ok so we lost Brennan Plumbing today. or yesterday technically. they emailed at like 4:47pm which is the most cowardly time to send a churn email by the way, you do it right before close so nobody can call you back.
they went to Jobber. of course they went to Jobber.
Brennan was a $79/mo customer. not huge. but they were one of the OG accounts, like sub #34 or something, and Mike Brennan was the guy who told three other trades people about us last fall and two of them converted. so it's not just the MRR it's the gravity of him leaving.
the email was nice. it was too nice actually. "we love what you built but we need scheduling and dispatch in the same tool." that's the line. that's the whole line.
and the thing is, we are NOT a scheduling tool. we never were. we are an invoicing tool. for small businesses. that is the whole pitch. that is on the homepage in 48pt type. INVOICING THAT DOESN'T SUCK. that's literally the headline.
so why am I angry. why am I angry that a plumbing company left an invoicing tool to go use a field service management platform that does invoicing AND scheduling AND dispatch AND customer reminders AND a CRM. of course they left. they were always going to leave. the question is why did we get them in the first place.
we got them because Jobber is $169/mo for the tier that has what they want and we were $79. that's it. that's the whole acquisition story. we were the cheap one.
and now that they have revenue they can afford the real thing.
so are we a starter tool. are we the gateway drug. is that the business. that's a fine business actually. that's how Mailchimp worked for years. you bring them in cheap, you keep them until they outgrow you, you collect $79 a month for 18 months and then you wave goodbye.
but it FEELS bad. it feels like we built something and then someone else got to keep it.
ok new feature idea. what if we did scheduling. not a real scheduling tool. but like, a calendar view. where you can drag invoices onto days and it sends a reminder to the customer the day before. "hey we are coming tomorrow at 10am, here is your invoice draft, reply YES to confirm."
that's not scheduling. that's invoice-driven scheduling. that's actually a different primitive. the invoice is the unit of work. you schedule the invoice, not the job. the invoice IS the job.
wait. is that good. that might be good. let me think.
no it's not good. it's a feature. it's not a wedge. Jobber will copy it in a quarter if anyone notices. and nobody will notice because we don't have distribution to make anyone notice.
but also. but ALSO. if the invoice is the unit of work then the whole product reorganizes around it. the dashboard becomes a timeline of invoices. paid, scheduled, draft, overdue. that's already most of what small businesses want to see when they log in. they don't want a CRM. they don't want pipelines. they want to know who owes them money and who they are seeing tomorrow.
ok wait. I'm getting excited. that's a bad sign at 2am. every idea is good at 2am.
let me back up.
Dev (engineer, not the role) said something in standup tuesday that has been eating me. we were going over the invoice templates rebuild and he said "I don't think the templates are the problem, I think people don't know we exist." just very flat. very matter of fact. and then we moved on to the next ticket.
and I have been chewing on that for FIVE DAYS now.
because he's right. he is so right. it doesn't matter how good the templates are if nobody is signing up to use them. our weekly signups are like 11. ELEVEN. you cannot build a business on eleven weekly signups even with our retention. the math doesn't math.
so the real problem is not scheduling. the real problem is not even Brennan leaving. the real problem is that nobody knows we exist and so when someone DOES find us they are a price-sensitive shopper who is going to leave the moment they can afford something better.
distribution. it's always distribution. I know this. I have known this since like 2019. and yet I am sitting here at 2am thinking about a calendar feature.
ok but here's the thing. distribution is hard and slow and I do not know how to do it and every blog post I write gets 40 views and the SEO play is a 12 month bet minimum and I do not have 12 months of runway for a bet that might not pay off.
shipping a feature is fast. shipping a feature feels like control. I know it's a fake feeling. I KNOW. but it's the feeling and I'm going to chase it because the other thing is too scary to think about at 2am.
real talk. is the positioning wrong.
"invoicing that doesn't suck" is a complaint not a position. it positions us against the bad thing. it does not say what we are FOR. what are we for.
we are for the solo operator who hates the admin part of their job and just wants to get paid faster. that's who Brennan was. that's who all our best customers are. roofers, plumbers, electricians, the occasional bookkeeper, two tattoo artists somehow, a dog groomer in Tucson who is our most active user by message volume by a margin of like 3x.
so the positioning is "get paid faster without the admin nightmare." that's better. that's a benefit. that's a thing a human would google.
but does that compete with Jobber. no. Jobber is "run your whole field service business." that's a bigger pitch. that's a more expensive pitch. that's a $169/mo pitch.
so we are not competing with Jobber. we are competing with QuickBooks Self Employed. and Wave. and people who are still using Word doc invoice templates from 2011.
ok so the competitor is Word docs and QuickBooks. that's a totally different mental model. that's a totally different ad campaign. that's a totally different homepage.
I should rewrite the homepage. tomorrow. today. whatever this day is.
but also if I rewrite the homepage I'm not shipping the scheduling thing. and the scheduling thing might save the next Brennan.
WOULD IT THOUGH. would Brennan have stayed if we had a calendar view. honestly. honestly honestly. no. probably not. they wanted dispatch. they wanted to assign jobs to their two guys in the field. we are never going to be that. we are never going to be that and we should not try to be that.
so the calendar idea is dead. ok.
but the "invoice as unit of work" thing might not be dead. that might be the actual product insight. that might be the thing that makes us not just a cheaper QuickBooks.
