Hello {{First name|Predictable Revenue community}},

Predictable update: I hit $3750 monthly recurring revenue this morning and I’m excited so I wanted to share. It’s gone from feeling like something that might work to something that has real momentum in the last 6 weeks. While I’m excited, I’m trying not to get too ahead of myself and that’s what today’s newsletter is about.

Feedback as a Gift

Subject line: Feedback as a Gift

Hey founders,

I had a similar conversation with three different founders this week, and that's usually a good sign I need to expand on it in a newsletter. The core of the conversation was that product feedback from users is a gift.

When we receive a gift, we want to make sure we accept it well, and send a thank you letter. Ignore it or treat it poorly, and you probably won't get another.

Growing slowly on purpose

On Monday I was talking with two founders who are using Predictable. One of them asked if I was planning to raise.

Honest answer: not right now. I'm not trying to grow yet. I'm not doing outreach, I'm not promoting it, and I'm not pushing very hard on follow ups (yet). I'm taking inbound and that's it.

That's not because I don't want customers. It's because I'm trying to take on just enough of them. Enough that feedback comes in fast. Not so many that I can't act on it quickly.

One of them mentioned he'd noticed changes in the app a day or two after he sent his notes. That's the whole game. Go slow on growth, go fast on feedback.

I've been here before. I pushed as hard as I could, and it ended up like fireworks. It looked pretty, and then it exploded.

What happened with Carb.io

With Carb.io, we found strong product market fit, but the MVP we built was janky, and that's being kind. It solved the problem in a unique way that people cared about, but the table stakes stuff just didn't work.

We knew this when we were at $1k in monthly recurring revenue (MRR), and we didn't take the time to fix it. It got worse when we hit $10k MRR, but we still kept pushing. It was obviously broken at $40k MRR a month later, and we all knew it, but our idiot CEO (me) kept pushing anyway. We hit $83,333 MRR within three months of turning on billing, and I felt like we had made it. Step one of the triple, triple, double, double, double (T2D3) that all the VCs were talking about at the time.

I spent those whole three months selling, bringing on new clients $500 at a time. I had some recurring calls, but only with the really big accounts. The average client was only $500 a month. What was I supposed to do, talk to them? You're crazy... I was a big deal entrepreneur now.

This is where I was humbled. I had succeeded at closing about 166 deals, but not at creating 166 happy customers. The next three months came and went with the same velocity of sales calls, but a funny thing happened. Our revenue flatlined. We were barely maintaining our revenue because we were losing customers as fast as we were adding them. Which sucked. Closing 50 new clients a month is a lot of work. Losing them three months later because they weren't happy cut deeply.

The crux of it was that we bit off more than we could chew and couldn't keep up with user feedback.

There are a number of things I think could have gone differently. Had we gone slower and paid attention, we would have learned more, reacted more, and taken on fewer clients. They would have been happier, and we would have most definitely earned a longer than three month average customer lifetime.

I was also too concerned with what our competitors were doing. Both Salesloft and Outreach had raised money and shipped a calling feature, and I kept pressuring the team to deliver one, even though they kept telling me we needed to focus on stability. We kept chasing feature parity with two venture-backed companies instead of taking care of our existing customers. We lost sight of what was important, which was respecting the customers who had taken a chance on us.

Here's the interesting thing. At the time, there was another startup called ZenProspects, a list-building tool. I had used them, but I didn't see them as a huge competitor. We did similar things on the data side, but we did it manually. Our goal was to eventually bring data, cold email, and cold calling together into one all-in-one prospecting platform. We pushed too early. We tried to ship too many things too quickly, and we lost the trust of our customers.

You know what ZenProspects did? They stayed a list-building tool for a while. Years later, once they had a solid revenue base, they built out a cold email tool. Then they had a platform that did both. They turned into Apollo, which has arguably done significantly better than both Outreach and Salesloft.

I was busy racing three companies who didn't know I existed. One company decided to do it right, build it slow, and ended up building something bigger than all of us.

Doing it differently with Predictable

I'm trying to learn from that experience and resist the urge to push too hard and take on too many clients for Predictable. That's not easy, because I'd love to shift more of my time from consulting to the software. I currently have around 20 paying customers, and I'm keeping up with most things, even though it's starting to feel a bit busy. It would be great to have more, but I'm waiting until the product reaches another level of maturity. Once some of the early clients don't need their weekly calls and I can move them to a group weekly call, I'll probably consider pushing on the gas a little more.

At this stage, I'm learning and building about as fast as I can. I don't want to disrespect my clients by taking on more than I can handle, overcommitting, underdelivering, or not paying enough attention to their feedback. I find folks are willing to work with a startup where they know things are going to be a little broken, as long as you show you're willing to listen and fix the broken things quickly.

On Thursday I had a call with a client who'd sent me a list of bugs and usability notes on October 1st. Seven of the fixes were already live by the time we talked. She said she was excited I'd actually implemented her feedback.

That's a gift received well. And here's the part I really believe: the best thing a user can be is mad at your product. They're mad because they care. They see the value and something's in the way of getting it.

Someone who doesn't care doesn't complain. They just churn.

If you're already behind

On Tuesday I talked to a founder in a spot that felt familiar. A big customer is hammering his product with data, pages are loading slowly, and they've rightly paused new features to fix stability. Unlike past me, they listened to their team.

The problem is a smaller customer who gave them a pile of great feedback. They got to some of it. Not most of it. Now he's skipping check-ins, not replying to pings, and his trial is up this month. He's drifting.

My advice: send him the thank you letter. Something like:

You sent us a ton of great feedback and we really appreciate it. Here's everything we heard. Here's what we've already shipped from it. Here's why the rest isn't done yet: we're focused on stability and speed before we push anything new. I wanted you to know we heard you.

You don't have to ship everything. You do have to say "got it, here's what we're doing with it."

The founders who win early aren't the ones with the fewest complaints. They're the ones whose users feel heard.

Have you slowed down shipping to focus on quality? Ever moved too fast and lost control like I did? I’d love to hear from you, if only to prove to myself I’m not the only one out there.

Collin

PS - If you know a startup that needs help with GTM, I'd love an intro. I'm only looking for a handful of folks this week. It’s a paid beta but includes some of my time to get things going.

The Terrifying Art of Finding Customers is the playbook for founders who never planned to do sales but have to figure it out anyway. It pulls together 13+ years of building software startups, building outbound systems for hundreds of B2B startups, and more failed experiments than I'd care to admit, into a practical guide for finding your first 10, 100, and 1,000 customers.

It will help you build a repeatable way to find customers without losing your weekends (or your soul).

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