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I see something often with early-stage founders: they land three or four promising logos by giving their product away because that desire to get some initial traction is so strong, and charging up front feels like it could cost them a deal, and then they wonder why nobody’s using it properly.

But ask a design partner who isn’t paying you to tell you what’s wrong with your product, and they’ll tell you it’s great. Ask one who is, and you’re much more likely to learn something useful. When someone has real financial stakes in the outcome, the dynamic shifts and the tone of the conversation changes. They’ll stop being so nice about it because they have more reason to tell you what’s broken.

Here’s why. “Free” feels like it makes the ask easier, and it does, but it comes with a catch. Free customers don’t complain because nothing is at stake for them - and worse, free terms don’t filter out the people who never had the problem in the first place. You end up with two silent groups that are hard to tell apart:

• Good fit potential customers who care but won’t spend political capital on a freebie

• Bad fit evaluators who are much less likely to buy

Unfortunately, silence is the worst signal you can get from an early customer, because it’s easily mistaken for satisfaction, and it robs you of the opportunity to learn.

A financial commitment fixes both of these: it screens out the people who never had the problem (bad fit), and it gives the ones who do a reason to be open, vocal, and blunt.

What produces the signal is an obligation to pay. In Inspired, Marty Cagan advocates for commitment but without any upfront charge and I agree. His objection to charging in advance is because it risks turning the relationship into something closer to a vendor/consulting contract, and you end up building a custom solution for whoever’s paying instead of a general product for the market you’re trying to serve.

That’s a definite risk, so a design partner contract should obligate payment aligned with your delivery cadence. Milestones defined as a feature list agreed on day one are the wrong instrument - you’d be locking down the roadmap before you’ve learnt anything, which is the opposite of what a design partner is for. Tie payment instead to the things that hold up as you learn: shipping to them on an agreed rhythm, hitting your response-time commitments, turning up to the review calls.

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Here are the four key parts that a good design partner agreement needs:

• How long it runs (sixty to a hundred and twenty days is a sensible window)

• What triggers payment, and the discounted rate (50-80% off list is a reasonable range, due on your delivery of the agreed milestones)

• What you owe them (access, an SLA, some input into the roadmap, maybe early-adopter recognition if appropriate)

• What they owe you (a feedback cadence - a biweekly call is a reasonable default, a written testimonial by a fixed date, and case study rights if it goes well)

It’s important to include a clause that’s explicit that you’re building one general product, not a bespoke version for them. That’s what keeps a design partner a partner rather than a client with a support contract.

It should also include what happens at the end. Does the contract convert to list price? Renew at a (potentially lower) discount? End cleanly?

FWIW, none of this is counter to PLG: Design partners aren’t your growth motion. Your free tier or self-serve funnel is for a product that mostly works, aimed at broad adoption. It comes later. Design partners are for a product that doesn’t fully exist yet, aimed at a handful of companies helping you find out what the product should be.

If your design partners are larger companies, another dynamic is introduced. Purchase decisions need approval, so senior leaders and/or finance teams start to get involved. Your design partner users need to justify the cost internally. But despite the temptation to circumvent that with free access, the feedback you can get here can be most valuable. In my experience, customer contacts that are bracing for pushback from their peers go looking for the issues and gaps they’d previously been happy to brush aside, and they bring those to you.

The ideal outcome is feedback like “this is nearly there, but I can’t move forward because X is broken.”

At the end of the day, the commitment is what makes the relationship honest. If a prospective partner won’t sign something with a real financial consequence attached, they probably weren’t your real buyer to begin with.

So here’s what I recommend. Aim for three to five partners you have high confidence are your ICP (rather than twenty loose-fit), because you can’t service more than that properly and targeted depth is the point of these programs. Lead with the obligation, not the discount, when you pitch it. Be clear about your list price, then describe the arrangement and what you need from them in return. And when a partner isn’t delivering signal even though they’ve signed on the dotted line, end it early. The programme has a real cost, which is your time, and a signed contract with no engagement behind it is about as useful as a chocolate teapot.

Book a free 1:1 consultation call with me - I keep a handful of slots open each week for founders and product growth leaders to explore working together and get some free advice along the way. Book a call.

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The gap nobody’s frameworks cover

A company I advised had a particular type of growth problem that isn’t talked about much.

