David Skok

There must be something, some characteristic about them that makes the product not work.

So one example of a company where I saw a big difference like this was conducted on a New York

They had some customers that were expanding like crazy and loved the product and some customers that were churning.

And we found out that the real key was that it was the nature of the users.

The users that were sticking with the product were pretty advanced users that really understood how to take a tool and apply a tool, whereas the ones who were churning were the ones who really were not that sophisticated and wanted an application, not a tool.

And so what Conductor really needed to do

was either change the way they qualified people so they didn't sell to the people that weren't looking for a tool, or better still, change the product and build an application layer, or alternatively, maybe a services layer that would actually run the tool and set up the tool for the group that we're used to looking for the more application layer.

So it's that diving in to segment and understand why are the logos churning?

If they're greater than 20% per annum, do not be happy with it.

You should not accept that and recognize that that's going to be a problem for you in the long term.

And really, if you can, try to get it even into the 10% range, although that's hard if you're dealing with smaller sized customers out there.

So I have no problem with that.

So I'm going to sort of give you a quick, very short story here.

This is an imaginary story, but the story is you're a

You're an employee at Glackendecker and you go to a annual meeting where the CEO stands up and he says, I've got good news for you and I got bad news for you.

The good news is drill sales are up like crazy and we're beating plan.

The bad news is we're not giving our customers what they want.

Customers would like to be able to walk in and buy a packet of holes.

And if we could give them that, if anybody, and never has this become more obvious than Uber coming along and disrupting rental car companies because you could be focused on the rental car company.

mode of thing and not recognize that what people really want is transportation from A to B. So why I bring that up in this particular case here is I think it's super important for entrepreneurs and founders to focus in on