Losing a Customer Sucks - Lessons Learned

We lost a customer today.

It's part of the startup journey.

Taking responsibility is step one.

It sucks.

Customer acquisition requires so much effort.

Those phone calls build meaningful relationships.

Email negotiations take time.

But misalignment destroys everything.

Poor expectation management kills trust instantly.

This lesson stings.

Our product was not ready yet.

Customer timeline estimates missed the mark.

Expectations were high.

It's constantly jockeying between the expectation timeline and the product delivery timeline.

We couldn’t deliver.

The customer asked for a refund.

As an early-stage startup, we will not always get it right.

We accept this loss as a learning opportunity.

Lessons We're Implementing Now:

1. Biweekly customer update cadence regardless of progress
   

2. Buffer time added to all engineering estimations
   

3. Transparent timeline shared with customers

The startup path includes these cringe moments.

We learn through these experiences.

The iterative improvement cycle never stops.

Better systems emerge from these failures.

Our next customer interaction will benefit from today's pain.

We keep building.

We keep learning.

We get better every day.

I am bootstrapping my startup journey. I write about it every Friday. Read more: https://growthwithgary.com/archive?tags=Startup

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I am Gary Yau Chan. 3x Head of Growth. Product Growth specialist. 26x hackathon winner. Building ClarityInbox. I write about #PLG and #BuildInPublic. Please follow me on LinkedIn, or read about what you can hire me for on my Notion page.