It sounds harsh for a studio to say it kills products. But the willingness to stop is exactly what lets us start so often. A studio that can't let go of its weak bets slowly turns into a graveyard of half-loved projects, each quietly draining the time and attention the winners deserve.
Every month you keep a product alive out of hope rather than evidence, you pay for it twice: once in the direct effort, and once in the opportunity — the better bet you didn't make because your best people were busy nursing the old one. The costs you've already sunk are gone either way. The only question that matters is what the next month buys you.
We don't kill products because we failed. We kill them because keeping them would be the failure.
The hardest time to judge a product fairly is after you've fallen in love with it. So we set the bar early, in writing, before launch — a clear retention and unit-economics threshold each venture has to clear to earn its next round of resources. When the moment comes, we're not debating our feelings; we're checking a number we agreed on when we were still objective.
Retiring a product is a decision, not a funeral. In practice it means:
Killing fast is not the same as killing early. We give every venture enough runway to produce a real signal — a validated funnel, a readable retention curve, an honest read on economics. What we refuse to do is extend that runway indefinitely on the strength of a good story. A story is not a signal.
The upside of this discipline is quiet but enormous: because stopping is normal and blameless here, people take bigger swings. Nobody's career depends on defending a doomed product. That's how a small studio can afford to be bold — it has made peace with letting go.