REPitchbook
Charlie Reese was a former investment banker turned software developer living in Toronto. During his years in M&A banking, he spent countless hours preparing presentations and analyses to win client deals. After ~3 years of burning out on investment banking, he quit to travel and learn to code. Once he'd spent a year struggling through coding bootcamp-style self-learning, he landed a role as a full-stack developer at Tulip Retail. By late 2017, armed with newfound JavaScript, React, and SQL skills, Charlie had an idea: what if he could democratize the presentation-building process he'd mastered in banking? "If I made it easy for others to create management consulting style presentations / pitches, they too could win deals. Professional pitches for everyone!" That motivation was enough to send him full-time into building REPitchbook.
Charlie worked "several hundred hours" over 6 weeks to hack together a prototype. The product was ambitious: it would generate customizable, presentation-ready visuals from real estate market data in seconds. It was laughably insecure and feature-heavy, but it worked. Charlie didn't validate his core assumption—that real estate agents actually wanted to pitch clients with professional presentations. Instead, he jumped straight into building.
Through a family connection, Charlie scored a meeting with the owner of several real estate brokerages. He showed the prototype and the presentations it could generate. The owner loved it. They agreed to a pilot: if 4 agents in one brokerage tested it and liked it, Charlie would get all ~100 agents in that brokerage access for $1,500/month. REPitchbook was also publicly available online, but "received minimal traffic." Charlie didn't invest in ads or SEO; instead, he focused on what felt natural: in-person marketing—meeting with brokerages, pitching them directly, and trying to convert pilot projects into sales.
The pilot project seemed promising at first—Charlie had secured actual users willing to test his product. But during conversations with pilot customers and other brokerages, reality set in: the interface was nearly incomprehensible, and pilot customers couldn't figure out how to use the app without Charlie's guidance. The second blow was worse: agents didn't want to pitch clients with long-form presentations at all. They wanted to market via email. Charlie's entire product thesis was wrong.
Charlie spent 6 weeks trying to fix the UI and add email integration, but the damage was structural. The application was a single-page app with the poor UI tightly coupled to the back-end logic—a complete rebuild was needed. As a junior developer, Charlie didn't feel equipped to pivot. He hadn't made any real sales. He decided to kill it.
Charlie walked away from REPitchbook with zero revenue but invaluable lessons. He identified three critical mistakes: shipping an MVP bloated with half-baked features instead of a few polished ones; ignoring user feedback signals (all 4 pilot agents couldn't use the app without instruction); and never validating the idea before writing a single line of code. He learned that "to your user, your design is your product." Today, Charlie is founder and lead engineer at MarketSnitch, a stock screener and alerting application. He applied every hard-won lesson from REPitchbook's failure.
- •Lack of pre-launch customer validation meant Charlie built for an assumption rather than a real market need—agents never actually wanted presentation-based pitching tools, they wanted email marketing.
- •Shipping an MVP with too many features created a confusing product that users couldn't navigate without help, signaling fundamental design problems that were ignored until it was too late.
- •Poor UI/UX was baked into the architecture (SPA with coupled front-end and back-end), requiring a full rebuild rather than iterative fixes, which exceeded the founder's willingness to invest more time with zero revenue.
- •The founder's inexperience in both programming and design meant he built in isolation without bringing in complementary skills, limiting his ability to pivot or salvage the product when problems emerged.
- 1.Talk to 20-30 potential customers in your target market before writing any code to validate that they actually have and care about the problem you're solving.
- 2.Build your MVP with 2-3 core features that are deeply polished rather than 10 features that are half-baked; ruthlessly cut scope.
- 3.Set up a user testing session with your first 5 pilot customers and watch them use your product without guidance; if they're confused, treat it as a critical design failure that needs immediate attention.
- 4.When you hit a major technical or design problem early, hire or partner with someone who has complementary skills rather than trying to learn and rebuild alone—time to market is often more important than building solo.
- 5.If your pilot customers are asking for a completely different feature than what you built (e.g., email integration instead of presentations), that's a signal to pivot or kill, not persist—don't spend 6 weeks fighting the market.
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