The award email landed at 8:14 on a Tuesday. It said Asenda had been shortlisted for a regional technology award, and the ceremony was in three weeks. The team was in the same room tracing why three customers had churned that quarter. Both were real signals. Only one of them deserved the morning.
The two signals that looked identical
The churn review was unglamorous. Two of the three customers had left for the same reason, a pricing misstep we had made in Q1, and one had simply outgrown the product. None of it was fatal, but all of it was work. The kind of work that does not get you on a shortlist.
The award email was the opposite. It felt like proof that the market saw what we were building. It arrived with a request to confirm attendance, send a company bio, and nominate a category. That is about ninety minutes of fiddly, flattering admin. It was the easiest thing on the table that morning.
The trap is that both signals activate the same part of a founder's brain. The churn review asks you to sit in a failure and pull it apart. The award email asks you to stand in a win. One feels like progress and the other feels like penance, and the feeling is a terrible guide to what actually moves the company.
What the churn data was actually telling us
The pricing misstep was the detail worth the whole morning. We had changed the structure for new customers in Q1 without a plan for the existing base, and two of the three churned accounts were on the old pricing, surprised by what renewal looked like. That is a fixable, concrete, known cause. It does not require a strategy offsite. It requires a decision about grandfathering, and a communication to the customers who had not left yet.
The third churn was different and more useful. The customer had outgrown us, which sounds like a polite way to say failure but is actually a segmentation signal. They wanted a feature set we had deliberately not built. Knowing that tells you who you are not serving, which sharpens who you are serving.
There is a documented version of this choice that has always stuck with me. In 1985, Coca-Cola's leadership, after years of market share pressure from Pepsi, decided to replace the original formula with a sweeter New Coke. The decision was made for rational, well-researched reasons. It was a catastrophe. Consumers revolted. The company reversed course and brought back the original formula as Coca-Cola Classic roughly seventy-nine days later, a reversal documented in the company's own history and in the press coverage of the time.
The reason that story is useful here is the moment that gets smoothed over. The Coca-Cola executives did not know, at the point they launched, that the reversal would work. There was a period where they had committed to a signal, watched it fail, and had to decide whether to keep defending it or admit the mistake. The part of the story where the outcome was genuinely in doubt is exactly where the founder sits on a Tuesday morning with a churn review and a flattering email.
The discipline of answering the wrong question
The award email was not worthless. It is a genuine signal that partners and prospective clients will search your name. But it answers a question about the past. The award committee judged what you had already built. The churn review answers a question about the future, which is whether the customers you still have are going to stay.
The discipline is to ask which signal would cost you more to ignore. The award email, ignored for a day, costs nothing. The churn data, ignored for a quarter, costs the runway that the award is supposed to validate. A shortlist does not pay for engineering time. Retained customers do.
This is the same discipline that applies to investor interest versus customer fire. What Happens When the Customer Fire Outranks the Investor Meeting? is about that exact trade, and the reasoning is identical: the external validation follows the internal health, not the other way around.
What I did with the rest of the morning
I answered the award email last. I confirmed attendance and filed the bio request in the folder where I keep things that need a quiet half hour, not a decision. Then I got back to the room where the team was still tracing the third churn, because that was the signal that would still be true in six months. The award would be a nice sentence on a deck. The pricing fix would be the thing that stopped the next three customers from leaving.
By the end of the week the grandfathering decision was made and communicated. The shortlist email is still sitting in the folder where I put it. I will deal with it when the ceremony is closer, but it is no longer running the morning.
Comments
No comments yet.