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Why design fails —
We do everything right as designers.
Heuristic evaluations. User interviews. User-centric flows.
The product starts converting.
But not for long.
Because UI/UX is just the tip of the iceberg.
So much is going on under the water.
If any piece breaks, the whole thing collapses.
I've been working on "TheCouponChaser."
The client spent $100k+. The product failed.
6+ employees were laid off in a single day.
I thought it was a design failure.
It wasn't.
The product was user-centric. UI/UX was working fine.
We still failed — here's why:
→ Our content strategy went against Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines
→ We jumped to 300k brands in a single day
→ No small team can properly QA 300k brands
→ We scraped all of them onto template pages with an AI layer
→ Google doesn't allow scaled scraped content
Within the first month, Google penalised us.
Traffic: 0.
Indexing: stopped.
The worst part?
We didn't even benchmark our competitors properly.
RetailMeNot built that scale over 20 years.
We wanted 10x of that — in a single month.
That's not ambition. That's a red flag we ignored.
After burning $100k, here's what I learned:
Wrong strategy + bad research + unrealistic goals = failure.
No matter how good the design is.
There is no shortcut to a product's success.
Every product has its own path, and finding it is the hardest part.
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