Death Clock founder scrapped four years of code after Most Days stalled

Why it matters

Franson's pivot puts a practical founder question in sharp relief: when customers like a product but the cost of reaching them defeats the business, another iteration may prolong the problem. Death Clock now has to prove that its attention-grabbing positioning can convert into durable use and that users trust its health guidance.

Brent Franson shut down Most Days in late 2024, discarded its codebase and redirected the team to build Death Clock, his consumer-health app. In a Business Insider interview published September 27th, 2026, Franson described the decision as an answer to what he calls "slow failure": the stretch when a product has enough users and promise to justify another iteration, but the business still cannot support itself.

The pivot came after four years of building Most Days, a mental-health app whose users liked it, Franson said, but whose customer-acquisition costs made a viable business difficult. Franson had already led a software company through an acquisition, but Most Days posed a different test: deciding when a product that seemed "pretty good" had stopped earning more time.

A clean break after a previous exit

Franson had an earlier company-building experience before Most Days. Euclid Analytics, where he was CEO, developed software that used Wi-Fi signals to analyze how physical spaces were used. WeWork acquired Euclid in February 2019, bringing its team and technology into a workplace-insights effort. WeWork's announcement did not disclose the deal's financial terms.

Most Days took a different path. The app launched in December 2020 as a social platform for routines intended to support mental, physical and emotional health. In its launch announcement, Most Days said it had raised a $3.2 million seed round led by Freestyle Capital, Harrison Metal and Village Global, with angel investors including Owen Tripp, Eric Roza and Sriram Krishnan. That was a reported 2020 financing; it does not establish how much capital remained when Franson decided to close the app four years later.

According to Franson, Most Days addressed a meaningful need and had users who valued it. The business problem was acquiring them cheaply enough. That gap separates user approval from a business model: people may appreciate a product without using it often enough, or paying enough, to make customer acquisition sustainable. Franson's account makes the uncomfortable part of the decision plain. A team can keep improving a product and still avoid answering whether its economics work.

He said the team chose to shut Most Days down rather than rebrand it, hire around its problems or bring its code into the new product. The break was literal as well as strategic: Death Clock started without code carried over from the earlier app. The team also considered the name "More Years" before retaining Death Clock, a name Franson said some investors liked and others disliked.

The next product puts distribution in the name

Death Clock asks users for health and lifestyle information and uses longevity research to estimate life expectancy and suggest changes. Franson called it an "AI private doctor" in the interview. The product's website describes it as a longevity app, says its estimate begins with 29 questions, and presents the result as a baseline that can incorporate bloodwork and wearable data.

Franson's second-startup lesson is about reach. He said Most Days taught him that a good product needs a way to find customers without relying on expensive paid acquisition. Death Clock's name is designed to draw attention in a crowded consumer-health category; Franson also acknowledged the risk that the provocation could make people take the product less seriously. A memorable name may earn a first look. It cannot by itself establish trust in health advice or bring users back.

Death Clock's homepage claims more than 1 million users in more than 100 countries. That is a company-reported reach figure; it does not show how many users are active, paying or retained. Those measures matter to the distribution argument Franson draws from Most Days, because attention and sustainable acquisition are different things.

The health claims also require a different standard from the name's marketing value. Franson told Business Insider that Death Clock avoids selling peptides because its clinical advisers do not believe the evidence supports them, a choice he said forgoes potential revenue. The restraint is part of the product's pitch, but it does not itself validate an individual's estimated death date or show that recommendations extend life. The service's commercial case depends on whether users trust its guidance enough to return and pay, not just on whether its headline prediction gets them to sign up.

Franson's advice is not to pivot at the first sign of difficulty. His test is whether a founder is working through specific problems with conviction or rationalizing why one more round of changes will fix the business. Most Days had users and a worthwhile mission, but Franson says neither was enough to make its acquisition economics work. The decision to close it, rather than preserve the product and its code, turned that diagnosis into a full bet on a different consumer-health proposition.