Chapter 11. Dénouement “And so, onwards...along a path of wisdom, with a hearty tread, a hearty confidence...however you may be, be your own source of experience. Throw off your discontent about your nature. Forgive yourself your own self. You have it in your power to merge everything you have lived through — false starts, errors, delusions, passions, your loves and your hopes — into your goal, with nothing left over.” — FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN SOMETIMES, PRODUCTS NEVER SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY, AND TYPICALLY never for reasons that you can expect or control. Financial crises, teams burning out, new technologies arriving, personal motivation, broken relationships, and more are a lot of variables beyond a UX strategy that will come into play. The software engineer whom you met in Chapter 1 pivoted to a B2B model after our Landing Page experiments and attempted to negotiate directly with insurance companies. But it was 2013, just as the entire healthcare system in the US was restructuring to comply with the new Affordable Care Act. When last I checked up on him, he told me how he saw that it could take years to disrupt the process of how treatment centers competed within a fragmented industry. There were just too many variables out of his control that even a perfectly designed website, UX, or business strategy was not going to solve. In a heavy Russian accent, the former chess prodigy half-jokingly told me that “I had killed his business.” For my students, Bita and Ena, Airbnb for Weddings was their class project, so when it over that was the end of it. They had other personal and professional dreams to conquer. I’m sure they’re rocking the world wherever they are. (And if you’d like to develop the value proposition, it’s yours for the taking.) For Jared, I recently spent the day with him at his Topanga Canyon home and talked about where he was with TradeYa. He’s now spent four years of his life and a million dollars of investment conducting experiments to solve why bartering online is so hard. The mental model has proven tough to shift, and even with more than 80,000 users, TradeYa is averaging 10 successful transactions per day. It still has a long way to go before it successfully conquers its blue ocean of the sharing economy as Airbnb did. Nevertheless, Jared has a lot of expertise now on how to make the basics of an online barter interaction work. He knows his power users now — small businesses, independent contractors, and the burgeoning creative class of entrepreneurs. I think it’s important that we remember there are many risks in life — some professional and others personal, and often it is impossible to separate the two. Take, for instance, my maternal grandfather, Alex Zindler. He was born in 1907