Complete Product Lifecycle: From $0 to $173K/Month to Controlled Wind-Down

The Setup

PE due diligence rarely sees a complete product lifecycle. Operators present the growth curve. Acquirers present the stable-state revenue. Nobody presents the full arc — launch, scale, peak, decline, and what happens to the infrastructure after the product winds down. The result is a systematic blind spot in portfolio evaluation: decision-makers are asked to underwrite growth trajectories without evidence that the operator has managed the other side.

According to Harvard Business Review research on product lifecycle management, fewer than 20% of consumer product companies have formalized end-of-life processes. A 2024 Deloitte study on DTC brand economics found that the median DTC product reaches peak revenue within 6-12 months of launch, with 60% experiencing revenue declines exceeding 50% within the following 12 months. The question is not whether products decline — they all do. The question is whether the operator extracts durable value from the arc.

The Stealth Labz operation, run by Michael George Keating, documented a complete product lifecycle for PRD-01 — from $0 to $173K/month peak to controlled wind-down — with transaction-level data covering every phase. What makes this valuable is not the peak. It is the completeness.

What the Data Shows

PRD-01 was a direct-to-consumer supplement product family operated through PRJ-12 infrastructure. Over 14 months of active revenue, it generated $499,038 in initial sales, $43,318 in rebills, and processed $32,535 in refunds — netting $509,821 in total revenue. Every dollar is traceable through Konnektive CRM at the transaction level.

The lifecycle unfolded in three distinct phases. The ramp took three months (November 2023 through January 2024): from $289 in first real revenue to $48K/month. This is a 166x revenue increase in 90 days, driven by external affiliate traffic through AFF-01. The peak lasted three months (February through April 2024). February hit $173,247 in gross revenue — the single highest month for any product in the portfolio. March and April sustained six-figure months as affiliate traffic rotated from AFF-01 to AFF-02. The decline was not gradual. Revenue dropped 88% in a single month — from $119K in April to $14K in May. By September 2024, initial revenue was $410. When affiliate traffic stopped flowing, the product had no owned traffic to fall back on.

The revenue composition tells its own story: 92% initial purchases, 8% rebill. This is a front-loaded model — first-purchase revenue, not recurring subscription revenue. The rebill mechanism existed, but retention was low. The 6.0% refund rate ($32,535 on $542,356 gross) landed at the low end of industry benchmarks for DTC supplements, which typically run 5-15% according to Chargebacks911's 2024 industry analysis.

The product did not fail operationally. The refund rate was manageable. The fulfillment pipeline worked. The payment processing handled the volume. What failed was the traffic model — 100% external affiliate dependency with approximately 0% owned traffic contribution.

How It Works

The critical insight for portfolio operators is not the PRD-01 revenue curve. It is what survived the product's wind-down. The infrastructure built to support PRD-01 — payment processing, affiliate tracking, rebill management, refund handling, all running through Konnektive CRM and the PRJ-12 stack — persisted after PRD-01 revenue went to zero. That same infrastructure subsequently supported PRD-03 (which generated $100,909 in net revenue over 5 months starting August 2025), PRD-08, and PRD-06.

This is the distinction between a product business and an infrastructure business. A product business dies when the product dies. An infrastructure business treats each product as a deployment on persistent rails. The marginal cost of launching the next product on existing infrastructure approaches zero — because the CRM, the payment processing, the affiliate tracking, and the fulfillment pipeline are already built and tested at scale.

The operator carried four explicit lessons forward from the PRD-01 arc: affiliate-dependent products are volatile (leading to investment in owned traffic infrastructure), front-loaded revenue needs constant volume (leading to stronger rebill models in subsequent products), refund rates are manageable at scale (refund management processes carried forward), and infrastructure survives the product (the same stack runs everything that came after).

What This Means for Decision-Makers

When evaluating operators, the complete lifecycle is more informative than the growth phase alone. An operator who has managed $173K peak months, 88% single-month declines, and controlled wind-downs has a fundamentally different risk profile than an operator who has only managed growth. The PRD-01 arc proves operational capability across every phase — not just the one that looks good in a pitch deck.

For portfolio construction, the infrastructure persistence is the durable asset. PRD-01 generated $509,821 in net revenue over 14 months. The infrastructure it validated now supports every subsequent product launch at near-zero marginal deployment cost. That is not a product story. It is a platform story — and platforms are what compound.

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Related: [C7_S148 — 28 Months of P&L Data] | [C7_S149 — How to Survive a 99.9% Revenue Collapse] | [C7_S151 — 38 Products Tested, 6 Scaled]

References

1. Harvard Business Review. "Product Lifecycle Research." Analysis of end-of-life process formalization rates across consumer product companies.
2. Deloitte (2024). "DTC Brand Economics." Research on DTC product revenue peak timing and post-peak decline rates.
3. Chargebacks911 (2024). "Industry Refund Benchmarks." DTC supplement refund rate benchmarks and chargeback management data.
4. Keating, M.G. (2026). "Case Study: The PRD-01 Arc." Stealth Labz. Read case study