Activation was strong. Retention was fine (but not trending in the right direction). They were sitting on a ton of usage data so they pointed a data scientist at the problem to find behavioural predictors of long-term retention. Which signals in the first 30 days predict who’s still paying in 12, 18, 24 months?

The answer: nothing. No feature, no usage pattern, no frequency threshold. With hundreds of thousands of customers, they couldn’t find a single behavioural signal that predicted long-term retention.

But the issue wasn’t with the data. It was much more fundamental - the category they’re in. Their product is effectively set-and-forget: you configure it once, and if it works, you never come back. They were searching for human-behaviour predictors in a product where humans don’t behave.

I’ve written a lot about engagement and retention e.g. user growth accounting, growth state models, engagement states. Nearly all of it assumes that a healthy user is one who keeps showing up. For a whole category of products, that assumption isn’t valid. And if you run growth for one of them, most written advice out there (my past content included) leaves you with a gap: what happens between activation and the renewal invoice?

Set-and-forget is a category, not a flaw

Take email and notification plumbing. Transactional email delivery, bounce handling, webhook routing, alert deduplication, escalation policies, notification fan-out. A developer signs up, grabs an API key, wires it into the codebase, tests that the password-reset email lands, and ships. Maybe they configure an escalation policy and a bounce webhook. That’s the whole relationship. If the product does its job, that developer has very little reason to ever log in again.
It’s part of the value proposition. “You’ll never think about email deliverability again” is the pitch. Something is very broken if there are users who log in daily to check whether their emails are sending. It means those users don’t trust you.

The category is bigger than you’d think: uptime monitoring, backups, DNS, cert management, dependency scanning, feature flags at steady state. If your roadmap has ever included the phrase “give users a reason to come back,” and it felt like pushing water uphill, you’re probably in it.

No habit loop, no DAU worth measuring, no session-based engagement model. Do we just give up on engagement and wait for the renewal to tell us how we did?

No. We change who (or what) we’re measuring.

Redefine the actor

No need for panic; your engagement frameworks still work, but you need to point them at a different actor.

After that developer ships the integration and moves on, something is still using the product every day: the integration itself. Emails send, bounces get handled., webhooks route, and alerts get deduplicated at 3am. The deployment has a heartbeat, and it beats far more regularly than any human user ever would.

So the simple solution is to track usage from two different perspectives, i.e. run two ledgers.

The machine ledger tracks the deployment: is the integration live, is it processing volume, is that volume trending in line with the customer’s business? This ledger is continuous, high-frequency and honest (seasonality and the odd staging environment aside). It can’t be flattered by a well-timed email campaign.

The human ledger tracks the people: logins, dashboard sessions, report opens. In this category it’s sparse by design, and that’s fine. It has a different job (more on that later).

Growth accounting works on the machine ledger with one change: swap the unit. Instead of new, retained, resurrected and churned users, you count new live integrations, retained live integrations, resurrected integrations (volume came back) and churned integrations (volume went to zero).

Use the same states as the growth state model, but a different actor. “Active” means the integration is live and processing, not that a human showed up.

Do that and the mystery from the intro dissolves. The company I advised couldn’t find behavioural predictors of retention because they were looking at the human ledger while the signal was in the machine ledger the whole time.

Churn already happened but you didn’t get the news yet

The machine ledger is so important because monetary churn is a lagging indicator. By the time the cancellation hits your dashboard, the decision was often made months earlier. And in a set-and-forget product, that earlier moment usually leaves a trace.

Think about how churn actually happens with email plumbing. It’s rarely someone logging in, looking around and cancelling. More often: the customer replatforms and the integration doesn’t survive the migration. Or a new engineering lead consolidates vendors and swaps your SDK for a competitor’s. Or the customer’s own product is declining and send volume decays with it.

In each case the commercial event (cancellation, non-renewal) is just the paperwork catching up with an operational event that already happened: your product stopped doing work.

Each of these is visible in the machine ledger long before it’s visible in revenue. Send volume dropping to zero means the integration was ripped out. Volume decaying quarter over quarter means the customer’s business is shrinking. An error rate spike followed by silence means a migration broke the integration and nobody came back to fix it (because nobody comes back, remember).

Of these, the replatform deserves a special mention as the canonical silent churn event in dev tools. Nobody decided to leave you. Your integration just wasn’t important enough to survive the rewrite.

