The High Price of Getting It Almost Right

When we talk about product failure in tech, we tend to picture the big blowups. The high-profile launches that crater on impact. The hardware device that never made it past the first production run. The app that burned through a marketing budget only to disappear quietly six months later. These kinds of failures sting—they can cost anywhere from $5 million to $50 million depending on the scope. But in a strange way, they’re the cleanest kind of loss. You know what happened. You know when it happened. And eventually, someone calls time of death and you move on.

But that’s not where most of the damage is done.

The real money—often 10x more—is lost on products that don’t fail loudly. They fail slowly. The tool that sort of works. The feature that gets some usage but never gets renewed. The offering that’s technically fine but strategically hollow. These poor-fit products don’t implode; they linger. They generate just enough traction to avoid getting cut, but never enough momentum to justify their existence. And that’s what makes them so expensive.

A poor-fit product can quietly burn through $10 million, $50 million, sometimes upwards of $100 million. Not in one dramatic blowout, but in a slow, unremarkable grind. The support burden adds up. Marketing keeps trying to revive it. Sales gets stuck explaining it. Product teams keep tweaking it, hoping for a turnaround. And all the while, something more promising isn’t being built. The most dangerous outcome isn’t failure. It’s distraction—backed by sunk costs, internal politics, and the desperate hope that next quarter will be different.

These kinds of failures are especially common in SaaS and platform businesses. In SaaS, the product ships fast and iterates endlessly—but if you miss the real use case or target the wrong customer segment, you can spend years optimizing something that never had real pull. In platform plays, the risks are even steeper. Whole ecosystems get built on the assumption that usage will follow. When it doesn’t, the collapse affects partners, developers, even brand equity. Hardware isn’t immune either: just ask anyone sitting on a warehouse of smart devices that became obsolete before they hit scale.

And to be clear, these aren’t dumb products. They often pass internal reviews. They look good in pitch decks. They survive beta. They even get polite customer feedback. But they don’t stick. Because they’re solving a problem that’s slightly off. Or targeting a user who won’t pay. Or chasing a market that doesn’t actually exist. They’re not wrong—they’re just off. And off is expensive.

So what’s the alternative?

It’s not just more research. Most teams already do a lot of listening. Surveys, interviews, feedback loops—they’re swimming in input. The problem isn’t the quantity of feedback. It’s who they’re hearing from—and what those voices are allowed to say.

The customers who really matter in these moments aren’t always the loudest or most “representative.” They’re the ones duct-taping features together. Building workarounds. Pointing out contradictions. These are what we call Catalytic Customers. They don't just use your product; they stretch it. Stress-test it. Spot what’s missing. They show you—early and clearly—what kind of fit you actually have, and whether it's worth doubling down.

Catalytic Customers don’t sugarcoat. They don’t give you what you want to hear. But they’ll save you from spending $100 million perfecting something the market never asked for. If you’re building without them—or filtering them out through sanitized research processes—you’re operating blind. You're listening, but not learning.

Not every product needs to be a blockbuster. But every product deserves to be grounded in sharp, lived insight. The kind that comes from people who know the category inside and out—and are invested in making it better. That’s what Catalytic Customers offer: not just feedback, but foresight.

And in a world where the cost of poor fit keeps rising, foresight isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the difference between strategic clarity and a very expensive distraction.