01 Killed before production 10 days · August 2026 3 parts
The Cuegence Postmortem
Cuegence — a learning-intelligence layer for schools
A longitudinal model of how students actually learn: curriculum graphs, evidence provenance, memory decay, revisable understanding. Six calls with the people who sign purchase orders priced it, and the answer arrived before a single production system was built.
Lessons kept
- Validate willingness to pay before validating architectural elegance.
- Find the budget line — “substantially better” and “operationally necessary” are different categories.
- Distribution and demand are different problems; a warm channel only makes “no” cheaper to hear.
- Stopping is execution, and speed of invalidation is a capability.