Page 9 of The Hard Launch

The office is dark; no one’s here yet. I turn the lights on and watch all the desks and conference rooms light up under the open-duct, industrial ceiling. It looks like a startup in here, even if it feels like a mess.

I’m glad to be the only person in; it means I have some time before I need to pretend everything is fine. Lots of Lettercatters will read the news today and wonder what it means for us, and while our list of core values includes Transparency and Honesty, I’ve learned that telling folks that you’re going to run out of cash in six months doesn’t do much for morale. Glenn and the Amber, the part-time CFO, are the only ones who know the whole story. I plan to keep it that way until I know the ship is sinking.

Edmund’s always talking to me about his Viking-ass version of leadership and I nod along, but to me, a real leader takes all the blows so their team can focus on what they do best. That’s what I try to do, at least. Today I could use a little help, or maybe divine intervention. Either or.

I kick my shoes into the corner and turn on my computer.

By now the full joint press release is out. Corday Ford and Tooity are partnering to combine the CF portfolio with the Tooity platform to create the future of online publishing, blah blah blah. They’ll start with the purely digital publications, then move to the print versions, and finally provide all Corday Ford authors a Tooity community newsletter. Great.

I check Trevor’s deck and find that CF’s three largest competitors combined have a lower market share than they do. Hindsight being what it is, I see how this strategy is more than a little risky, especially considering the plundering manner in which Corday Ford operates. They’ll either bankrupt or acquire Tooity within a year, and it’s hard to say which one is better for the founders.

Sure, it might be a lie I’m telling myself, but it’s the story I’m going to go with today. “Dodged a bullet,” is better framing than “all is lost.” I roll my whiteboard over and angle it so anyone who walks in can’t see that I’m literally starting from square one as I brainstorm things we can build. Edmund’s voice in my head takes over: where is there a large, underserved market that Lettercat can disrupt? Enterprise level, small business verticals, the public sector. I write until my arm is sore, waiting for a lighting bolt that never comes. And then it’s 8:58. People are starting to drift in.

Glenn’s meeting is virtual, so I’ll take it in my office even if Lacey’s here. I log in but turn my audio and video off, then pop out to the kitchen to get a water and see if all the good fruit has been stuffed in people’s work bags and brought home. I know they do this, I’ve seen it happen.

When I get back to my office with a sad banana and some ice water, Lacey’s just logging in. She’s working from home, but where she lives could be a Zoom background. Better than that: it has personality, unlike my apartment. I consider adding this as a to-do for myself, but writing get personality on my Notion board only seems sad.

“Hello?” she says, but I’m on mute and my hands are still full. As I go to unmute myself, I see her study herself on camera. She fluffs her hair up in front. and tucks some of it behind her right ear. From this close, I notice she has a sprinkle of freckles on each cheek, and that her eyes aren’t brown like I thought they were: they’re hazel.

I should turn my camera on and say hello, but instead I watch her rummage in a bag she’s holding and pull out a lipstick. It’s bright red. She leans in close to her camera and applies it, tracing the M of her top lip slowly, then a quick stroke along her lower lip before she settles back, smacks her lips together and surveys her work. I know it’s only a screen, but her face just feels so close to mine. I’m holding my breath, fully a creeper behind a two-way mirror, and I don’t know how to make it stop. Oh god. Camera first, or mic?

I unmute.

“Hey,” I say. “Sorry, just getting back from the kitchen.” I turn on my camera and show her my water glass and banana, completely unnecessary evidence.

“Good morning,” she says.

I catch a glimpse of myself onscreen and it’s not good. Has my left eye always been so much larger than my right? And the hair. I missed an appointment two weeks ago and still haven’t rescheduled. I grab a Lettercat baseball hat off my desk and put it on, see that it somehow makes it all worse, and take it off again.

“I’m not sure if you saw the news,” I say as a way of opening, and she nods. This is going to be fine. She’s here, at least, which is more than I can say for Trevor.

“I did. I guess that’s why you have time for my ideas now,” she tells me.

Okay. So it’s going to be like that.

CHAPTER FIVE

LACEY

Because part of my job is to listen to and accept the truths in other people’s points of view, I suppose I didn’t have to start off on such a harsh note. What I was aiming for, when I think about it, was that same blunt affect Jude uses, the one where his delivery is so flat that it seems like he’s “just asking,” and you don’t realize that he’s stabbed you in the heart until you look down and see the blood. I’ve seen him do it to Kate about customer satisfaction scores, to Dave about architecture decisions. We get it, you’re smart. Do you really need to make us look stupid to prove it?

It’s immediately clear that I missed the mark. I see him startle at my opening line, and I wish I could soften it. Though I stand by my point; he wasn’t interested in hearing me out until he was stranded, paddle-less, on Let’s Move Upmarket Island. Instead of apologizing, I get right into it.

I start off with the data, qualitative first. Feedback survey responses, quotes from support tickets, win/loss data from the sales team, all of it showing that our customers are frustrated creators who want to spend their time creating. They don’t want to have one system for their newsletter, another for their marketing, yet another for their website. Jude nods along. At least he’s engaged.

Then I shift into numbers that show the same thing. We lose lots of customers not to a true competitor, but to their existing website and email marketing services. Expanding our offering to include those things would reduce customer churn, and selling it as a premium package would give us a revenue lift.

Before I move to the last slide, I check in with the box on my screen that contains Jude’s face. He’s not exactly beaming, but he looks less angry than he did when I began. I see him lean in when I move to the last slide, the one with the revenue projections based on presumed adoption and upsell. His eyes go to the bottom row, where I’ve highlighted the annual recurring revenue and the return on investment. He sighs. Leans back.

He looks disappointed.

Glenn’s voice crackles through.

“Sorry to chime in from the train,” he says. “But I do think there’s something here.”

“There is,” Jude agrees. “There’s just not enough of it.”

“Lacey’s been a bit conservative with her projections,” Glenn offers.