And volume going up isn’t automatically good news either. Usage growth means invoice growth, and if you’re on volume pricing that isn’t competitive, a rising bill is often the trigger that puts you under evaluation. The customer’s finance team notices the line item, someone gets asked if there’s a cheaper option, and an integration that was invisible for two years is suddenly on a spreadsheet next to three alternatives. With price-sensitive customers, that growth looks like expansion revenue right up until it becomes the reason they leave.

Something to be aware of - you won’t know in advance which of these signals actually predict churn for your product. That’s exactly why you capture them now. When the negative events happen (and they will), you can look back, correlate the signals with the outcomes, and build the early-warning system that gets you ahead of the next one. But only if the data is there to correlate.

So the retention playbook here isn’t a re-engagement campaign. It’s pre-churn detection: alerting on the machine ledger the way your customers alert on their own infrastructure. An integration that went quiet three weeks ago is a renewal conversation you still have time to change. A cancellation notice is not.

Value delivered ≠ value felt

There’s a second problem the machine ledger can’t solve on its own. Even for customers whose integrations are perfectly healthy, value in this category is delivered continuously but felt never.

This is the same structural problem insurance has. You pay every month, the product works silently in the background, and the value only becomes visible on the day something goes wrong. In the meantime, the one recurring touchpoint you reliably have with the customer is the invoice. The only time you show up is when you charge them, and that’s a bad position to be in when renewal comes around.

The fix isn’t getting people to log in more. What works instead is engineering moments where the value gets felt, with zero effort required from the user. A quarterly digest: 2M sends delivered, 40k bounces caught before they damaged your sender reputation, 12 incidents deduplicated before they woke anyone up. A short note when you handled something automatically: “we rotated your DKIM records, nothing needed from you.” The customer reads it in 20 seconds, thinks “glad that’s handled”, and gets on with their day.

I want to be clear about something though - these aren’t marketing emails and you shouldn’t treat them as such. They’re receipts for work performed. The goal isn’t to fight set-and-forget - it’s to turn set-and-forget into set-and-felt. And in this category, engagement with those receipts is a real metric rather than a vanity one; it’s the measurable trace of value being felt, not just delivered. (Measure clicks and replies rather than opens given what Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection did to open rates.) That trace is what you want sitting in the customer’s recent memory when the renewal invoice lands.

Don’t poke the bear?

“Any touchpoint invites a cancellation decision. Why would we remind people they’re paying us?”

I’ve had this conversation more times than you might think, because it’s a fair concern. And it’s half right. But it conflates two very different kinds of touchpoint. An activity nudge (“come back and check out your dashboard!”) asks the user to do work, and implicitly invites them to ask why they’re paying for something they never use. Value reinforcement (“here’s what happened while you weren’t looking”) does the opposite: it makes the invisible work visible and lowers the perceived case for cancelling. And if you’re still nervous, this is a testable claim, not a matter of opinion: hold out a segment, send the digest to everyone else, and compare renewal rates instead of debating hypotheticals.

The two ledgers also tell you which accounts are which. A healthy integration with a dormant human is fine: reinforce quietly, ask for nothing. A dead integration with a dormant human is not a bear you might wake. They’re already gone; the only question is whether you find out now (when a win-back conversation is still possible) or at renewal (when it isn’t). The bear to worry about isn’t the one you might wake. It’s the one that already left the cave.

Engagement is an expansion prerequisite

The strongest reason to care about any of this only shows up when you need to grow revenue from your existing base.

Most set-and-forget companies eventually face NRR (Net Revenue Retention) pressure. The core product is priced per integration or per volume tier, natural expansion is limited, and the answer is usually a second product: the email plumbing company adds SMS, push notifications, an alerting product. At that point the engagement question flips. It stops being “does engagement predict retention?” (in my experience, only if you’re measuring the right things), and becomes “do we have any surface on which to sell the next thing?” And that’s the human ledger’s different job I promised earlier: it measures whether expansion is even possible.

Cross-selling push notifications to an account that hasn’t touched your dashboard in 18 months is possible, but it’s a cold outbound motion with none of the product-led advantages you built the business on. The value digest becomes the road back to the product, and the product is where expansion conversations happen. In set-and-forget, engagement is more than just a retention lever. It’s an expansion prerequisite.

