Anthology

Tom Leung's journey began in 2012 with Yabli, a startup he believed in deeply. He invested two years and $1.5 million into the product, convinced he was solving a real problem. But after all that time and capital, Yabli never achieved product-market fit. Users wouldn't even ask free questions on the platform—a telling sign that the problem he was solving wasn't truly urgent. Tom faced a hard truth: he'd been solving a "mild annoyance" problem, not a "migraine" problem.

Instead of abandoning entrepreneurship, Tom changed his approach dramatically. Rather than spending a year perfecting each idea, he compressed his validation cycle. In six months, he ran eight pivots—a ruthless pace designed to fail fast and learn faster. Each experiment was designed to test a different hypothesis about what professionals really needed. Then came the ninth pivot: a one-page HTML form for a platform called Poachable that would let employed tech professionals explore career opportunities anonymously.

The form was brutally simple—no fancy design, no SSL certificate, no complicated onboarding. Yet something magical happened. People started entering sensitive information: their current salaries, job titles, career aspirations. The fact that they were willing to share this data on an unsecured form told Tom everything he needed to know. The problem mattered enough that security concerns took a back seat.

On day two, a GeekWire article about Poachable hit the internet, and the signup flood began. In one week, Poachable proved what two years of Yabli couldn't: genuine product-market fit. Major tech companies—Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix—quickly recognized the value and began recruiting through the platform. The contrast was stark. With Yabli, users had shown zero urgency. With Poachable, they couldn't sign up fast enough.

The core lesson was about problem severity. Yabli solved an incrementally better way to do something people could tolerate. Poachable solved a genuine pain point that justified giving up private information to strangers. Tom realized that adding more features to Yabli wouldn't have saved it—you can't iterate your way out of solving the wrong problem.

The other critical insight was timing and pace. Tom's tendency to persist with Yabli for two years wasn't tenacity—it was blind faith mixed with ego. Admitting failure felt like admitting he wasn't smart enough. But speed forced clarity. When you set a one-month kill threshold per experiment, you can't hide behind the "just one more feature" excuse.

Poachable rebranded as Anthology and became the platform where anonymity and genuine opportunity meet. The validation method itself—asking for real data that mattered to users—proved more valuable than any email signup metric. Tom had learned that 10,000 worthless email addresses are worth far less than 1,000 paying customers with genuine intent.