Why we sold Hairloss AI

My brother and I, alongside our friend Amaan, co-founded a hair loss app that helps men detect whether they're losing hair. We hit $6K CAD MRR and I was adamant we sell. People have asked me why we sold more than once and this piece answers that question.

Money

I like to think that I sold it for the money. My share of the sale would come out to $30K CAD. I was in my final term at university and was just about to graduate. The money would provide runway and I wouldn't have to ask my dad for money. But if I am being completely honest with myself, this was not a major motivator.

Status

Selling an app before graduating is quite the play. People tend to pay attention and I know I had a chip on my shoulder on account of not bagging any prestigious coops while at the University of Waterloo. Still, this wasn't why I wanted to sell.

Product

I hated our product. It was the first mobile app my brother and I built. The design sucked and experience of using the app felt janky. I was dealing with what I later came to understand as the taste gap.

We were being predatory in our pricing models. I hated that we had a hard paywall. $50/year for the value we provided was and still is ridiculous. We were, put simply, a GPT wrapper paired with hair segmentation, producing confidence and binary masks. I hated that some our subscribers opted for the "cheaper" $10/week option and forgot to unsubscribe.

I was reluctant to show the app to strangers. I did not think it was good enough. I distinctly remember attending my first socratica co-working session and avoiding the chance to showcase my work. I did not want it to represent me.

This is not to say that I did not keep iterating. I did but then I quit. I couldn't get my work to not disappoint me. The only think I was proud of at the time was the scanning process I curated for our users. It consisted of automatic image capture based on the user's head orientation. That was neat.

And yet, when my brother or Amaan showed people the app, they were impressed. One person described it as "clean" and my initial instinct was to not take that remark seriously. The party we sold to downloaded all the popular hair loss apps on the market and chose to go with ours. I still remember them telling us that our product was superior by a long shot.

Reflection

I have always set a really very high bar for myself. I want things to be perfect. And it is paralyzing. I've always taken the all or nothing approach. But how can one be the best at the beginning. This has extended into other aspects of life. I have not achieved much of what I thought I would by the time I turned 24 and I believe this is partly why. I self-reject and I don't try.

Things take time and it's okay to suck. It's not okay to skip. For those of you with a similar mindset, iterate, iterate, and iterate again. It's the only pragmatic thing to do. You will close that gap whatever the domain so long as you keep iterating. It's only a matter of time.