The founder who kept changing the lever

Founder: Bootstrapped founder of a seasonal B2B/B2C SaaS product, about two years full-time (name and company withheld — no testimonial recorded). Stage: Live product, paying subscribers, solo operator. Session: One 90-minute diagnostic, paid at the published €750. Result: One customer segment committed to for 90 days, chosen from his own data in the room, and two previously deprioritized retention levers.

What he thought was wrong

Churn. It had been running at 31%, which he described as naturally high for his market. He had just shipped a three-tier pricing feature and wanted thirty days to see whether it worked before drawing any conclusions.

That is a reasonable plan, and it is why the session did not start by disagreeing with it.

What the session found

The pricing change ran its course. Churn came down to roughly 20% and then stopped moving. Meanwhile the subscribers who were paying full price were using one feature.

That combination does not describe a pricing problem. People who pay the full amount and use one feature are telling you what the product is worth to them, not what it costs.

Underneath it was a longer pattern. Across two years he had switched go-to-market strategy every one to two weeks — one buyer type, then another, then a different product framing, then a companion app — without leaving any single direction in place long enough to produce evidence either way. There was no committed segment, no review interval, and no filter deciding which work survived contact with the next good idea.

So the constraint was not churn and not pricing. It was that the business was run reactively, off intuition, with no decision structure to protect important work from the next exciting option. He put the cost of that switching at €10,000–50,000 a month in missed opportunity — his estimate, not ours.

What changed in the room

He walked his own segment data live and picked amateur teams as the 90-day focus. That mattered because it was not one of the two segments he had arrived favouring; it was the one the numbers supported.

Alongside it, two retention levers he already knew about and had never prioritized: 30% first-month churn, and no path moving monthly subscribers onto annual plans.

Why this one is here

He had named his own pattern before the session started — he called it shiny object syndrome on the qualifying call, unprompted. The label was accurate and it had not helped him, because a label describes the founder and does not rank the options in the business. What was missing was a decision, made against evidence, that made the other options safe to stop.

He booked a four-week execution sprint the following day. That is the honest shape of this case: the diagnostic produced a direction, and he judged that holding the direction steady was a separate problem worth paying separately for.

The longer argument about labels and reset loops is here: Is shiny object syndrome why your startup keeps changing strategy?

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Attribution note: this founder has not recorded a testimonial. The account above is published without his name, company, product category or subscriber numbers, and contains no quotes beyond the one self-description he volunteered.