September 29, 2020 | Churn always hurts

We are so fragile as solopreneurs.

One day you get a new paying customer and feel like you can conquer the world.

The next day a customer unsubscribes and you feel like you should polish your CV again.

The reason is that we have direct contact with the source. The customer. The new one. The old one. The churned one. The complaints. The "thank you" emails. Everything. There is no one is between, and therefore it's harder to have boundaries between life and work.

Most CEOs or founders of companies don't have this kind of relationship with their customers. They will get a report from an employee, with the trends, or the total numbers of paying customers.

Maybe that's a more healthy way of living life, maybe not.

Customers are humans. But taking every single event into consideration and bringing it inside your daily life might not be the smartest thing.

Someone churning feels almost like someone rejecting you as a person. Which is insane and makes no sense.

You are not your product. You are not your churn. You are not your MRR. You are not your business.

It's hard, but I've become a lot better at it. One, it takes time. Most makers, like myself, are only two or three years our entrepreneurial journey. That's nothing. Let's see how much better we'll be in another 5 or 10 years.

Another thing that helps, and it might sound shallow, is making more money.

When I was at $100 MRR and lost a $50/mo customer, I almost needed to be carried on a stretcher. Haha. I had just lost half of my revenue in an instant.

When I am at $2,359 MRR and a $50/mo customer unsubscribes, ok. I went to $2,309. Not a huge deal. I can cope and make up.

I'm writing this because today I lost two customers. That is super rare, and it sucks. It was the worst start to my morning.

One good thing is that I don't have impostor syndrome. I don't start wondering if what I've built is useless or whatever, because I've seen the results. Customers of mine closing multi thousand deals and making hundreds of times their money back.

But whatever. Fuck it. It happens to everyone. There is no business out there that has zero churn.

And I know that everyone get's hurt by churn, so nothing special there either.

I like being in touch with the source, and knowing my customers by their first name, one by one. I love the expression, "running your business like a boutique". So, I'll keep it that way, but actively try to remind myself that I am Alex, not Cyberleads.

Also, one thought that helps me a lot:

"The longer the game you play, the less small loses matter."

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