Why We Killed Our Own Product in a Bear Market.

To start off, building a product isn't easy, and the first version of Adtivity was nothing close to what we have today.

Ola and I [Jae] built the first phase of Adtivity for Web3 marketers, which was basically my problem fit: a tool that brought on-chain analytics, off-chain analytics, and user analytics stitched together in one product, designed to scratch the exact pain I was living when I ran marketing in Web3. The thesis was tight. The product worked. Customers showed up.

Then the bear hit.

My own freelance work thinned out first.

My own contract marketing work started thinning out first. I'd built a freelance pipeline alongside my other jobs, and one by one the clients pulled back, not because my work was bad, but because their budgets were gone. Web3 was tightening up, and the first line item on every founder's cut list was the marketing one.

Then the agencies I'd worked with also started shutting down. The big boys in Web3 marketing were going quiet, downsizing, or closing entirely. The pattern got loud enough to name.

There's a joke in marketing that marketing is the first thing companies cut when times are tough. It's a joke because it's true in any business in any cycle. But Web3 has its own additional bipolar disorder. The category itself runs in seasons, with bull runs paying for everything and bear drag paying for almost nothing, and if you stack the two you get a situation where marketing in Web3 is doubly cyclical: the first to get cut in any company, in a category that itself has the deepest cuts.

If you're a SaaS, you do not want to be selling to the first function that gets cut, in such a category.

That was the call, and I had to figure out a way around it.

There were no clean receipts. There was momentum.

A futuristic version of this piece that landed two years from now would point to a number. A 60% MRR drop with a graph of churned contracts and a pre-and-post chart that justifies the decision in front of an investor.

But that's not how this went. There was no clean receipt of contracts lost. There was the qualitative signal. My contract work just drying up, the agencies I worked with shutting down, the customer conversations all turning the same direction at the same time.

A friend in London, a fintech founder building a payment platform who also worked in Web3 as a community builder and ran his own product on the side, was on the same titanic. Different category, same conclusion. He was pivoting too. Every other person I spoke to who was in a similar position was pivoting too, and most of them were moving fast. No one in the conversation pushed back. There wasn't a contrarian voice in the room saying hold the line. The room was uniform, and the room was moving.

That's the thing about the right moment to pivot. The market doesn't always send you a dashboard alert. Sometimes it sends you a quiet hallway full of doors closing at the same time. You read the hallway.

The customers were already leaving before we did.

The customers Adtivity already had didn't disappear when Ola and I started thinking about pivoting. They were pivoting too. The on-chain analytics value didn't go away. But every customer conversation was drifting the same direction: revenue-focused, subscription-shaped products. Leaving the pure-token-economy mental model and stepping into the SaaS one, where customers pay every month and churn is the metric that actually matters.

We weren't abandoning the existing customers. We were meeting them where they were going. The product they needed was less marketing analytics for Web3 ops teams and more revenue analytics for the founder running a subscription product who happens to have a Web3 piece on the side.

So Ola and I picked our slice. AI-native founders building on subscription. Indie hackers and micro-SaaS founders already paying for Claude, Cursor, and ChatGPT, who would actually use the product, give us real feedback, and grow with it over time. That's the egg play, named on the day the ICP got rewritten. Catch founders as they're starting up. Grow with them through their first $1K MRR, their first $10K, their first $50K. Be the analytics layer they don't leave when they scale, because every other tool in the category was built for a team with a data engineer and a finance function, both of which AI-native founders don't have.

Founders love analytics. Until they have them.

That insight came from talking to those founders directly. It's the line the brand keeps coming back to: founders love analytics, until they have them. Then they don't know what to do with them, just like having the supermodel you always wanted to date.

It's not a time problem. It's not a dashboard-visibility problem. It's that founders aren't marketers. They were never going to be. Most of them are engineers who learned product, or product people who learned engineering, or designers who learned both. Asking them to also do the marketer's read on a sea of metrics is asking the wrong person the wrong question.

So we reframed the product. Adtivity wouldn't just give founders the dashboard. Adtivity would do the marketer's read for them. The what does this mean, what should I do about it, when does it matter layer that founders couldn't supply on their own.

That's what eventually became Adtivity 2.0 with EI (Execution Intelligence, we're still workshopping the name, Ola hates it), Pulse Alerts, and the thesis for our Founder Wall. All of it traces back to that one insight, on those conversations, in that period.

Pulse Alerts shipped because founders wanted to share, not just see.

The other thing that came out of those conversations: the indie and founder community didn't just want to see their metrics. They wanted to share them. The building-in-public ethos was real. Every founder I spoke to was already posting screenshots of charts on X, or sending Slack screenshots to their group chats, or trying to communicate progress somehow.

If founders want to share their metrics, why don't we build the product that natively analyses the metrics, generates the insight, and packages the moment to share, all in one rail?

That's what Pulse Alerts are. Automated updates that fire when something material happens. 700 users churned. 50% growth this week. A milestone crossed. Every one of them comes with a built-in share rail, so the moment goes from analytics to socials without the founder having to translate. The product becomes its own distribution. Every founder who shares a Pulse is also showing Adtivity.

The Founder Wall is the next layer. A single canvas where every section of a founder's experience lives in one place, so the receipts stay even if the project doesn't.

The Ola moment.

I brought the pivot to Ola, and being who he is, he didn't push back much (thank God) and just went: "I haven't doubled down on anything in a while. Let's do this in a week."

That was the green light. Not a debate or a war, just one sentence from the cofounder. The week-long timer started right after.

The bigger principle.

The pivot wasn't data-driven in the conventional sense. There was no clean number. There was no investor pressure. There was no founder-board governance forcing a rethink.

What there was: a market that wasn't offering value in its current shape, a founder paying attention to what his own contractors and customers and friends were doing, and a cofounder who said yes inside of one sentence.

Pivoting at the right moment is an ideology, not a metric. The right moment is when the market stops offering value in the shape you're built for. You don't wait for the dashboard. You watch the hallway.

Marketing is the first thing companies cut. Every founder knows that. Most of them build for marketers anyway, because the budget exists in the good years and the good years feel permanent. We did the same thing. We just stopped earlier than we were supposed to, and the reason we stopped is that I was the marketer whose budget got cut, so I didn't have to read a report to know. I was the report.

That's why Adtivity is Founder OS now. Not because the data said so. Because the hallway was empty and I was standing in it.