Your Hardest Customer Is Your Most Valuable One (opens in new tab)

Three months into my first startup, a customer called to cancel. Not a polite cancellation email. A phone call, forty minutes long, where she walked through every way our product had failed her team. I remember dreading that call. I should have been taking notes from the first sentence. She didn’t renew. But everything she said became the product roadmap for the next six months. Two of the features she demanded became the primary reasons the next ten customers signed. She cost us one contract...