Telescope CS
The churn-prevention tool that taught me to build the right thing next.
Before Telescope was a semantic layer, it was a Customer Success analytics product. Two years of building, 500+ operator interviews, and one uncomfortable realization: the market was smaller than I thought and the real problem lived one layer deeper.
Pitched as a churn-and-expansion cockpit for CS teams. Users liked it. Reviewers liked it. I stopped liking it once I understood the shape of the market.
The $1.1B GainSight exit in eleven years became the ceiling. The TAM wasn't the one I wanted to stake a decade on.
Shutting it down wasn't a failure. It was the most valuable piece of market research I'll ever do.
lesson
The tool gets thrown away. The lessons don't.