The Customer Who Almost Quit Knows More Than Your Fans (opens in new tab)

A few years into building a B2B analytics tool, a founder I know got an email from his largest customer. The operations director had prepared a seventeen-point complaint document. Fonts too small. Export function broken for edge cases. The onboarding flow assumed too much prior knowledge. The founder’s first instinct was to fire back defensively, or at least to deprioritize the feedback because this customer was, objectively, a pain. He sat on it for two days. Then he got on a call, listened ...