Empty support inbox? Revenue just jumped off a balcony.

_{Day 144/100}

Hey—It's Tim.

Not gonna lie, this is a hard one to write.

I’ve spent the last week playing whack-a-mole with symptoms while the disease tip-toed out the door.

Quiet cancellations.
No goodbye email, no snarky tweet.
Just a neat little line on Stripe: “user deleted subscription.”

I’ve come to realise it’s the polite exit is the one that kills you.

Netflix’s data crew once proved the point: when watchers leave quietly they’re twice as hard to woo back.

Makes sense.
The people who complain still believe you can change.
The ghosts already wrote your eulogy.

Quiet ≠ happy

I used to think an empty support inbox meant things were smooth.
Turns out it often means nobody cares enough to file a ticket. When we rolled out the new Clusters a few months back, responses were good, and then… crickets.

My ego threw a party.
Revenue threw itself off a balcony.

Now every “inactive-for-7-days” user will get a blunt text from me:

Most will ignore it.

I’m hoping those that answer give me the raw, unfiltered truth.
That truth stings. It’s the kind that makes you pace the hallway at 3 a.m.

(Barefoot. Because metaphor.)

But it’s supposed to win back 1 in 10. Which, in SaaS land, is a small resurrection.

The polite lie

“Interesting product.”
“Maybe later.”
“I’ll run it past the team.”

Polite words smell like hope but rot like fruit. I’ve started answering with:

Half the time they laugh and admit it’s really about price, or trust, or the fact their backlog looks like a crime scene.

The other half?

They ghost. Saves me three follow-up emails and the slow bleed of optimism.

Time isn’t timing

“Not right now” is code for “Not worth it.”

If Penfriend shaved six hours off their Tuesday, someone on that team would skip lunch to install it.

So we’re rebuilding the onboarding to get you the most value possible as fast as possible. My little rebellion against excuses disguised as calendars.

When price hurts, value lives

Slack noticed the customers who argued hardest about cost became their loudest cheerleaders once they paid.

Turns out pain is attention is care.

Today when someone balks at Pro, I offer a usage-based discount and a 20-minute roadmap call.

Conversions jumped eight percent. More importantly, the new users show up to that call with questions, not “maybes.”

Metrics I now lose sleep over (in English, not SQL)

• First meaningful action: did they do something that matters, fast?

• Day-two boomerang: did they come back when the novelty wore off?

• Depth, not breadth: did they explore the corners, or just the lobby?

• Time-to-pay: nothing clarifies value like a credit-card timestamp.

Superhuman tracks “time-to-first-email.”

I stole that philosophy, pointing it at “time-to-first-article.” The dashboard yells at me if it’s over 5 mins.

5 mins is amazing when you get a fully researched, SEO AND LLM optimised article.
With your own voice.

I like dashboards that yell; they’re honest.

Silence is comfortable right up until it isn’t.

So here’s my Saturday resolution: chase the noise, hug the complaints, treat ghosts like emergencies.

If your product is whisper-quiet today, check the vitals before Monday hits.

✌️ Tim "Churn Bounty-Hunter" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. If you ever tried Penfriend and drifted away, hit reply and tear me to shreds. What confused you? What bored you? What made you quit? The blunt truth helps me build something worth sticking around for. No sugar-coating, please—I can take it.

Penfriend.ai
Made by content marketers. Used by better ones.