Sunsetting Rise

> The one burning question you might have: why didn’t you just charge individual users for Rise? It obviously is one that we contemplated a lot, too. The first reason is one based on the fact that we always believed that in order to help teams, we needed to rely on individual users to bring us in. We wanted ‘Product Led Growth’. And we felt that free usage would put us in the best possible position to do so.

I think 'product-led growth' is a euphemism for expecting users to give you unicorn hockey-stick growth for free. Relying on individuals to pull in their employers and teams requires strong pmf, and also requires a very specific user with personal usage patterns that overlap with their professional usage patterns.

I think that 4 years of product-led growth not working should've shown that something needed to change, and that baseline profitability while searching for pmf should've been a higher goal than hockey-stick growth and turning Rise into a unicorn -- but I know, I know: investors.

Regardless, sad to see them go. This was a great refresher on the startup journey.