I spent thousands of dollars learning the wrong answer. Then I changed the question.

I nearly launched a product that didn't work.

Not through laziness or cutting corners. Through the opposite. Pushing too hard, in the wrong direction, for far too long. With the focused determination of a man who has confused stubbornness with strategy and is absolutely certain he's winning.

Here's what happened.

When I started formulating Radical Good I was set on a liquid format. It felt right. Simple, distinctive, easy to use. I was convinced. Deeply, expensively convinced. Multiple Australian manufacturers. Multiple formulation consultants. Thousands of dollars. Quotes, back and forth, reformulations. Months of it. The kind of months that feel productive right up until you realise they weren't.

Then two things became clear almost simultaneously. The COGS were unsustainable at any volume that made commercial sense. And the stability issues weren't a manufacturing problem. They were a format problem. The liquid simply wasn't going to work. Not here, not at this price point, not without quietly delivering a product I wouldn't be proud of.

Several Australian manufacturers were perfectly happy to help us do exactly that.

I could have kept pushing. Found someone willing to make it work on paper. Launched it anyway and hoped for the best. This is, I have learned, a surprisingly popular strategy among founders. It is also how you end up with a very expensive lesson and a logo.

So we pivoted to powder. Different format, different manufacturers, different cost structure. The stability issues disappeared. The COGS made sense. The product got better, not worse. Quietly infuriating, given the months spent arriving at what turned out to be the obvious answer.

My executive coach Anton later described it as a scale of responses. Not just the gas pedal. A genuine range of gears depending on what the situation needs. We'd already made the decision before he said it, but he gave language to something I'd done by instinct and nearly hadn't done at all.

The liquid format needed a sidestep, not a sledgehammer.

The sidestep wasn't giving up. It was the most aggressive thing I could have done for the long term health of the brand. It just didn't feel that way at the time, which is the annoying thing about good decisions. They rarely do.

Most ambitious people, myself very much included, have one default gear. Push harder. Apply more force. If it's not moving, more effort is clearly required. Sometimes that's true. But sometimes the thing that isn't moving isn't stuck. It's just wrong. And no amount of pushing is going to make it right.

The skill, and I'm still learning it, is knowing when to apply the gas and when to question whether you're on the right road entirely. Before you've spent six months and a meaningful amount of money finding out the hard way.

Radical Good is better because we didn't launch it when we could have. That's not a comfortable thing to admit when you're impatient to get something into the world.

But a bad product launched is just an expensive lesson with a logo on it.

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