Something I keep running into: the work gets approved, everyone's happy, and then a week later comes "can we just tweak one small thing?" Then another. None of them are big on their own, but together they quietly eat the margin on the project.
I'm curious how others deal with it:
Do you include a set number of revision rounds in the original scope, or handle each request as it comes?
Is there a point where you start quoting post-approval changes as new work, and how do you say that without souring the relationship?
Does writing down exactly what was approved (and when) actually help, or do clients just ignore it?
Would love to hear what's worked for you, and what backfired.
We spent six months in beta testing our B2B SaaS platform, and last Tuesday, we finally launched out of beta with a massive marketing push. We were thrilled. By Thursday morning, we had onboarded 50 paying customers on our $99/month plan.
On Thursday afternoon, I was doing a routine review of our database logs and my heart stopped. I noticed that a change we made to our API authentication right before launch had accidentally bypassed our multi-tenant architecture. Essentially, if a user knew exactly how to format an API request, they could pull data from other companies' dashboards.
I felt sick to my stomach. This was a catastrophic privacy breach.
We immediately took the entire platform offline to patch the hole. For 6 hours, our site displayed a "Scheduled Maintenance" page while I sat in a cold sweat fixing the logic. We patched it, brought it back online, and then I had to do the hardest thing I've ever done as a founder: write an email to those 50 customers confessing the mistake.
We built a B2B productivity tool that helps freelancers track billable hours. Our core web app is priced at $35/month, and we have about 400 paying customers. Last year, we finally launched our iOS app to capture the "on-the-go" market.
We set the price in the App Store at $35/month to match our website. Then, we looked at the revenue reports. After Apple took their 30% cut, we were netting just $24.50 per user. We were actually losing money on every iOS user after accounting for hosting and support.
So, we made a decision: we raised the App Store price to $50/month to cover Apple's tax and maintain our margins. We thought our power users would understand; after all, we were providing immense value.
The backlash was immediate. Within two months, our iOS subscriber count dropped from 120 to 70. Our App Store rating tanked from 4.8 stars to 3.2 stars. The reviews were brutal: "Greedy developers. Why is it $15 more expensive just because it's on my phone?"
When someone raised money, especially from a prominent VC with a strong reputation, like Antler or Y Combinator, the company immediately sounded more trustworthy to me.
But the latest analysis shared by @4kulia showed that in the first half of the year, only 26 launches were VC-funded.
One workflow in my app can take about a minute on the first run because it reads several pages before producing a report. The work is happening, but a spinner makes it feel frozen.
I added clear progress stages and cached repeat runs. That helped, but the first run is still slow.
If your product has a long-running AI or research task, what helped users feel comfortable waiting? Did clearer progress make a difference, or did you have to redesign the task?
A few months ago, we were in talks with a mid-sized company for a $500/month contract. Their team was swamped, so they asked if we could extend our standard 14-day trial to 30 days. Wanting to close the deal, I said yes.
A month later, they still hadn't onboarded their team, and asked for another 30 days. I agreed again because the deal was "so close."
By the time the 60-day trial ended, we had spent over 15 hours in support calls helping them set up, built two custom CSV imports for them, and basically acted as their dedicated onboarding team for free.
When the trial finally expired, the VP told me they decided not to move forward. His reasoning was baffling: "Because you kept extending the trial, it felt like there was no urgency to actually roll it out to the team. We just kept putting it on the back burner."
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.
I have created a lot of accounts on many different payment gateways including lemonsqueeay, paypal etc. Now I realize, it was just a waste of giving information to those companies as I do not use them at all. Paypal even suspended my account permanently. I came across this platform called dodopayments, and it wasn't very strict on completing kyc for accepting your first dollar. I know that it will not let me withdraw money unless kyc is done. I was very confused as to what everyone does regarding this? What do you do commonly with these payment gateways?
