How long should an early-stage company support its earliest customers? Probably not as long as you think!
A sign you have achieved product-market fit is when the cost of acquiring your customers is less than the value of the customers themselves (CAC is less than LTV).
Early on, your customers are very valuable, but they also cost a ton. Not only because it’s time-intensive to acquire them, but also because they will quickly start asking for new features that are also time-intensive and distracting.
It’s not just the cost of acquisition, but also the cost of support.
But what happens when, one day, you wake up and realize the cost of continuing to support those customers is more than they are truly worth?
What if the things they’re asking for aren’t helping your larger market, or aren’t lining up with where your product is heading?
This is where you have to get comfortable, for lack of a better word, with nuking them.
While it’s true that Early Adopters are your marketing rocket fuel, they also feel a sense of entitlement and ownership over what you’re building.
When they realize you’re no longer solving their problems, they’ll get LOUD.
You need to let them go so you can focus on the people you’ll make happy moving forward.
Your early customers aren’t your ex.
When you break up with a person, you (should) do it with a face to face conversation.
But with customers, you have to weigh if you ever want to squarely tell anyone, especially in business, that you no longer care about them.
To be fair, it won’t stop them from feeling upset (and even betrayed) when they realize you’re no longer answering their emails, but that shouldn’t stop you from moving on.
There is no way to let them down easy, and you shouldn’t feel like you have to.
Chances are, they’ll be fine.
While we all want to be the hero in our own stories, the fact is, we overvalue ourselves (and our products) in everyone else’s lives.
People will function without you. People will be ok.
People who aren’t, aren’t reasonable. So don’t bother trying.
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PS. I’m a bit of a people pleaser and this lesson took me a long time to really embrace. Thankfully, in my years as a coach I’ve been able to help a number of founders make this transition as they scale their business to a much larger market.
Want to know more? Send me a DM here on LinkedIn and let’s have a chat.