CTO Scrapped Months of Work After Demo Revealed Wrong Product Direction

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A startup CTO in the United Kingdom shared a key lesson learned while building an edtech SaaS platform for researchers. After months of development, a product demo revealed that the solution built did not effectively address the users' problem, despite a solid technical foundation. The team decided to discard the existing codebase and start over, acknowledging that sunk time should not justify continuing with a flawed approach. The experience led the CTO to rethink the development process, emphasising the need to validate assumptions and ask critical questions before writing any code. The core takeaway is that understanding a problem does not automatically mean the proposed solution is the right one.

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