A builder-side observation I wrote up this week, in case it's useful to anyone shipping fast and wondering why adoption doesn't follow.

We build an AI newsletter tool, so I spend a lot of time looking at the gap between what companies ship and what their customers ever hear about. There's a number that measures it, and it's uncomfortable in a useful way.

Count the items you shipped last quarter that a customer would actually care about. Then count the emails you sent that told your full customer list about any of them, including the accounts that went quiet after onboarding. Divide the second by the first. Most teams land in the single digits.

The reason it stays low is structural, not lazy. In-product announcements only reach people who log in, and the accounts drifting toward churn log in the least, so the customers who most need a reason to come back are the ones the announcement banner reaches last. Every org chart has an owner for building and an owner for selling. Almost none has an owner for telling existing customers what got built. At a company under 50 people, that job usually belongs to nobody.

The part I find genuinely interesting for other builders: a feature the customer never heard about performs exactly like a feature you never built. Same adoption, same renewal impact, same expansion pull, which is to say none. The only difference is the engineering bill. That reframes a low-adoption problem that everyone treats as design or prioritization into a distribution problem wearing a product costume.

If you're building something that ships often, curious where your own ratio lands and whether you've found an owner for the telling half. We tried a few homes for it before it stuck.

Cagri Sarigoz

Activity

Products

Recently upvoted

Posts