more. Our amazing investors supported us, and we were extremely fortunate to have people who were always on our side including Ekin, Luc, Ben, Dom, Loïs, Michael, Stan, Nemke, Alexis&Jean, and all the others.

However, despite a great start, topping Product Hunt’s favorite projects, receiving awards and fancy titles, we realised that we were working on a utopia, or at least, the way we took was one and we got stuck. We will dig below into the reasons but this is our farewell love letter. I’ll forever be thankful to all the people who have crossed our path, from team members, users, investors, friends, competitors. You have all helped us grow. The entrepreneurial way is a journey and each adventure makes you grow. We all grew, discovering our strengths and weaknesses, confronting a market we thought was ours, learning how to interact and create sparks for our users, how to navigate startup financing, the struggles of managing the team’s stress when the financial market crashed - which meant we had to pivot hardcore. We learnt to build, and tear down a company. Both ways, up and down, taught us plenty - about companies and about ourselves.

So one last time, thanks ♥️. Now, let’s dig into some of the reasons - maybe it will help the next team trying to solve this productivity riddle.

1. We don’t think a personal task mgt tool can really become a project management app for a team anymore. Task mgt is very personal and subjective. The tool that fits one indiv will probably not be the one that fits the rest of the team, it makes it very hard to grow across all team members. The tool needs to be very flexible (= Notion 👋) and take years to build. Even discussing with the new CEO of Superlist (our main competitor with whom we shared a very similar vision at the beginning) we see how they have done a complete switch to a team based tool only.
2. We don’t think anymore that product led growth is the way to go on that market. While the value for the individual user for a task mgt app is clear, there’s little incentive to share projects. You could share a task but that’s very 1-1 relationship while PLG needs a 1-N basis. Miro is a great bottom-up tool because the indiv creative user has a strong reason to use it (materialise their visual ideas) but the team also has a strong reason to use it (align people on visual ideas online). Thus the bottom-up motion works. The indiv has a driver to onboard everyone, and each user has a reason to join.
3. Project and task management is overly popular = hard to keep users’ attention and you need strong exit barriers. We knew it was a crowded market but we didn’t realise how many new apps appear every week. Unfortunately it’s also a segment where people love to try new apps, and managing to keep users’ attention, and not have them try and switch to another tool is hard. You build little exit barriers, as your past tasks on projects don’t matter. Thus as soon as a project is finished the user has no issues in switching tools. The only 3 sticky reasons would be: (i) analytics that build up with usage, (ii) having spent time organising your tool (but many users actually love to spend that time again and again), (iii) having built a habit like our top users with our macOS shortcut - but it’s hard to make it not copy-able by competitors.
4. Integrating with Notion was a great acquisition move but a bad monetisation one. Our users came for our Notion integration, with the dream to follow-up on everything that was asked across Notion. That meant they already had a project management app they were paying for, so to pay for Kairn as a team, we had to at least match Notion’s features which significantly improved on project mgt over the last years. So make sure you’re not a feature of one of the tools you integrate with…
5. The willingness to pay is close to … zero except when you’ve caught up with Asana / Monday / Notion. On task management there are way too many free apps / free features from apps paid by your team, to make the mass pay. You could focus on a niche, but then you’d need to significantly increase the price vs our thinking of mass adoption. Even when we launched very demanded features like a Chrome extension / an iOS app / a gCal integration etc, users liked it but it didn’t drastically change their willingness to pay (nor our acquisition metrics…)

Of course another reason for us to stop was the tech market crash. It changed the dynamics of fundraising and made it increasingly hard for PLG companies not monetizing yet to get good financing. We knew our roadmap would take forever to monetize so we’d need a big raise to get there. To raise, we needed a clear roadmap to monetize, given what we had discovered about the market (☝️ cf above) that meant a strong pivot to change our company’s future. As a solo founder I had to make the decision, did I see clearly enough how we were going to attack the market and believed in it or was I pushing for the pure sake of having a startup story on my LinkedIn and Twitter profiles. Would I be asking for people’s money to simply put another coin in a cash machine that serves no point? Weighting it, I decided it was time to stop.

Stopping is far from an easy decision, as an entrepreneur it’s putting an end to years of hard work, of sweaty brain, and it’s not the pretty exit. You never know what comes after - some will consider it a failure, others a learning. The “nice” exit would be selling the company but then - do you believe in this industry enough to sell and go work for the buyer / do you have enough to sell? / Does the team want to go work on this product at the seller (at this stage you often “sell the team” more than the product)? / Are you selling for the fame of or the future of it? A sell process is long (rarely takes less than 6months) and it’s best done when you’re trending high, otherwise the buyer has the upper hand. A bad sell is extremely negative on an entrepreneur’s mind, it’s a tough roller-coaster and in tight financial times it often falls dead at the last second. We were not in a high position, we didn’t believe in it anymore, so I decided to call it quit and let everyone continue with their next adventure.

As for what will happen next, I’m super happy to say everyone found a new place they love. Xavier at Jitter the Figma of motion design, Alex & Mathilde at Staycation to book your vacation in your own town, Thomas at Marble to help companies prevent fraud, Gov at Melga (his own startup 👏) to revamp the catering industry, Julien at Sopra and Lucas at Kanoma - both developing amazing apps for clients, Romain at Florence helping nurses manage their shifts, Roby at Sociabble, and Gus developing Web3 apps.

For my part, I took some time off to process Kairn’s end. I’m writing articles about our product and company’s choices and I am helping teams redefine their product, improve their UX, and build some magic into it. And the rest of the day, I’ve been surfing coz after all, even when all goes to s*°t, you can still turn any day into a great day, just need to find what that means to you 🤗.