Emma Laurent

We launched our SaaS with a very generous free tier. We wanted to get as many people using the product as possible to build word-of-mouth. It worked our free user base exploded by 300% in six months, and our brand awareness grew massively.

But I just finished our quarterly financial review, and the numbers are terrifying.

While our paid revenue grew by 15%, our support costs grew by 60%. When I dug into the data, I found that 80% of our support tickets were coming from free users. They were asking for custom features, requesting API access, and expecting 1-on-1 onboarding calls for a product they were paying $0 for.

We are essentially running a free help desk for people who have zero intention of ever upgrading. Our small support team is burned out, our response times for paying customers are slipping, and our margins are shrinking because we have to pay for more support staff just to handle the free crowd.

I m a technical founder. I can build a product, fix a database, and debug an API in my sleep. But sales? I hate it.

We needed revenue, so I decided to try cold emailing. I bought a list of 2,000 leads from a B2B database, wrote a 4-paragraph email explaining our features, and set up a sequence to send them out from our main company domain. I figured if I hit enough inboxes, someone would eventually buy.

I was wrong. Here is the exact result after 30 days:

• 2,000 emails sent.

• 3 replies (two of which were "unsubscribe," and one was an angry person telling me to stop spamming).

• 0 demos booked.

• And the worst part: Our main domain got flagged by Google, so now all my transactional emails (password resets, receipts) are going to spam.

Two months ago I asked here how people stay aware of what their agents are doing, and @getosmo replied with something that has been quietly rearranging my roadmap since.

I had been treating "can you undo it" as the line for when an agent should stop and ask. He took that apart. Irreversibility over-fires and under-fires, he said. It over-fires on things that cannot be undone but that nobody cares about, like the agent writing a log line. It under-fires on the ones that really hurt: a mass email to 50k users, or a migration you can only roll back after downtime. "Reversible on paper, ruinous in practice."