Five million impressions, then gone in two weeks
EaseUp had real momentum — then a Netflix acquisition removed a core dependency and the product had fourteen days to live. What I took from it.
EaseUp started with something personal. I’d worked through my own social anxiety with the help of a therapist, and the thing that actually moved the needle wasn’t insight — it was doing small, real-world things, repeatedly, until they stopped feeling impossible. I kept coming back to one question: why isn’t there an app for that? So I built one.
After a year of development, EaseUp launched in 2025 — an app to help people build real-world confidence through action, not just theory. Along the way we were accepted into the Google Cloud for Startups programme, which let us scale the infrastructure ahead of launch.
And it worked. In our first month we did five million impressions and reached around a thousand iOS users. For a brand-new app in a crowded category, that felt like the start of something real.
Then Ready Player Me — the avatar technology powering a core part of EaseUp’s gamification — was acquired by Netflix. Within about two weeks, the service we’d built on was shut down. The feature that depended on it went with it, and a big part of the product roadmap went too. We didn’t have the runway to rebuild that fast, and I made the call to wind EaseUp down.
The lesson is an old one, learned the hard way: if a core part of your product depends on someone else’s platform, you don’t fully own your roadmap. A single acquisition upstream can end you in fourteen days, no matter how well the product is doing. I knew that in the abstract. I know it differently now.
I won’t pretend it didn’t sting. But you learn more about yourself in the hard moments than in all the wins combined — how you respond, what you’d do differently, whether you’d start again. I would. EaseUp has wound down, but the reasons I built it haven’t gone anywhere, and neither have I.
Onto the next one.