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

Book update: Here’s the full Mark Roberge (Co-Founder @ Stage 2 Capital, Prof @HarvardHBS; Founding CRO @HubSpot; Author of Best Seller "The Sales Acceleration Formula") quote from the front of the book. Get your copy today.

Onto the newsletter…

I was on a call with a client this week. They build developer tooling, and one of their customers had just dropped a bomb on them: somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of the code his team writes is now agentic. Not assisted. Agentic. Entire features are shifting from writing code to writing specs.

And then this customer asked: "What should I do about this? Are you guys thinking about it?"

A paying customer, essentially asking: do you still understand my world?

That question is floating around in a lot of your customers' heads right now. Some are asking it out loud. Most aren't. They're just quietly reassessing whether your product still fits.

If you use Claude Code, you know that Shift-Tab switches you from execution mode to plan mode. Nothing gets built in plan mode. It feels like you've stopped. But it's the most important thing you can be doing, because you're making sure you're building the right thing in the right way before you write a single line of code.

That's what customer interviews are right now. Plan mode for your business.

I know it doesn't feel productive. You'd rather be shipping features or closing deals. But here's how I think about it. Your product-market fit is the output of a formula. On one side, you've got the needs of the market. On the other, how well your product satisfies those needs. When the market shifts, the needs shift with it. And right now, the market is shifting faster than most of us have ever seen.

The reasons someone renewed last quarter might not be the reasons they renew next quarter. Maybe your fit is getting stronger. Maybe it's weaker. Or maybe there are opportunities sitting right in front of you that you can't see because you haven't asked.

You need to talk to your customers to know. And I don't mean a survey or a feedback form. I mean get on a call. Ask them where they see the world going. Ask what's changed in their workflow over the last six months.

Because what you're really trying to figure out is whether people are still thinking about your product the same way. Are you three months away from a churn wave you didn't see coming? Or sitting on something new you haven't spotted yet?

Either way, same answer. Talk to the people who are already paying you.

When you get on those calls, one question does most of the work: If I could solve any problem for you related to [your space], what would it be?

Then follow up: On a scale of 1-10, how important is that to you? And, on a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with how you're currently solving it? 

If you find a high importance, low satisfaction problem you must also ask about the impact. How will solving it impact the person and the company? Remember, companies only care about three things: increasing revenue, decreasing costs, or decreasing risk. 

High importance, low satisfaction, big impact. That's where you build.

It’s also a good idea to check in how your product is currently serving them. Is it more relevant? Less? What’s changed in the last 6 months?

During this particular call, something interesting happened. One of the founders started showing me their new product, and I basically became their customer interview on the spot. I told them what I wanted and what I'd pay for. And while the thing I described wasn't exactly what they'd been building. It was adjacent. The pain was real, but it showed up differently than they expected.

That's what always happens. You think you know what customers want, and you're maybe 40% right. You've got the right general direction, but the specific shape of the problem, the way people actually talk about it, is different from what you imagined. You only close that gap by having the conversations.

My advice to this team was to go wide first. Talk to small teams, big teams, existing customers, old prospects. Don't pre-filter. You're in discovery mode, not sales mode.

But track everything. Track the persona. Track the company size. Track how many people they have on their team. Because you might find that the person with the biggest pain has the least money to spend. Meanwhile, solving a slightly different version of the problem for a bigger team could be worth 20x more.

You won't know that until you've talked to enough people to see the patterns.

Resist the urge to skip ahead and build a landing page before you've had these conversations. I say this as someone who has spent hundreds of hours working on marketing websites and probably wrecked my SEO every time I touched it. Landing pages feel like progress. They're not. Not yet.

One more thing from this call that stuck with me. The bigger players in this space are stuck. Their existing customers are pulling them in the direction of "don't change my dashboard." They'd have to build something that disrupts their own product to adapt to the way work is actually changing. Classic innovator's dilemma.

I get it. I'm the same way as a user. Every time Gmail moves a button one pixel, I lose my mind. Clay has a recurring bug that adds about 20 pixels of extra line spacing, and I find myself in Inspect Element trying to fix it. If your customers are as irrational as I am, it's really hard for incumbents to make big moves.

Which means founders who are paying attention right now have a window. It won't stay open forever. But while the big players are locked into their existing roadmaps, you can move.

Only if you know what the shift looks like for your specific customers, though. What your actual paying customers are dealing with and wishing someone would solve.

So go find out. Get on those calls. Switch to plan mode. The code can wait.

Collin

PS - shoutout to Mei for this very kind review. Mei - if you’re reading this and want a discount on a box of books for the rest of your company, hit reply. That goes for anyone else that’s reading this too 😀.

PPS - I was on the StartWell podcast last summer and it just dropped, check it out here.

PPPS - if you’re agentic coding like myself and thinking of moving from Cursor/Windsurf to Claude Code, check out Ghostty (terminal) and Zed (editor). They’re free and make the process so much more enjoyable.