The Origin Story

OK, so this is my first post of the blog: it should probably be a summary of what might be to come here, and how did I even get to this point….

It is not my natural inclination to be open and vocal about these things. “Class Partiipation” has been below average for my life from pre-kindergarten onwards. I’m not the first to throw my hat in the ring or raise my hand with an answer. But let’s give it a try with this blog…

A caveat: this blog has no intention of offering any answers. Instead, my hope will be more of a documentation, with transparency and tactics of how I am going about doing things. A running diary of sorts? And a lot of this will be learning on the fly.

You may be reading along like you’re watching the innocent idiot in a horror movie walk right into the trap……NO, don’t go there you fool!!!

So yeah, I very well may be that hapless victim in a horror movie making naive mistakes until the fatal end. Or I may fly off into the night like a bad ass witch screaming “Suckazzz….” hopefully it will be somewhere in the middle. But if I can learn a few things, and share them here, then I’ll call that a Win.

So that brings me to the goals:

Of this blog:

• Share what I am doing as I build a software company. I have already encountered some of the unforeseen challenges, distractions, and disappointments of this, in just a few weeks. A few off the top of my head: I came across a product that was for sale in the same space, thought that I could purchase it, but oh well, already sold. Cofounder? I thought that I found someone who was a good fit in skill sets, ambitions, goals. Didn’t work out. #missedconnections

• Better Communication – I can write–emails, notes, summaries, etc. But to produce polished and structured pieces of writing? There is a few years of dust built up, the muscle has atrophied, the gears are rusty. I hope that with consistent practice, my writing (and metaphors) will get more crisp. Writing is a foundational skill that has transferrable skills to most things in life, and I will hope to improve through practice here. And related to the point above, it will help clarify the thoughts around what happened, and what I plan to happen, as I continue forward with building a company.

• Meet Interesting People – my network is relatively small–great friends and family, but I don’t know too many people in the bootstrapped software space, which is the sandbox that I am entering. So I hope that by virtue of sharing my experiences, I can meet some more people. Let’s start now! If you are reading this, then say what’s up: gen@retainable.com

• Accountability – Things get a lot more tricky when you put things out in the public–the margin of error, and the ability to hide behind excuses, diminishes. And I need that. So with that, I hope to share the plans, and the progress, on the blog.

My Professional Goals:

• Get a working product and a customer who values what I offer – I mean, damn….I should have started with this, but it should be a primary goal to establish a simple fact: people want what I am making. The simple proxy to figure this out is if I can get a paying customer, ideally someone that I do not know. That is goal numero uno: get a paying customer.

Peel the layer back on that goal, and there are a few sub-goals:

• Help software companies reduce their churn in a meaningful way. I know from personal experience that churn is one of those things that keep software people awake at night. Literally. I had countless nights thinking about the problem and how it can be addressed, and it is a near-universal challenge for SaaS people. I think that I have some solutions, so getting in front of people who need those answers is paramount.

• Attack the problem of customer churn in an innovative, and scalable manner: Going back to my first point, I am building a software company. It is easier, and certainly tempting, to make this a service. As in, manually pore over the data and extract actionable insights on how I can help a company reduce churn. But that defeats the purpose. And also sidesteps the secret sauce, which is using historical data and patterns to inform future behavior, ie use machine learning to predict churn. So I am going to stay committed to the software component of this out of necessity.

And my personal goals:

• Spend time with my family: Again, there a several components to this….. One is to raise a happy and well-adjusted child. At 3 years old, the world is just starting to open up and a tiny human is starting to take form in personality, desires, needs. This means having her enjoy school, healthy diet (the scientists behind creating addictive fast foods are evil geniuses who I battle every day….), physical activity. Another component is maintaining a happy and healthy marriage. Again, easier said than done when trying to balance a busy day to day life, and the demands of a child, a job, and limited waking hours.

• Travel abroad for extended periods: I was a bit late to the digital nomad game, and by the time that I embarked on my first overseas live/work situation, there was a 1 year old in tow. However, we found ways to make it work, and it ultimately created some of the fondest memories and experiences that we have had as a family. The approach is a more simple slow travel, but actually makes for a better experience in my opinion anyway.

Let’s move this to a self-directed Q &A:

What are you working on now?

Retainable is a predictive churn analytics for SaaS companies. In less annoying jargon, I want to help software companies know who is going to cancel before they actually do, so there is time to save the customer and keep them as happy (and paying) customers. In the software world, it’s called Churn, and it really sucks.

When people talk about solving a pain point with a new start up, customer churn most definitely falls in that category. There is nearly a personal and visceral element to churn, like death by a thousand cuts. Literally.

Customer churn can be a huge limiting factor to growing a subscription business, and I think that a lot of software companies are hindered by understanding the drivers of churn and how to pre-emptively reduce it.

