For Hung, two tickers signalled a deeper problem. First, even though users signed up, "there was basically no activities on the platform." Second, there were no paying users, and a monthly active number "too embarrassing to discuss right now."
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Hung describes how founders get attached to their product and push through dry patches, so the question is how to tell a patch from a fundamental issue. Looking back, he realized the tools they'd built from the base of Personal AI were "a great set of tools and solutions, but they were not addressing the specific problems that our customers had." The signal that it was structural rather than a marketing problem was the combination of zero on-platform activity after signup and zero paying users — the two major tickers that told him they really needed to change.