Hey builders! 👋

I'm Sam, founder of Sparkle.io. I'm new here, and I figured the best way to introduce myself is to share something I've been struggling with for the past 2.5 years. I'm shutting down my product Sparkle in its current form. After 2.5 years and 4.2 million lines of code. Not because we couldn't build it. Because we spent all that time building something customers didn't really need. We copied competitors, kept adding features, and convinced ourselves that eventually people would come. They didn't. And that was on me. Last October, I had two choices: shut Sparkle down or give it another shot. I doubled down. But instead of building more features, we started doing the work for our customers. We offered done-for-you email outreach, charged a monthly retainer, and landed 10 paying customers. For the first time, Sparkle was making real revenue. I thought we'd finally figured it out. Three months later, most of those customers were gone. So we changed the model again. This time, we only charged when someone replied with interest. That worked too. But we kept hitting the same problem. Customers were getting interested replies, but those replies weren't turning into meetings. And that's when something finally clicked. We'd spent 2.5 years selling everything except what customers actually wanted. First, the software. Then, the emails. Then, the interested leads. But what they wanted all along was qualified sales meetings on their calendars. Sounds obvious now, doesn't it? So we're rebuilding Sparkle around one simple promise: We book qualified sales meetings for B2B teams. You only pay when we book one. We're still building this new version, and I have no idea how many more things we'll get wrong. But this time, I want to build alongside the people who actually need it. That's why I'm joining Buildside. I'll be sharing the rebuild here, including what we're testing, what fails, customer conversations, and the decisions behind it all. And here's where I'd love your help. If you're a B2B founder or run a sales team and struggle to turn outbound efforts into actual meetings, we're opening a waitlist for early access. 👉 https://sparkle.io I'd love to have some fellow Buildside founders among our first users and hear what you'd want us to get right. And one question for everyone building here: Have you ever spent months (or years) building something, only to realize customers wanted something completely different? I'd genuinely love to hear how you handled it. Here's to building something people actually want this time. 🤞

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