Why You’re Losing Customers Through Software, Not Marketing
The start…
You have a great idea.
It solves a problem people have. You do your market research, and people want it. You even talk to your VC and Angel investors and they tell you it’s a great idea — Let me know when you’re raising funds they say. Perfect! Let’s go 🚀!
Your team is awesome. You have a fantastic CTO / founding engineer and Claude can prototype your application in days, not months. Your marketing team (also you?) works overtime to get those sales calls. All is going well, you’re doing Series A and B funding rounds.
But something is nagging you now. You’re not closing enough. Sales cycles are getting longer and longer. Your existing customers are leaving. What is going on?
Why are things falling apart?
There are many answers to this and this is but a short overview of the things we have seen. It’s also the things we help you fix if you find yourself in a similar situation.
As your team grows, new people join in and the culture changes massively. It stops from being a fun start-up where we break things and move fast to a grown up company. It is now impossible to do all the things: you must delegate, relinquish control, and learn how to do less yourself. This means letting go. It is hard when it’s your baby. Even if you hire the best of the best in their field. This is what our foundation of People is about.
Your developers are starting to drown in technical debt, which of course, is not a technical problem but a business one — Back to leadership! Features are taking longer and longer to write, the quality of the code goes down, and more and more time is spent on fixing new and old bugs. After all, for $1 spent on development, $0.50 is spent on bug fixing. 😱 This is what our foundation of Development is about.
Reliability failures lead to frequent crashes, bugs, or downtime which erode trust. Customers expect software to work seamlessly, and repeated failures push them to competitors. Small predictable downtimes are fine, but repeated errors are not. Observability goes hand in hand with this. It helps you see what goes wrong early, where to optimise, and why your AWS bill is over £100k per month. This is what our foundation of Operations is about.
Cybersecurity is another one. Most companies will evaluate yours using Security Scorecard or similar tools. Ours ranks as an A(100), if you wanted to check it out. Your customers will run a security scanner on your services, just to see what happens. And they might even ask for a SBOM report or require SOC-2 / ISO 27,001 compliance certification. It’s a cost which offsets the risk of incidents. We all know data breaches or weak security measures damage reputation and trust. Customers prioritize security and will leave if their data is at risk. This is what our foundation of Security is about.
AI (LLM) do enhance developers allowing them to write much faster code. Although, this moves the bottle neck in your pipeline elsewhere. And the quality of that code might not be as good as you think it is: 1.7 more bugs, whose impact is twice as serious might not be what you wanted when you got those Copilot and Claude subscriptions. This is what our foundation of AI is about.
Conclusion
Does this resonate with you?
If so, please book a call with us. We can help. It’s what we do.
Imagine, if you will, a day when all the drama is removed from your software production: no panic, no crisis, just smooth software releases that exceed your customer’s expectations. This is what we have done in the past and can do for you.