c/canadian-startups

pat360•2d ago

Investor told me to kill my favorite feature. I fought it for 2 months.

I was building a Toronto based SaaS for construction project tracking. Had this one feature where subs could upload site photos with GPS timestamps. I was obsessed with it. Took me 3 months to build. Then an angel investor looked at my demo and said "that's a distraction, your problem is payment tracking not photo storage". I argued. I was sure photos were the hook. But after watching 3 beta users ignore the feature completely, I finally caved. Killed it last week. Put all that code into a payment approval workflow instead. Early numbers show 40% faster invoice processing now. Hard to admit he was right. Anyone else had to kill a pet feature to make the actual product work?

1 comments

palmer.ryan•2d ago

I finally got my Shopify store running after 3 months of overthinking

Everyone says launching a startup is easy with all these drag and drop tools. I spent 3 months messing with themes, plugins, and payment gateways before realizing I didn't even have a proper product to sell. The real issue was I kept adding features nobody asked for instead of just getting the basic store live. That first sale came from a simple Facebook post with a photo taken on my phone, not from the $200 theme I bought. Took me 12 weeks of late nights to figure out what should have been a weekend project. Has anyone else wasted time on polish before proving the product works?

c/canadian-startups

Investor told me to kill my favorite feature. I fought it for 2 months.

I finally got my Shopify store running after 3 months of overthinking

Warning: Threw $2,800 at a chatbot wrapper instead of building real features

Hit 500 email subscribers in just 8 weeks with zero paid ads

Quiet win: My solo dev tool hit 100 users in 3 months without a dollar on ads

Just hit 50 signups on my Vancouver-based app after 3 months of nothing

PSA: Cold emailing VCs from a .edu address got me 3 meetings in a week

Investor told me my pitch deck was "too Canadian" - here's what I changed

Switched from cold outreach to warm intros for my Vancouver SaaS and signups tripled in 6 weeks

Just realized foreign founders can get startup visas way easier than I thought

Pitching to a VC in a coffee shop and the wifi died mid-demo

Can we talk about using local focus groups for early beta testing?

Blew $3K on a coworking space subscription I barely used

Pro tip: using a local college's business library saved my startup $400

Tried running a FB ad for my Toronto SaaS and got zero clicks for 3 days straight

I was dead wrong about coworking spaces for early stage founders

Overheard a Shopify partner say 'don't burn cash on ads' and it clicked for me

Overheard a Waterloo founder say "you just need to build it and they will come"... made me roll my eyes

I was dead set against using a virtual CFO until last month

Had a chat with an angel investor in Vancouver last week that totally flipped my thinking

Was scrolling through Startup Canada's latest report and saw Toronto startups raised 42% of all VC funding in Q1 this year

Made a classic noob mistake with my startup's pricing in Toronto

Hit 100 users in my first month and thought I'd cracked it - then the real work started

Bootstrapped vs. VC funding for my SaaS tool - picked wrong?

Pulled 5 beta signups from a single Reddit comment last night