Ryan Shank explains why PhoneWagon declined a prospect requesting custom call recording on Cisco VoIP phones. The work would take 30 hours, require integrating Twilio and modifying SIP settings, and benefit only one customer. Walking away protects product focus and preserves engineering resources for features that serve the core business.
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What up guys, it's Ryan Shank and here we are at day 27 of our morning updates. Today, no coffee, water only. Here we go, let's dive right in. Today I do want to talk about one thing and that is walking away from customers based on their requirements. I think it happens too often, people get too what I call like trigger happy, right? Where they see, you know, someone comes to them, they almost fit the mold of a good customer, however, their requirements are a little outside the box and what they want to do or what people tend to do is go ahead and build that feature for them or do something for them that doesn't necessarily make sense for the business. I think I've talked about this before, but it's really important to really understand who your customer is and decide, you know, if something is a little bit out of scope or far out of scope, when is a good time to walk away? Quick story about what is happening right now personally. I have someone coming on, or coming to us right now. I'm talking to them and what they wanna do is they simply want to record the calls for their existing VoIP phone, okay? So they have a Cisco VoIP phone. All they wanna do is record the inbound and the outbound calls, okay? So what would that require? I mean, we could do it technically. We'd have to take our, you know, PhoneWagon system, you know, and Twilio, hook into their existing system, change around, you know, maybe port some things, change around their SIP, P code, I believe, and then we could do it. However, that is not core to what we do. We are pure right now inbound call tracking and we're, you know, automation and tools like that, whereas that would be more of like an actual phone system and just like a recording system. It's a little— it's too out of scope. And, you know, even yesterday after I talked to the customer, you know, I got really excited. I contacted my developer. I'm like, let's see what we got to do to figure this out. Let's do it, let's do it, let's do it. You know, this is a good good customer. But, you know, after thinking about it more last night, the work that's going to be required for it, one, it would probably be maybe 30 hours worth of work to really get one customer more of like a custom— basically it would be almost like consultation for this customer and doing like a customization for them. And it doesn't really make business sense. And I decided today we're going to walk away from the deal. So anyway, it's really, really, really important to understand who your customer is. And when it makes sense to walk away from a deal. A lot of times it might be a decent fit and it might make business sense because you spend all this time developing or maybe customizing something for them, but then it can be applicable across the board, or if it's a really highly requested feature, it's like you're going to be able to utilize that feature in the future for other customers. So anyway, understand when to walk away from customers. Kind of sucks, but it needs to happen and you need to just be disciplined about your product and your time mostly, and I think that'll pay dividends in the long run. Thank you guys, day 27. Let's go.
