Customer Feedback Pivot: The Product Nobody Bought

Folake spent eight months building a meal planning app for busy professionals. She designed features, hired a developer, created content. When the launch day came, she got 47 downloads, three people used it twice and nobody paid for the premium version.

Six months later, the same founder was running a profitable meal prep delivery service doing ₦6 million monthly. The app still exists, but only as an ordering tool. The business she built wasn’t the one she planned.

This customer feedback pivot story shows the difference between stubbornly pursuing your vision and intelligently adapting to what customers actually need.

The Vision That Seemed Perfect

Folake identified a real problem. Remote young professionals in Ilorin wanted to eat healthy but lacked time to plan meals and shop for ingredients. She experienced this herself working 60-hour weeks.

Her solution was a meal planning app. Users would input dietary preferences, get weekly meal plans with recipes, and receive shopping lists. The app would calculate nutrition and costs. It seemed comprehensive and useful.

She validated the idea by asking friends and colleagues, “Would you use a meal planning app?” Everyone said yes. That felt like enough validation to build.

The development took eight months and cost ₦1.8 million between the developer and content creation. She launched with a free basic version and a ₦2,500 monthly premium subscription for advanced features.

Initial downloads were decent from her marketing push as friends shared it. She also posted on social media, paid for some ads. But usage dropped off immediately. People downloaded, looked around, maybe created one meal plan, then disappeared.

The Customer Feedback She Almost Dismissed

Users who actually engaged with the app left feedback. Most of it wasn’t about features. It was about execution.

“The meal plans are great, but I still don’t have time to shop for these ingredients.”

“I got to the grocery store and couldn’t find half the items on the list.”

“Even with the plan, I’m too tired to cook when I get home.”

“Can you just deliver the actual meals instead of telling me how to make them?”

Folake initially dismissed these comments. Her app was for planning, not delivery. These people misunderstood the product. She’d built exactly what she intended.

But the pattern persisted. Almost every piece of feedback mentioned the gap between having a plan and actually eating healthy meals. Her solution solved the planning problem but ignored the execution problem, which was bigger.

One beta user was blunt: “I don’t need another app telling me what to eat. I need someone to make it and bring it to me.”

That comment sat with Folake for weeks.

The Uncomfortable Realisation

Her app had assumed the main barrier was knowledge and planning. But the actual barrier was time and energy to execute. People knew they should eat healthy. They didn’t need meal plans, they needed meals.

She tested this hypothesis by asking her most engaged users a different question: “If I delivered ready-made healthy meals based on these plans, would you buy them?”

Twelve people said yes immediately and asked when she’d start.

That was more paying interest than her app had generated in three months. The market was telling her something clear: we don’t want the tool, we want the outcome.

The customer feedback moment came when Folake admitted her solution addressed a symptom (lack of planning) rather than the core problem (lack of time and energy to execute healthy eating).

The Pivot Decision

Folake had to choose: keep improving an app nobody wanted, or pivot to a service people were asking for but she hadn’t planned to build.

She chose the pivot. Not abandoning the app entirely, but repositioning it as an ordering and preference management tool for a meal delivery service.

She started small by cooking meals from her apartment kitchen for the 12 people who’d expressed interest. By following the basic operations, they’d select meals through the app and she’d prep and deliver on Sundays for the week.

As a result, revenue was took a new turn. ₦180,000 in the first month from those 12 customers at ₦15,000 each for 5 meals.

She used that revenue to improve operations: hired a cook, rented commercial kitchen time, expanded menu options. Within three months, she had 45 customers paying ₦6,750 weekly on average, hitting ₦1.2 million monthly.

The app became a tool for customers to manage preferences, select meals, and track orders. Not the centerpiece product, but a supporting function for the actual business people wanted.

Lessons for Building Businesses

1. Test willingness to pay, not interest.

“Would you use this?” is worthless. “Will you pay ₦X for this?” reveals a much better truth. Better yet: “Pay me ₦X now for this.” Pre-sales are the ultimate validation.

2. Listen to what customers do, not just what they say.

Folake’s users said they wanted meal planning. Their behaviour showed they wanted meals. Pay attention to actions more than words.

3. Look for patterns in feedback, not individual requests.

One person asking for delivery was an outlier. Ten people mentioning the execution gap was a pattern worth investigating. 

4. Pivot doesn’t mean complete abandonment.

Folake didn’t start a completely new business, she solved the same core problem (healthy eating for busy people) through a different mechanism.

5. Start small when testing pivots.

She didn’t immediately raise ₦10 million to build a meal delivery infrastructure. She cooked for 12 people manually and proved the model before scaling.

6. Founder vision matters, but market reality matters more.

Have conviction about the problem you’re solving. However, stay flexible about the solution. Folake was right about the problem but she was wrong about the solution. Adjusting that isn’t failure; it’s intelligence.

Conclusion

Two years after the pivot, Folake’s meal delivery service does ₦6 million monthly revenue serving 400 customers. She hired kitchen staff, rents commercial space, and operates delivery logistics. The app exists but as a customer management tool, not the product itself.

The customer feedback pivot saved her business because she was willing to be wrong about the how while staying committed to the who (busy professionals) and the what (healthy eating solutions).

Your customers are telling you something right now. The question is whether you’re listening or just hearing what confirms your existing vision.