Every week, I advise founders on how to hit $10k MRR. On Tuesdays, I share my consulting notes from those private sessions. Learn from their mistakes so you don't burn your own cash.
He had 100% churn. The problem wasn't his product.
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Hey Reader, Your churn data is lying to you. Right now, countless AI tools are flooded with "AI tourists" — curious users who sign up to play with new tech, not to solve a real business problem. Their feedback is a trap. A founder I'm advising called me in a panic last week. Ten out of ten trial users had churned. He was convinced his tech wasn't good enough and was about to burn his last $20k tweaking the AI model. I told him to stop. We didn't look at the product. We looked at the users. The problem wasn't that the product was bad; it was that he was listening to the wrong people. He was trying to satisfy users who were never going to be real customers. The AI wasn't broken. His Go-to-Market was. He was building a product for one user (a professional with a painful, recurring problem) but marketing it to another (a tourist looking for a cool demo). This is one of the most common ways founders fail to achieve Product-Market Fit. My advice was simple: Stop listening to the tourists. We rewrote his landing page to speak directly to a tiny, specific user with a painful, manual process that his AI could automate. The next cohort of users stuck. You haven't built a haunted house — you've just built a theme park, and the visitors are leaving after the free ride is over. Your job isn't to rebuild the ride; it's to find the people who truly need to get to the destination. — Dmitry P.S. If your user feedback feels like noise and you're struggling to find the real signal, let's talk. I help founders cut through the chaos to focus on what actually drives traction. Book your free strategy call. |
Clarity Filter
Every week, I advise founders on how to hit $10k MRR. On Tuesdays, I share my consulting notes from those private sessions. Learn from their mistakes so you don't burn your own cash.
Hey Reader, Founders love to pitch an inevitable future. They see a clear shift in the market, build a product for that future, and launch. Then they get silent buyers and a dead pipeline. They assume the product is broken. Or the marketing is wrong. But the problem is usually much simpler: they are early. And in an early-stage startup, being ahead of your time is functionally indistinguishable from being wrong. A market can be directionally attractive and still be a terrible opportunity...
Hey Reader, In my last email, I broke down how Sam Altman’s relationship network literally purchased his first company's failure for millions. Most builders read that and thought: "Great, but I don't live in SF and I don't know any VCs." You are looking at networking all wrong. You don’t need billionaires. You need a net of adjacent peers who are 6 to 12 months ahead of you. If you want to know if your current network is there yet, here's a handy validator for ya: Look at your calendar for...
Hey Reader, Founders love the myth of the exceptional product. They believe Silicon Valley legends won because they built better software. Here is the reality. Sam Altman's first company, Loopt, had no real traction. It failed as a consumer product. It was acquired for millions anyway. Not because the tech was brilliant. Because Altman had well-connected VC relationships. When the app failed, his network caught him. The relationships were the infrastructure that literally purchased his...