With the year ending & many a startup founders around the world working on their dreams through the midnight - it would be great to celebrate it with your best moments and share a learning to help others
Happy, unexpected moment: Added a stupidly expensive "Enterprise" pricing tier as a polite way of declining business from users who were taking up too many resources to bother trying to service.
Learning: if you ask your users to help you improve your product they will give you bad ideas. If you ask them to tell you stories about what keeps them up at night they will give you gold.
Happy moment: growing way faster than we did the year before. Rentify now transacts with more landlords than nearly every brick and mortar letting agent in the UK.
The old story is true: ask a farmer at the turn of the century (next last anyway) what they wanted, they'd say "a horse that pulls harder and eats less hay". They never said "a tractor".
Quality experience translates into repeat customers and steady growth. Not features; not highly-paid sales teams; not flashy design. Just support the customers you have with good empathetic skilled staff, beef up the quality of your pipes and codecs, make the on-boarding experience clean and clear, and the customers get on board.
Learning: Single Focus. Speed. We digressed a bit and we lost the game both ends a bit. Wish we had focused on one thing.
Happy Moment: We were 17 people and we went out for a trip from the company, stayed in a good resort, had a time-off. It made me happy to think back from where it started.
edit: going by what I said on the post - one liners. removed rest.
And people started buying it.