My Trip to Hell and Back

In Spring 2024, monthly churn for Copilot CRM hit 11% At that rate, 90% of customers would be gone before the year's end. Our codebase contained 285 documented bugs. The database was fragile, inconsistent, and often experienced outages during peak hours.

I had hardly slept for almost four days. It was excruciating...

Not because we were losing members. Not because people were cursing at me online or threatening legal action. It was painful because the members were my friends, franchisees, and closest supporters.

Everything broke. Emails got hacked, texting stopped, jobs disappeared, invoices gone. Every time we fixed a bug, three others popped up. Regression after regression.The codebase was melting under the pressure of massive user growth.

IT WAS HELL!

A few months before, everything was gravy. We had tripled users for two straight months. We got to break-even without investors. Q1 2024 was on track to be profitable. We had delivered 15+ massive features in 2023. Everything was going great.

So fast forward to present day. We have reduced the reported bug count by almost 80% (we aren’t done yet!)

We have had stagnant growth for most of 2024. Churn is still high at 4% monthly. Our expenses have more than tripled, and they have room to run as we continue to hire more team members. In the meantime, I bought out my co-founder to ensure I would take the financial hit required to get us back on track. We aren't out of the woods yet.

Credit is due.

1.) Most important. The users that stuck with us from the beginning. The company would have failed if everyone had left. They had every right to. I will not forget this. We have 1-2 more months to clean up the mess I created, but you have my word; I will make it up to you.

2.) The team. I am not going to mention names. They know who they are. They were unwavering in their support for me and the vision of Copilot. People have worked and continue to work around the clock. I messed up big time trying to hire engineers as a non-technical founder. I had to make difficult decisions to cut staff and rebuild from the ground up. This caused intense pain. Thank you to each person who contributed to this effort!

3.) Josh Kahle deserves a special rose. I needed to attract the best talent in the industry to turn the company around. Why would ANY great engineer step into this mess??! For some reason, Josh believed in me. He had the tech skills, experience, and connections we needed. He caught my vision for home services, software, and robotics. He cosigned on the vision of Copilot and put his reputation at stake. This gave us credibility to attract the top engineers, designers, and team members.

So why am I writing all this? Where is the feel-good ending? It’s not here yet. But it's coming...

Quitting is not an option.