I believe that reducing churn is one of the most cost-effective and efficient ways to super charge growth.

I learned this from personal experience. At my last job, I was leading the marketing team. Overall, I think that we did a kick ass job, and drove a tremendous amount of growth at a nearly unprecedented clip.

Yet, customer churn was a persistent challenge, largely due to the nature of the product (think about a dating app like Tinder–the ultimate goal is to have people succeed and no longer need to find a partner on Tinder. We were very analagous to that).

I liken it to those crippling moves in an UFC fight–persistently painful shots to the ribs…It’s not necessarily a knock out blow, but it makes it a hell of a lot harder to win the fight. And over time can certainly cripple a behometh to tap out.

Yeah, that hurts….let’s move on now.

Many software companies set up analytics as a de facto step in launching their product. There are reams of data that are collected, with the well-intentioned thought that one day once all of these imminent fires have been addressed, we’ll be able to analyze and understand the data.

I believe that software companies can improve their customer retention (and inversely reduce churn) by understanding where customers are not getting their desired value. And more specifically, who is not succeeding with the product. These two elements, of who may churn, and why they may churn, would lead to game-changing insights for software companies.

A few problems here:

• The fires and urgency of a fast-growing start up never end. The list of Things To Be Done is so long and varied that analyzing churning customers often falls to the bottom of the list.

• The resources and bandwidth are limited, so a dedicated head to dig through reams of data and extract actionable insights is years in the future, if at all. Data Analysts and Data Scientists are not often the generalists and core members at early stage companies. Instead, they are often specialists who come in after product-market fit to drill down in the data.

• Automated solutions scale well, but miss the mark on actually stemming the tide of customer churn. As a result of the two points above, companies will use a band-aid approach of setting up some automations and triggers to connect with disengaged or members who just canceled. This is a great first step, but becomes such a blanket approach that misses the mark of knowing the nuances of what a customer wants to achieve by signing up, and where the product is falling short in meeting those goals.

Fun fact: it costs 5-25 times more money to acquire a new customer as it does to keep an existing customer.

– Harvard Business Review

So that makes it a no brainer to focus on ensuring that ALL existing customers are happy and getting value from the product. Hence the emergence of a whole new industry of Customer Success.

One wrinkle with Customer Success though: it is easy when there is a clearly defined 1-to1 relationship with a customer: you know them by name, you know their dog’s name, you can have regular check in calls, and there is an annual contract that you damn well better renew. So there is a singular focus to those Customer Success managers.

But what about self-serve SaaS products, where there may be a high volume of transactions and things are automated out of necessity? Then things get a bit more tricky…..

And that’s where Retainable comes in.

I want to provide a customer health score for each customer, to know exactly which customers are at high risk of churning, and why they are at risk of churning.

This will help companies know who to target, and what pain point is not being addressed.

Things In My Favor:

• I know the problem and the market –
• It is a real problem, with large dollars at stake
• There is an identifiable and reachable market
• There is willingness to pay

Things Not In My Favor:

• I don’t know for certain if my solution is the right one
• I am outsourcing the initial build out of the product to a freelancer
• I don’t have an audience, a huge network, customers, or pre-sales.
• I can’t develop the product myself. Or more accurately, I do not want to put in the time and effort to learn to code.
• I don’t know what I don’t know – this is my first SaaS company. I’ve been privileged to be on the leadership team and a seat at the table of an incredibly fast-growing SaaS company for four years. But there are still going to be pitfalls and challenges that I will run into inevitably.

Toss ups — Good and/or Bad:

• I have a little money: I have been saving for years now, without a distinct goal in mind. Just for the “One day I might want to start a company….” Well that time is now. And it’s about $40k. Depending on who you ask, this is a tall stack, or a teeny tiny stack. Regardless, it is what it is, and I think that it can be more than enough to build a working product and validate the idea.
  • And more importantly, my mindset of frugality and extending this runway will be ever present, as time is money and money is time here.  
• I have a family – less time, more responsibility, greater accountability
• Relatedly, I want to maintain my work-life balance. And part of that means working and traveling and living abroad.
• I’m doing this as a solo founder

So there it is– an introduction to the blog, my goals, and my commitment to Retainable. This is going to be a learning experience for me and hopefully any readers of the blog, on the course of building something from scratch.

When I have told people that i am starting a software company, I usually get something along the lines of an enthusiastic “Congratulations1” to a somber “Good luck….” there is a mix of excitement, apprehension, uncertainty, and optimism.

I can’t really say that fear is a present emotion, because in reality, what is the worst case scenario? A public crash and burn and a return to a normal job. That isn’t the ideal outcome, but it isn’t life-threatening or catastrophic.

Maybe that’s just a defense mechanism, but nevertheless, the journey begins now! My goal is to post updates once a week with some of the activities and updates.