Why I Stopped Mining the Internet for Business Ideas (And What I'm Doing Instead)

I killed Rippl, my second mini startup.

There’s no dramatic story here. No big moment, no devastating failure.

It just gradually became obvious that it wasn’t working, and I decided to stop spending time on it.

If you’re waiting for the dramatic part, this isn’t that kind of story.

But here's what's interesting: I killed Rippl to focus on ArtsyPetz, my first business that's actually making money. And that decision changed everything.

Listening to What the Data Says

When I launched Rippl almost two months ago, I made a very conscious decision to listen to what the data was saying. When you launch a startup, you can be tricked into a huge amount of emotional investment that can ultimately cloud your judgment.

Just because you want something to work doesn’t mean it will.

The data ultimately showed that there wasn’t any interest in the product. In the rest of this article I’m going to talk about specific data points and how I felt at each moment:

No paid users. Not even any free users.
No interest from cold outreach
No conversions from Google Ads

No Users

This isn’t technically true, but let’s not split hairs.

Rippl did technically have users. When I first released the product, there were people in my network who created an account to play around and see if they liked it.

…they didn’t (lol).

Some of the feedback included:

“This is cool but it isn’t something I would use.”
“I already do this manually with ChatGPT or Claude and I’m fine with that.”
“This output doesn’t sound like me. Groq sounds more like me.”

Overall, people just weren't interested. If they were dealing with the problem I was solving, there wasn't enough pain for them to pay for a solution.

The last piece of feedback in that list was the most interesting. I think part of that feedback was based on the user not understanding the tool completely. I don't think they spent the time loading their writing samples to let the system learn the writing style and tone. Maybe I didn't build that system the right way.

That was something I considered trying to fix but that user ended up saying they wouldn’t pay for that tool because it wasn’t something they needed.

I could have pursued that avenue more but it ultimately didn’t feel right. I wasn’t going to invest time and resources into building new features based on the feedback of one user who was casually looking at the product with no intent to buy.

No Interest From Cold Outreach

My cold outreach approach was done via Substack. I looked for Substack writers with growing audiences. Finding these writers was easy because Substack will tell you who the top 100 growing writers are for a given category.

If you want more details, I talk about it in detail in a previous article.

The main takeaway was the lack of engagement.

I contacted somewhere around 20 writers. Only a few responded by thanking me for the compliments I gave them but none of them were interested in Rippl.

There is an argument to be made that I didn’t do enough cold outreach. Maybe I should have reached out to more users on Substack, maybe I should have found other places to find writers to approach. Those would be fair criticisms. I ultimately decided against it because I saw the larger problem being that I built a “nice to have” and not a “need to have.”

No Conversions from Google Ads

I created a Google Ads campaign for the first time ever. Overall, it felt powerful to learn, even if the results weren’t good.

In the beginning, things were looking great. I got about 2K impressions and 67 clicks within the first week or so and that felt like a good sign.

But the devil was in the details.

None of the 67 clicks led to users. In reality, that's normal. I was curious to learn more about the clicks and impressions so I started to dive a little deeper into the analytics.

I noticed that a lot of the clicks were coming from really weird websites. When I kept digging, I noticed the problem.

Most of my impressions and clicks were coming from the Google Display Network.

If you don’t know what that is, it’s basically ads that are embedded in other websites. A good example is looking up a recipe. If you go to a blogger’s website to get a recipe, all the ads you see there come from the Google Display Network. That is very different from the ads that appear at the top of a Google search.

That traffic felt cheap, low-quality so I turned off the option for the display network.

Then the ads campaign results dropped considerably.

After I turned off the display network, the following 3-ish weeks resulted in 800 impressions and 35 clicks.

That’s still something but none of it was converting to users.

My Decision in Detail

The data didn't explicitly tell me to shut down Rippl. For each point, I could argue that I could have done more.

I could have pursued more feedback from the small number of users. I could have done a lot more with cold outreach, finding more spaces where writers congregate and reaching out to more of them. I could have updated the Google Ads campaign or done more see if my website was the problem (the value proposition and copy weren’t convincing enough to get people to sign up).

Ultimately, my gut told me that this product wasn’t right.

And my mind kept going back to "I built a vitamin, not a painkiller." Rippl is a nice to have, not a necessity.

I explicitly wanted to avoid a sunken cost fallacy where I continue to work in Rippl because I've already spent months working on it. The emotional part of me wanted to do that but the logical part of me said no.

What made the decision clearer was that I had something else that WAS working. ArtsyPetz, my first business, had made $500-600 with zero marketing effort. People were actually asking about it. That's a signal. And every hour I spent on Rippl was an hour I wasn't spending on something that had proven demand.

What I'm Doing with ArtsyPetz

Now that I have more time and resources, I've been busy with ArtsyPetz.

I went through the whole website and fixed a bunch of bugs and made some improvements. I got rid of bloated features and made the whole thing way more streamlined. The flow makes more sense from the user’s perspective.

I signed up for a vendor event! In the middle of November I got a space for a table at a dog-themed fall shopping festival so I’ve been figuring out a lot of details around that. Simple things like how to decorate the table and bring example products.

Once I get those details figured out, I'm looking to get a lot of feedback during the event. It'll be a great opportunity to see what people's initial reactions are and what changes I can make to make sales.

Then I’ll go back to Google Ads world to get more traffic to the website.

Oh, and social media! I have an Instagram and TikTok account so I’m making an effort to post about the upcoming event as well as day-of content.

"People hate being sold to. People hate being mined for business ideas. People love getting help and having their problems solved."

Ignoring the Signal

My entire experience with Rippl was awesome, even if it never made money or got any users. All of the lessons I learned are transferrable to other products I decide to create.

The biggest insight for me was that I ignored ArtsyPetz even after it made $600 with zero marketing, choosing to chase something new instead.

Maybe I got "shiny object syndrome" and just wanted to play around with something new.

Maybe I didn't recognize what was working because I had no clue what a next step would be. By ignoring the signal from ArtsyPetz, I was able to avoid doing anything akin to sales and marketing. By deciding to go with Rippl, I gave myself an excuse.

Maybe I had to kill Rippl to realize I should have been focusing on ArtsyPetz all along.