I Finally Got My First Customer...but....

I was sitting at my desk one evening last week just wrapping up some work. And then I saw it. An email from Stripe saying that I had just received a $15 payment from a purchase on my SaaS - Waitlisty.io.

Then something else happened soon after. I use Crisp as my customer support platform. I have a chat widget built into the site so that people can contact me quickly with any issues they may have. This was the first time a "real person" paid for my product. I thought I had gotten all of the bugs out. Things worked great when I put it through manual QA by embedding widgets on some of the other landing pages I have out there. But I was wrong.

I had only tested the widgets on white backgrounds since that's what I use. The problem with this is that I didn't realize the widget itself has a white background. And that was a dealbreaker for this first customer. Argh!! 😠

The second problem rolled into the chat. The customer didn't realize that I currently don't offer any type of email validation. Also a deal breaker.

Third problem; third deal breaker - the widget takes too long to load and is slowing down the user's lighthouse score on their landing page.

Soon enough, the refund request message came through. I felt crushed. However, I was courteous and immediately submitted the refund for this customer. Then, I messaged a good friend of mine to tell him what had happened. He helped me reframe this experience as a positive one. Someone had actually found my product organically and had paid me money for it. They found value enough in the idea that they wanted to pay for it.

So I'm going to soldier on. I've addressed all of the bugs that this first-paying customer brought to my attention. I'm also very close to being finished with the double opt-in flow so that there is some form of email "validation" available.

Until next time 👋