It’s the end of the road for Klop!. I could not build it the way I hoped. I’m quite proud of the idea that my first product didn’t work out. I’m not sure if that’s the right way to think about it, but imagine not even trying? Klop failed because of the technology and the problem space.
The project ended months ago, but I wasn’t willing to accept failure.
Let me start with the biggest issue I faced: Access to bank transaction data. Firstly, access was expensive and secondly, after access, the experience was terrible.
I assumed that access to bank information would be an API agreement away. It was, but at a cost I wasn’t willing to pay for a bootstrapped product. The API provider would be willing to onboard us for R10,000 minimum per month. This is not a lot of money, but for a business that doesn’t have any traction it’s a risk. I wasn’t sure how quickly I’d be able to ramp up business revenue to cover it. I wasn’t willing to take that risk. In other countries where Open Banking is already rolled out, access to bank transactions is simple and easy. Klop needed this. It simply wasn’t going to work without it.
The second issue I mentioned earlier was about the user experience. Every time I requested data from any bank, the user had to grant access via 2-factor authentication. So I couldn’t pull in anything without the user consenting — every single time. This was not the experience I had in mind.
A few weeks ago I had a meeting with the data provider. He was kind and gave me the facts straight. What I expected to be a long interesting chat turned out to be a very short, but effective one. We got straight to pricing and experience. I knew immediately that it simply wasn’t going to work, but I held it in my head for a while just to make sure I shouldn’t try anything else. I wasn’t 100% convinced right then, but I came around later.
The next phase of realising it wors over was my usage. It went way down, until the point where I hardly looked at it. It has been weeks since I opened up the app and now I’m at the point of just going back to my Excel sheet. The experience there somehow felt much, much better. I think it has to do with how easy it is to re-arrange things by just copying and pasting and of course changing things was a breeze. The saying is true: All software competes with Excel. If I’m not going to use my own app, why would I expect anyone else to?
I may not have tried hard enough. I may have gone into it naively. I may have lacked the charisma to sell people on my ideas. I’m not the type of person who talks big when he doesn’t have anything to back it with. So I had to build it first. I had to put in the effort. I had to see it for myself. Only then could I see the full picture.
I take from it lots of learnings. I created my first iOS app. I built my own product. I learned a new programming language. I tried something new and I don’t regret anything.