Why we canceled all our paying customers and relaunched

Four months ago, we arrived at a crossroads. We worked long nights and dedicated every weekend for the past two years developing this product, a promotional tool for Etsy sellers. We had 120 customers who were happy enough with the product that they continued to pay for it. But we came to that crossroad, which at the time felt more like a wall, and realized we had to change our direction in order break through that growth limit wall. So we did what few would do, canceled every single one of our customers and started over.

Recognizing Growth Limits

It’s not easy to recognize your start up’s growth limit and even harder to completely start over. Though it now seems like the best possible decision, alienating your current customers for potential future customers is not in any start up playbook that I’ve ever read. We knew we had 120 guaranteed paying customers by staying the same and could build on that moderate success. We also saw that our growth was slow and despite having happy customers, we weren’t gaining more customers. We had to admit this to ourselves and it was difficult. But it was also realistic. So by taking a risk and choosing to take one step back, we are now giving ourselves the opportunity to take 10 steps forward.

It Still Comes Down to Execution

After the decision was made, it still took 4 months of development to create our new product. It wasn’t easy and we questioned our decision almost daily. And it was made even more difficult by our relocation to London. But we ultimately believed in our decision and all completely bought into the product and the direction we would take. This was probably the most important lesson from the entire journey. By believing in the product, we stayed more motivated and focused on our end goal; the product launch.

The Future

We built Fanchimp as a simple and efficient solution for social media content discovery and scheduling. To many, the most time consuming part of social media marketing is finding the actual content. And many small businesses don’t have the time to spend hours searching for it. We wanted to create a powerfully simple tool that allows these small businesses to plan and schedule any content for the week while they’re waiting for their morning coffee. That was our goal. And of our original 120 customers, some are happily using our new product. This has given us a ton of confidence knowing that even after we canceled their monthly subscription, they liked our product enough to sign back up and continue paying for our product. It’s still hard to believe our biggest growth opportunity came right after cancelling every single customer.

Originally published at blog.fanchimp.com.

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