Unleak

Today is a big day for me. The product is not ready right now, but I decided to go all-out on transparency while stretching for the last few miles before the official release.

That means I won't fake it until I make it.

I connected Stripe to showcase revenues. $0 / month I connected Google Analytics to showcase the visitors. 0 / month

Unleak is a side project, which means it will grow slowly. It won't be ready for launch in the next couple of days; this will take time.

There is much to do, but I plan on enjoying the trip rather than expecting to arrive at the destination early.

Today, the first line of code for Unleak has been written. The core product would offer four widgets at its release date:

• Greeter: just a simple modal window asking the customer what he is expecting from the product he just signed up to. The first step to customer success is to realize that not all customers are a good fit for your product.

• Enroller: again, a simple widget where the user selects a plan and enter payment information. He is then a customer. Yay!

• Manager: a complete modal widget that would show the status of your subscription, enable you to change your plan, preview what the change would do to your billing, retrieve your previous invoices, cancel your account, etc.

• Paywall: ask your users to upgrade their plan to access certain features. This will help you achieve negative churn more easily by selling the right upgrade at the right time.

After mentoring a couple of other tech entrepreneurs, I clearly saw that my problem was something more generalized that I thought.

I started to think about ways to solve the problem. I was deep in customer success at the time, mostly reading every book or blog post I could find.

Most companies offer tools to their customers to help them solve their big problem, but most fail in helping them to use that tool properly. I think that the learning, knowledge base, tutorial stuff is out there. But I believe that there are still a lot of things to tackle to help your customers have the best experience they can in your product.

I decided that the first step would be to help them achieve success in managing their subscription.

After selling my latest business, I did a recap of the years in the making and realized that there are a lot of things I promised I would achieve and I did not.

Three years working on the same business and code base, and I would still log in to Stripe to send invoices to customers who would ask it. Three years, and still no proper "Your account" section with past invoices.

Seems crazy, but when building a product and competing with people that have 100x your budget, 100x your head count, you got to focus on value-added stuff. Or at least I thought so.