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

Two of my best beta customers stopped replying to me.

Not slow replies. Not "sorry, crazy week." Gone. I've sent two follow-ups to each of them and gotten nothing back. These are people we used to have weekly calls with. People who replied to my emails in minutes. I had plans to go visit one of them, maybe both.

We met them about a year ago. From the first conversation they were insanely keen. They gave us a crazy amount of time. They were kind, they were helpful, they gave us real feedback instead of polite feedback, and they shared tons of their own data so we could see how the work actually got done. If you'd asked me last summer to name our two best shots at a design partner turning into a customer, I'd have named them without thinking about it.

Now they won't answer an email.

There are innocent explanations available if I want them. They're residential property managers, and this is a busy stretch for new rentals in their markets. They have families, so some of this is probably travel. I could tell myself that story and feel fine.

I don't think that's what happened.

Some context on the year. ReplyLoop is a workflow tool, and it's mission critical. If an email goes missing or lands in the wrong place, there are consequences for the person using it. So we made a deliberate call to build it slowly. We did not want to put the AIs on autopilot and let it run and find out later what it had done. I still think that was the right call. I'd make it again.

But being right about your build pace does not protect you from the cost of it.

Compare that to my other startup. Predictable is on the prospecting side. It's important, but it isn't mission critical in the same way. If it goes down or throws a bug, your day isn't over, it's just annoying. That difference in stakes lets us move fast, and moving fast has done exactly what you'd hope. When I ask somebody if they want to see it, there's a high chance they say yes. If we get on a call and I walk them through it, there's a high chance they buy. I'm sure churn is coming, because the product is still janky and incomplete. But it's doing the thing for people, and it's doing it now.

Two products, two paces, two completely different levels of energy from the people looking at them.

What I've been chewing on all week is what actually makes someone agree to use unfinished software.

They have to be in pain. Everybody knows that part. But there's a second thing nobody talks about, which is that they also have to be a little bit crazy. They have to be willing to bet on something they know is going to be a bad fit at first. They know it'll be janky. They know things will break. They sign up anyway, because the new thing is exciting and they want to be part of it.

That second ingredient is the one with the expiry date. Pain lasts. Pain is structural, it comes from how their business works, and it'll still be there next year. The willingness to tolerate a broken product on the way to something better does not last. It burns off.

I've started thinking of it as a honeymoon phase, because that's what it feels like. You meet someone, at an event or over email or through an intro, and you're new to each other. They're excited about what they're building. You're excited about what you're building. You're both excited about what the other one is building. For a stretch there, it genuinely feels like you can solve the whole problem together.

Then time passes and nothing new shows up. They already know what your software looks like. They know how it works. They know what you're going to say on the call. The dopamine hit of the new thing is gone, and you didn't convert it into a habit while you had it.

And now, in their eyes, you're the startup that doesn't ship.

I don't think that's true. We started talking to these two exceptionally early, before there was much of anything, and we've shipped a lot since. But it doesn't matter what's true. It matters what it looks like from their side of the table.

Here's the specific thing I got wrong, and it's not the thing I would have guessed.

I kept in touch. That was the mistake. Not the year, the keeping in touch. I stayed close to them the whole time, checking in, keeping the relationship warm, because that's what you're supposed to do. But I was checking in more often than I had anything worth showing. So every conversation was a small reminder that we still hadn't shipped the thing. I thought I was maintaining momentum. I was documenting the absence of it.

Contact without progress is worse than no contact. It doesn't hold their attention, it spends it.

So I'm changing how I run design partner work, and the change is about shape more than speed. Instead of a steady drip of check-ins, I'm going to do it in thrusts. Go hot and heavy for a stretch, take a pile of meetings, learn a bunch of things fast. Then tell them plainly: I'm going to go work on this for a couple of months, and I'll come back to you when there's something to see. Then actually go quiet. Then come back with a real chunk of progress, and run the next big push alongside it.

Two things happen when you say that out loud. You stop burning attention you can't afford to burn. And when you come back, the gap works for you instead of against you, because two months of shipping shows up as one visible jump rather than eight weeks of not much. I’ll probably resume regular check-ins when I have regular progress to show. So I guess the learning is to calibrate your check-ins to the pace of progress.

That's the part people are actually buying when they agree to work with a startup. Not a weekly status update. A front row seat to watching the thing get carved out of a big lump of granite. They don't need to see every chip come off. They need to see the shape change.

So here's what I'd ask you. When you check in with your design partners, are you showing them progress, or are you just reminding them you haven't made any?

Collin

PS - If you know any property managers that use RentVine, I’d love to chat to them.

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