I keep coming back to this. the invoice is the artifact the small business actually cares about. not the customer record. not the pipeline. not the lead. the invoice. because the invoice is the moment money is owed. everything else is theater.
what if everything in the product was just a transformation on an invoice. estimate is a draft invoice. recurring billing is a scheduled invoice. payment reminder is an event on an invoice. customer is just "all invoices for this name." you could throw away half the CRM concept entirely.
this is actually kind of interesting. this is the kind of thing I would pitch to someone if I was on a podcast.
but it's also the kind of thing I would build for six months and then realize nobody asked for and we are out of money.
god.
ok shifting gears. the team. let me think about the team.
it's me and Dev and Priya. Priya is part time on design and doing great work but she's clearly looking. she didn't say she's looking but she's not posting in slack as much and she took two long weekends in a row and that's the pattern. I should talk to her. I should have talked to her last week.
Dev is fine. Dev is great actually. Dev is the reason the product works. Dev is also clearly disappointed in me which is not a great combo to have in a two engineer team.
am I a bad founder. probably. I am definitely a bad founder this week.
no wait. no. the product is good. the customers we have love us. the NPS from the q1 survey was 61 which is not nothing. we have 217 paying customers and 89% gross retention. those are real numbers.
we are not failing. we are stuck.
stuck and failing are different. stuck means the engine works and we don't know where to point it. failing means the engine is broken. our engine is fine. we just need to point it.
ok so what is the actual action item for tomorrow. let me try to write one down because if I don't I will wake up and answer emails for six hours and then it will be 4pm and I will be angry at myself.
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rewrite the homepage headline. drop "doesn't suck." try "get paid faster, with less paperwork." or something. test it.
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do not build the calendar feature. write it in the someday file. close the tab.
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talk to Priya. just ask. "are you good." don't make it weird.
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write back to Brennan. a real reply. ask if he'd take a 20 minute call. churn interviews are the highest signal data on earth and I keep skipping them.
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that's enough.
oh and one more thing. the "invoice as unit of work" idea. write that down. don't lose it. don't build it. just write it down. it might be the thing in 18 months. it is not the thing this month.
ok.
it's 2:47am.
the cat is on my keyboard. she's been on my keyboard for a while actually. she does not care about Jobber.
I should go to bed.
I'm not going to go to bed.
one more thought. the thing that bugs me most about Brennan leaving is not the MRR. it's that I FEEL like I should have seen it coming. he asked about scheduling in like february. I have the email. I said "not on the roadmap right now, let me know if it's a dealbreaker" and he said "not yet" and I took that as a win and moved on.
"not yet" is not a win. "not yet" is a countdown. I should put every "not yet" into a spreadsheet and review it monthly. that's a real process. that might be worth more than any feature.
god ok. churn risk register. that's a thing. write that down too.
actually that might be the most valuable thing I figured out tonight and it's not a feature it's a SPREADSHEET. typical.
ok ideas list before I forget:
- churn risk register based on feature requests we said no to
- rewrite homepage around "get paid faster" not "invoicing"
- invoice-as-unit-of-work as a longer term product direction
- calendar / scheduled invoices feature (LATER, not now, stop it)
- customer interviews. real ones. monthly. not when I feel like it.
- some kind of referral incentive because Brennan referred two people and we never thanked him beyond a generic email. we should have sent him a damn bottle of wine.
- did we ever fix the stripe webhook retry thing. I think we did. check tomorrow.
- distribution. distribution. distribution. I have no answer here. but I have to have an answer here.
the distribution thing is the one that scares me. everything else is a known problem with a known shape. distribution is just a blank page.
maybe I should write. like actually write. not blog posts. just write what I know about getting paid as a solo operator and put it on the internet and see if anyone reads it. that's a year long bet though. that's the thing I keep flinching from.
every successful founder I admire built an audience BEFORE the product. I built the product first because I thought the product would be the audience. that was naive. the product is not the audience. the product is a thing the audience buys.
I have a product. I do not have an audience.
ok now I'm spiraling.
the product is fine. the product is good. our customers love it. we just need more customers. we just need MORE CUSTOMERS. that is not a hard problem statement that is a CLEAR problem statement.
we lost ONE customer. we did not lose the business. one customer who was always going to leave eventually because they were always going to outgrow us. that is the SYSTEM working. not a system breaking.
god I keep flip flopping on this. ok one more time. the product is fine. we just need to ship faster and tell more people. that's it. that's the whole thing. ship faster, tell more people.
if I can hold that in my head tomorrow morning the day will be a win.
ship faster. tell more people. ship faster. tell more people.
3:11am. cat is now on the floor staring at me like I'm the problem.
she might have a point.
going to bed. probably.
one more.
ok actually here's the thing. the engineer comment. Dev's comment. "I don't think the templates are the problem, I think people don't know we exist." it bothered me because it was true but ALSO because I think Dev was telling me something else. I think Dev was telling me he doesn't think the work he's doing matters. and that is a much bigger problem than any feature roadmap. that is a "your best engineer is going to quit in 90 days" problem.
I need to talk to Dev too. add to the list.
- homepage
- someday file
- priya
- brennan
- DEV. talk to dev. not about features. about whether the work matters. about why we are doing what we are doing. give him the bigger picture or admit I don't have one.
I think I don't have one. that's the truth. I have a product and a list of features and a vague sense that small businesses should pay us money. that is not a vision. that is a job.
founders need a vision. I need a vision. I do not have a vision tonight. I am hoping I have a vision by friday.
ok. for real. bed.
if anyone ever reads this in six months when we IPO I want it on the record that I figured it all out at 3:18am on a tuesday in may while a cat judged me from across the room.
if anyone ever reads this in six months when we shut down I want it on the record that I tried.
both can be true.
going to bed.