I’m trying to figure out how to best reply here!
First off @Jeff, @Albertkinng, and some others I appreciate that the criticism or worries/anxiety are also bundled with much genuine love for the app and the human effort that goes into it as a project.
I will be digesting on these and try to address FAQ’s as they bubble up. Let me start with one for the frequent shoppers who we really do owe extra answers to. Tagging @modigliani for this one too.
Why not go harder on the Shop?
David and I were really starting to feel burned out by summer or so last year after focusing a ton of our energy on cranking out and supporting the shop, and generally pushing to make it as successful as we could. It was getting a lot harder to come up with new ideas that were also as good as the previous 200+ after we plucked all the most fun obvious ones, kind of like the puzzle difficulty just keeps rising as we continue.
If we somehow doubled the amount, it would ultimately mean like, one or two more months of ‘fresh’ collectibles that rotate? And then are stale again. So I just couldn’t see this turning at some point from this uphill climb grading steeper and steeper as we go, to downhill.
It is possible that over a longer period of time, we slowly build up the collection, and also meaningfully grow our base where shop sales start turning around. But it truly feels like the base would have to multiply 5x or more to get there and we are not at all on a trajectory currently to continue betting the business on it or pouring most of our creative energy into this.
I am really grateful for the support we received from the frequent shoppers and super fans of the collectibles, and we are trying to figure out something for you that can be at all proportionate to how much you contributed.
P.S. @Jeff I am generally a pretty optimistic / hopeful person, and to be honest it can get me in trouble sometimes. This business pivot is some version of that, in that I genuinely believed there was a real chance this would work for Clear, despite it being a fairly crazy experiment, and held onto this a little past the point of productivity.
It is very disappointing the experiment ultimately didn’t succeed, and we let you down. It was something of a reality check for me, and we truly need to solve this to move forward.
I’m a little pooped today so will continue reading and try to answer a couple more of the rising FAQ’s tomorrow.
Thank you all for sharing your thoughts so far, I know that even if we might disagree on how, we are all generally here with the goal to make Clear successful and better. And it seems like by the time this thread wraps up we will have very thoroughly assessed this together.