Hey Reader,
Your churn data is lying to you.
Right now, countless AI tools are flooded with "AI tourists" — curious users who sign up to play with new tech, not to solve a real business problem. Their feedback is a trap.
A founder I'm advising called me in a panic last week. Ten out of ten trial users had churned. He was convinced his tech wasn't good enough and was about to burn his last $20k tweaking the AI model.
I told him to stop.
We didn't look at the product. We looked at the users. The problem wasn't that the product was bad; it was that he was listening to the wrong people. He was trying to satisfy users who were never going to be real customers.
The AI wasn't broken. His Go-to-Market was.
He was building a product for one user (a professional with a painful, recurring problem) but marketing it to another (a tourist looking for a cool demo). This is one of the most common ways founders fail to achieve Product-Market Fit.
My advice was simple: Stop listening to the tourists.
We rewrote his landing page to speak directly to a tiny, specific user with a painful, manual process that his AI could automate.
The next cohort of users stuck.
You haven't built a haunted house — you've just built a theme park, and the visitors are leaving after the free ride is over.
Your job isn't to rebuild the ride; it's to find the people who truly need to get to the destination.
— Dmitry