The welcome, nudge and
win-back emails.
Mara writes them all.

Hi Tomas,

You set up a status page on Monday and it's still living at brightpage.io/s/7f2a. Which works. It just doesn't look like it belongs to you, and that's the bit that matters at 2am when somebody is deciding whether to trust it.

The blocker is almost always DNS. I know that because our own status page ran on the default URL for the first fourteen months of this company. I was the one telling customers to bookmark a link with a hash in it.

So: tell me the domain you want and I'll send back the exact two records to paste, already filled in with your values. Two minutes of my time, and it saves you the documentation crawl.

If DNS isn't the holdup and something else is, say what it is and I'll deal with that instead. Which one is it?

Dana,

You built three quotes in March and then nothing. I'm not going to pretend I know why. Either Quotaflow didn't fit the way you sell, or March got busy and it fell off the list. Both happen, and I'm fine with either.

In case it was the product, here's what we still don't do: multi-currency, and approval chains deeper than two levels. If either of those was the wall you hit, I'd rather you hear it from me now than come back in six months and hit it again.

There's no expiring discount at the bottom of this email and no countdown. If something was missing, reply with it in one line. I keep a file of those lines and it is the only reason the roadmap is any good.

Hi Jules,

You started cancelling this afternoon and picked "too expensive" on the way out. Nothing has gone through yet, and I'm not going to put a discount pop-up in front of you. But I'd rather you knew what your options actually are than leave without them.

You're on Team at $79 for four seats, and two of those seats haven't logged in since March. Solo is $19, keeps every record and every note you've written, and drops you to one seat. Almost everything you actually touch is in it.

And if Nestbase isn't worth $19 either, that's a real answer. Cancelling is one click from where you left off, your export runs first, and I won't email you about it again.

So which is it: too expensive, or not worth it? Those are different problems and only one of them is mine to fix.

Hi Ravi,

Your roadmap crossed the free plan's ceiling last night. Here are the numbers first, and then you can decide whether any of it matters.

28 people found the board this month. They left 41 votes and 12 comments. The most-wanted item is SSO with 19 votes, and 4 of those came from accounts on your own paid plan. Free caps a public board at 50 votes, so the next 9 land and then voting closes.

Starter is $29 and lifts the cap. If you'd rather not, nothing breaks: the board stays readable, the votes already cast stay counted, and the export gives you every vote and comment as a CSV. I won't email you about this again either way.

If the votes coming from your own paying customers are the part that matters, that's the argument for upgrading. If they aren't, ignore me.

Hej Nadia,

Your onboarding form has been working while you were gone. 67 responses since the 3rd, no errors, nothing on fire. It does not need you, which I think is the point.

One thing worth thirty seconds though. Two people typed some version of "I did not understand question 4" into the free-text box, and 11 more dropped out on that exact step. Question 4 is the company-size one with the open text field.

Turning it into a dropdown is a two-minute fix. I've left a note pinned to that question so you'll see it the second you open the editor. I'm not sending you a list of links. Just that one.

Worth fixing, or is question 4 doing something I can't see from here?

Kai,

Two of your endpoints hit the free-tier retry ceiling this week. Tuesday 14:02 and Friday 09:31, both inside what look like deploy windows on your side.

The math: 51,340 events this month against a 50,000 ceiling. Past the ceiling we deliver once and don't retry on failure. 900 of those first attempts came back 5xx from your side and were dropped instead of replayed. I can send the exact event IDs if you want to check my arithmetic, and you should.

Team is $19 a month and moves the ceiling to 500k. I'm not going to tell you 900 dropped webhooks is a catastrophe, you know your own system better than I do. But you were going to find this in a support ticket eventually, and I'd rather you found it here.

Want the IDs?

Hi Marta,

You cancelled yesterday and it went through immediately. No retention flow, no dark pattern, nothing pending. Your workspace stays readable until the 14th and the markdown export is on the settings page whenever you want it.

So this is not an email to talk you out of it. You already decided, and I'd be irritated too if someone tried.

It's just that you were here eleven months and you filed four issues that made this better, including the one about nested docs breaking on rename, which we fixed because you found it. So I'd like one sentence, if you're willing: what should Stacknote have done that it didn't?

You will not get a sales pitch back. You'll get a thank you, and that is the whole of it.

Hi Sofia,

You have answered 214 tickets by hand this month. I read through them, and 61 were some version of "how do I change the billing email", answered 61 times, in 61 slightly different ways.

Rather than tell you about auto-drafts again, I've switched them on for your five most repeated questions. Draft only. Nothing sends without one of you pressing send, and the drafts are built from your team's own past replies, so they sound like you and not like a robot reading the help centre.

They start appearing tomorrow morning. If you hate them, one toggle in settings turns the whole thing off and I won't raise it again.

If you like them, tell me which of the five came closest to what you'd have written yourself. That's the one I'll teach the rest from.

Hello Amara,

Most invoicing tools would be pushing you to send something in the next five minutes. I am not going to do that. You have just finished a job and you are tired, and the invoice will still be there tomorrow.

When you are ready it takes three fields: who, how much, and when you want to be paid by. The numbering, the tax line, the reminder if they go quiet, I handle those on your behalf and you never have to think about them.

The reminders are the part people are nervous about, so you should know how they work. They go out on day 7 and day 14, they are polite, and you can read the exact wording before a single one is sent. Nobody gets chased in your name without you seeing it first.

One thing that would help me help you: what kind of work do you usually invoice for? It changes which template I put in front of you, and it takes five words to answer.

Hey Lars,

Your project space has a name, a cover colour and three teammates sitting in it. What it does not have is a single file. Which is a bit like a kiln with no clay in it, and I say that as the person who named the company.

The upload is one drag. You do not need to sort anything first. If what you have is forty PNGs called final-final-v3, drag the whole mess in. Sorting the mess is literally what the first screen does: it groups by name and date and stacks the versions for you.

The slightly awkward part, and the reason I am writing at all, is that your three teammates are already in there waiting.

Is something specific stopping you, or was it just a busy week? Either answer is fine. I only want to know which one it is.

Hello Bea,

You left in March with February half closed. I remember why, because you wrote it in the cancellation box: the Stripe payouts would not line up with your bank rows and you were matching them by hand, which defeated the entire point of paying us.

That went out in June. The payout matcher pairs each Stripe deposit to its lines on its own, and receipt forwarding shipped in the same release, so the shoebox of emailed receipts is handled too. Those were the two things you asked for. I am telling you because you asked, not because this is a convenient week for me to send an email.

Your books are untouched and exactly where you left them. February is still half closed, waiting. If you come back, nothing needs importing.

And if the answer is no, this is the last one you will get from me. That is a promise, not a technique. Which is it?