We offered 30% recurring commissions. We got thousands of signups. But our churn exploded because affiliates were promising features we didn't have. We switched to a 'Partner Certification' model.
Free users generated 80% of our support tickets and 0% of our revenue. They were noisier and ruder than paying customers. We replaced the Free Tier with a 14-day trial. Revenue went up.
We launched a community Slack. It was just 5,000 users tagging @channel asking for support. It cannibalized our channels and made paying customers feel ignored. We shut it down.
Customers were 20% more likely to churn 30 days after a QBR. We were forcing them to sit through a 60-minute PowerPoint about 'value' instead of delivering value. We replaced QBRs with async Value Reports.
Consultants promised to sell our software. We signed up 50 partners. They generated exactly zero leads. It was 100% overhead for 0% incremental revenue. We killed the program.
We had a $10M Series A on the table. To return the fund, we'd need a $500M exit. Our market was $200M total. Success was mathematically impossible. We walked away.
We had 47 integrations. 35 had fewer than 5 users. Some had zero. $400k/year maintenance for zero incremental revenue. We killed 30 integrations. No customers churned.
We chased a Fortune 500 deal for 18 months. Countless calls, a 200-hour RFP, security reviews, legal reviews. Final contract: $120k/year. Six months later, they churned. We lost $25k on our 'biggest win.'
Our NRR was 140%. Investors loved it. What they didn't see: new logo acquisition had collapsed. When our biggest customer churned, we had no pipeline to replace them. NRR went from 140% to 85% in one quarter.
Our deck said '2 million MAU.' What 'active' meant: opened the app once. Of those 2M, only 50k did anything meaningful. Only 8k came back the next week. MAU was hiding a dying product.
Beautiful mobile app. $200k/year to maintain. 2,000 MAU out of 50,000 customers. 4% adoption. We killed it. Redirected to mobile web. Zero customer complaints.
We offered 20% off for annual. 60% of customers took it. Our 'cash flow optimization' had cost us an estimated 35% of potential revenue from our most loyal segment. We killed the discount.
We paid $80k in affiliate commissions for $320k in 'revenue'. Then we discovered 70% of those conversions were customers already in our funnel. We were paying a 20% tax on customers we already owned.
From AI-driven personalization to the death of third-party cookies. Here is where you should be allocating your marketing budget.
Why sustainability is no longer a choice but a necessity for modern businesses looking to thrive in the long term.
The Airbnb CEO coined 'Founder Mode'. The internet laughed. But he was right. The era of the 'Professional Manager' who manages by dashboard is over. We need builders who can micromanage the details.
We implemented 'No-Meeting Wednesday.' Productivity would soar. Instead, Wednesdays became chaos. Slack exploded. Meetings crammed into Tuesday/Thursday. We displaced the problem, not solved it.
Our churn was 8%. Product blamed Engineering. I blamed Sales. We analyzed the data and found we were selling Enterprise software to bloggers. I fired 300 customers, and we became profitable overnight.
We paid a $10k premium for a 'Success Manager' who literally read us the PDF manual over Zoom. I realized: CS is just a patch for bad UX. We fired them and built a self-serve wizard.
Our AI feature costs $8,000/month in API bills. We charge nothing for it. It's the single best business decision we ever made. Here's the spreadsheet that convinced my co-founder.
The definitive guide to building high-performing distributed teams. Learn the strategies, tools, and cultural shifts required to thrive.
Quality is often viewed as a cost center. Learn how to quantify the Return on Investment of QA and present the business case for quality engineering to executive leadership.
My friend sold his startup for $50 Million. He got $0. The investors took everything. Here is the dark math of 'Participating Preferred' stock.
Our best customer chose the $50/mo tier over the $500/mo tier. 'We don't need your CSM explaining things. Just let us self-serve.' We flipped our entire pricing model.
In our Series A pitch, I said 'our data is our moat.' The partner asked: 'If I gave a competitor $10M and 18 months, could they replicate it?' I had no answer. We didn't close that round.
We built a Discord with 4,000 members. It looked like a rocket ship. In reality, it was a support forum for job seekers and competitors. We shut it down and churn decreased. Here's why.
I analyzed 50 SaaS pricing pages. The public 'Basic, Pro, Enterprise' tiers account for less than 30% of revenue. The other 70%? Hidden structures they never show you.
The 'AI Wrapper' gold rush is over. In 2026, the only moat left is proprietary data. If your startup is just a prompt, you are already dead.
The subscription model is dying. Customers are tired of paying for 'access.' They want to pay for 'results.' Here is the data behind our terrifying pivot.
I walked into our board meeting proud of 94% gross retention. The investor asked: 'What's your net retention?' We hadn't tracked it. '99%. You're barely replacing losses.' That changed everything.
The era of the Attention Economy is ending. The Retention Economy demands products that respect user time. How to design for health, not just engagement.
We saved $100,000 on licensing fees by switching to Open Source. Then we spent $500,000 maintaining it. The math nobody tells you about 'free' software.
Learn the proven tactics for scaling your software product from initial traction to mass market adoption.
I joined a company with 12,000 Slack messages per day. 'We're async-first!' they said. When I asked how to deploy, I got 'search Slack.' 47 threads. 6 contradictory answers. 2 hours lost.
Monday morning. 400 support tickets. 395 from free users. We killed the free tier that afternoon. Chaos ended. Revenue grew 40%. Here is why Friction is a Feature.
We were charging $29/mo. We moved to $99/mo. We thought users would riot. Instead, Churn went DOWN. Here is the counter-intuitive psychology of B2B pricing.
Our investors loved Usage-Based Pricing. Then a customer got a $50k bill, churned, and our CFO quit. We moved to Flat-Rate pricing and finally slept again.
My Monday standup includes Sarah, Jake, Claude, GPT-4, and a custom model we call 'Edgar.' I assign them tasks, give feedback, and occasionally 'fire' them. This is not a metaphor.
Our first enterprise deal took 18 months to close. $120k/year. Meanwhile, PLG acquired 4,200 customers in the same period. $380k/year. We celebrated the wrong win.