Guess who just got ROASTED Awesome experience with @asmartbear and @esbenfj We talked about the challenges of growing Senja from $1,000,000 ARR Lots to reflect on, and execute But for now I am just feeling grateful for their time And the opportunity to keep learning, and become a better founder

We had 716 paying customers churn since April Here's exactly why they left The main reason is they are no longer actively collecting testimonials. For many businesses, testimonial collection is campaign based. We've added functions that automate ongoing collection, but that behaviour is much more common with reviews. Adding the function to constantly collect only helps the small segment who would've done that anyway. In other words it doesn't actually change the customer behaviour. We've also added Churnkey [pause account], focused on activation, and increased educational content like webinars and emails. This is why I call churn "systemic" as I believe it's a reflection of the ICP and offer, not the @SenjaHQ product itself. Interesting aside: we are not seeing people leave because they vibe-coded their own solution. Churn is one of the issues I am looking forward to discussing when I record my pod with @asmartbear.

Another flat revenue month at Senja We've been stuck at $1,000,000 ARR for several months now Here’s what’s going on: Our sign ups and churn have met. Each day about 8 customers cancel and 8 users upgrade. I spent the last year dealing with the fall out of my cofounder leaving. I now work with an awesome marketer @startupwithana, engineer @ngrushkovsky and 'everything else' person. Growing sign ups is really hard right now. Our strategy is partnerships - affiliate and sponsorships to educate about Senja and drive sales in return for a kickback. This work isn’t driving sign ups, yet. But it’s early. Right now I’m looking for signals that relationship building is working. Ana has worked 24/7 to secure calls with some incredible people. That’s the first step. Early on, most my marketing work lasted an hour, then a week. Now, this one bet is going to take months to run. We’re also exploring going upmarket. We’re using fake doors to pitch new product ideas to paying customers, asking them to book a call to learn more and get early access. This is very early. We’re making product changes to ensure @senjahq works end to end, from testimonial invite and collection to sharing as social posts, widgets, reels and case studies. I’m still loving my communities, @Microconf and @DynamiteCircle. For me they have both been life changing. Every founder should have a tribe to support, advise, and hold to account. Churn is still high at about 5.5% which appears to be systemic rather than fixable. This is a big lever that won’t move. Fundamentally, testimonials are not a big market. It’s not reviews, it’s not feedback, it’s a little, awesome niche and we may have tapped it out. I’m an engineer now. I spend my time fixing papercuts to improve lifecycle performance. These are reviewed by Nikolai who is now mainly working on our bigger bets and more complex engineering challenges. Craft is still important to me. I’m still talking to customers, reworking and refining screens and flows, and agonising over small details. But I also iterate on the product every day. I have been struggling with my health. I’m nomadic and have been lucky to visit 10 countries already this year. If I want to hit other goals including PBs in the gym I will probably need to travel less. I hired for hard work and energy, and I’ve got it. I have to tell my team to work less, not more. I feel lucky to have it that way. I think building trust is getting harder which is making the concept of collecting and sharing proof more marketable… but educating and changing buyer behaviour is hard to do when LTV is high, and impossible when low. I’m both excited for the business and team, and extremely uncertain about the future

Is it just me or did @stripe get enshittified? They have fees on EVERYTHING Currency exchange, foreign bank accounts, faster payouts, and radar

I’m tripling our marketing spend From $5k a month to $15k a month I want @startupwithana to start taking bigger bets This money will be used to book paid sponsorships Sponsoring educators with large audiences to create content about proof and Senja Our priority will be longform content like webinars, YouTube videos and email sequences

Resilience is having a bad day, like Tiago did, and continuing Every successful entrepreneur had multiple days when they wanted to crash out That's where the personal and professional growth lives - working on yourself, and through the challenges

If you can't answer this question you're ngmi Why do your customers LOVE you? What do you do better than your competitors? This is the foundation of your marketing Sharing and proving your secret sauce In your landing pages, your paid ads, your comparison pages, your cold emails, your social posts, and even your page titles So how do you do it? First, ask them Second, and more easily, review the feedback they have already shared with you We're making that ridiculously easy for @SenjaHQ customers They can now see their testimonial themes See what their customers love about their product, policies and team It looks like this, and it's live now...

You’re marketing constantly And all marketing is real Build in public is marketing Email is marketing Sharing with friends is marketing YouTube is marketing Free tools are marketing Just because you enjoy it doesn’t mean it’s not marketing But it’s a good lesson for founders Find the marketing channel that works AND you enjoy executing That’s the way you’ll continue doing it

We actually did it! We hit 50 days of thanking our customers We sent every new paying customer, partner, affiliate, webinar attendee, and friend a thank you email Each one had a custom video attached In fact @startupwithana alone sent over 1,000 thank yous When was the last time you thanked a customer or showed them some love?

I've wasted 1000s of hours I've spent so much time thinking about users outside our ICP People who signed up and used us, but Senja isn't really built for Reviewing sign ups, churn and activation for people that will probably never love us, or stay We're stopping that today All of our internal reporting now only surfaces our ICP We're only reviewing how onboarding, activation and churn looks for them We're going to find more people who love what we do and get more of them to success So we're basically returning to our product-led foundations