The Pivot Meeting

Priya had booked the meeting room for two hours, which was how Dev knew it was serious. They never booked rooms. They had a whiteboard wall in the corner of the coworking space and a tacit agreement that anything important got said standing up. "Sit," she said. He sat. She'd brought coffee for both of them and hadn't touched hers, and the dashboard was already up on the screen: eleven months of weekly active users, a line that had climbed for six of them and then gone flat like a patient on a monitor. "I know what this is," Dev said. "You don't, actually." She turned her laptop toward him. "Look at the support tickets from the last quarter. Not the numbers. Read them." He read them. Forty, fifty tickets. The same thing again and again, phrased differently: could they export the reminders to a calendar, could they turn off everything except the reminders, could they pay less if they only used the reminders. "They're using the wrong feature," he said. "They're using the feature that works." Priya finally picked up her coffee. "We built a whole project management tool and the only part anyone loves is the thing you built in a weekend because you kept forgetting to chase invoices." Dev leaned back. Outside the glass, somebody from the drone startup was trying to get a printer to work. He had a sudden, unhelpful memory of the night they'd named the company, three beers in, laughing at how good the domain was. "We have eight people," he said. "I know." "Three of them are working on the Gantt view." "I know, Dev." "If we cut everything except reminders we don't have a product. We have a feature. Nobody raises a Series A for a feature." "Nobody raises a Series A for a flat line either." She didn't say it unkindly. That was the thing about Priya; she'd never once said anything unkindly in four years, which made it impossible to argue with her the way he wanted to. "I ran the numbers on what a reminders-only plan would look like at nine dollars. Seventy percent of our current users would stay. Our costs drop by about half because we can kill the sync infrastructure. It's not a rocket ship. It's a business."

"It's a lifestyle business." "It's a business that pays eight salaries. Or five, honestly. I'm not going to pretend." He looked at the flat line again. He'd looked at it every Monday for five months and every Monday he'd found a reason it was about to turn: the new onboarding, the conference, the integration that was nearly done. The reasons had started to sound like the way his uncle talked about horses. "Which five?" he said finally. Priya slid a piece of paper across the table. She'd written it by hand, which was worse, somehow. He recognised every name. Two of them had joined because he'd personally talked them out of better offers. "I want to tell them myself," he said. "I assumed." "And I want to keep the Gantt view up for existing customers for six months. Not maintained. Just up." "Fine." "And I want to rename it. If it's just reminders, the name's stupid." For the first time she smiled. "The name was always stupid." They spent the rest of the two hours on the actual plan, and at one point Dev got up and used the whiteboard, and it felt almost normal. When the room booking ran out they stood in the corridor and neither of them moved toward the desks. "It was a good idea," Dev said. "The whole thing. It was." "It was a good idea that turned out to contain a better one." Priya shouldered her bag. "Come on. You've got three hard conversations and I've got to email the landlord."