Set-and-forget is the customer’s privilege. It can’t be yours as a vendor. So, pick your machine heartbeat metric, define “active” at the integration level, rebuild your growth accounting on it, alert when volume goes quiet (or spikes beyond what the customer’s pricing tier makes comfortable), and put a first receipt-for-work-performed in front of your dormant-but-healthy accounts.

The humans may not come back but the signal is still there. Make it felt.

Book a free 1:1 consultation call with me - I keep a handful of slots open each week for founders and product growth leaders to explore working together and get some free advice along the way. Book a call.

View the State of AI Search for Dev Tools 2026 benchmark report - 126,814 citation records across 1,075 representative tool-evaluation scenarios, 43 developer-tool categories, and five AI search platforms

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GEEK OUT

Touch Grass

I'm sitting on the sofa. My laptop is open. My kids are somewhere nearby. I can hear them, which I'm telling myself counts for something. My wife is doing the thing where she's not saying anything about the laptop but also very clearly noticing the laptop. I've been at my desk since 7am. It's now 9pm. I moved from the office to the sofa about an hour ago, which in my head qualifies as "finishing work for the day."

It doesn't, obviously. I know it doesn't because I've done this before. The slow drift from "I'm just going to check one thing" to realising you've been absent from your own evening. Your own weekend. Your own life, in the ways that actually matter.

I swore I'd never let it happen again. And here I am, on my sofa, laptop open, doing exactly the same thing in a different costume.

This time the excuse isn't the same as before. This time it’s AI.

I want to be clear about something before this piece goes where it's going: the AI tools we have right now are extraordinary. I f✱king love them. Every day I’m amazed by some new unlock. So this isn’t a doom piece. I'm not here to tell you that AI is bad and you should go live in a cabin.

I'm a product and growth advisor and a founder building DevTune. Not long ago, the things we’re doing across the business, the coding, the go-to-market, the content, the infrastructure, would have required a sizeable team. Now we can move at a speed that would have seemed absurd even twelve months ago. I can prototype something in a morning that used to take a week. I can go from idea to working feature in a single sitting. I can research a market, draft positioning, build a landing page, and ship it before lunch.

I've been in tech long enough to have sat through several hype cycles, and this one is different. The productivity gains are real, and they're compounding. If you're a builder right now, a founder, a developer, someone who makes things, you can do work today at a cadence that simply wasn't possible just months ago.

I don't take that for granted. I'm pretty sure I'm comfortably in the 99th percentile of people experimenting with and leveraging these tools. I use AI across every part of my business, every day. Writing code with agentic coding tools. Running multi-agent workflows for research and GTM. Building open source tooling that pushes what these systems can do. The opportunities this all opens up as someone building a business in 2026 is honestly insane, and I feel fortunate to be living through it all.

So I need you to hold that in your head, that I believe all of this, deeply, while I tell you what it's costing me.

Here's the thing about having superpowers: you want to use them. All the time. There's always another experiment to run, another feature to build, another angle to explore. And because the tools are so good, the gap between "I wonder if..." and "let me just quickly..." is now near zero.

So you do. You try the thing. Again and again and again.

The FOMO is unlike anything I've experienced, and I've worked in tech for a long time. Every day on X, on LinkedIn, someone is shipping something extraordinary that they built in a weekend. Someone is sharing a workflow that makes yours look primitive. Someone is launching a product that sounds like the thing you were going to build next week. The rational part of your brain knows that most of this is noise, that you're already ahead of the curve, that no human being can absorb and act on everything. But the irrational part, the part that drives most founders, doesn't care about rational.

I'm writing this from the perspective of a founder, because that's the life I’m living as all this unfolds. But I've had enough conversations with PMs, marketers, and DevRel folks to know this isn't just a founder problem.

The tools don't care what your job title is.

If you're in tech and you build, ship, or create things, you're feeling some version of this.

That being said, for me, the FOMO isn't really about other people. It's about unrealised potential. The growth PM inside me can't stand the idea of leaving experiments unrun. Failing is fine. Failure is just learning. But failing because I didn't try everything I could have tried? That's one of the things that keeps me on the sofa with my laptop at 2am.

And underneath all of it, there's this feeling that I've struggled to name. It's not burnout. I'm not crashing. It's not overwhelm. I'm still functioning, still shipping, still moving forward. In fact I’m still buzzing about what’s possible. Still excited.

It's something more subtle. A low-grade hum of unease that never quite switches off. A bubbling level of stress that sits just below the surface. You're always edging it. Never quite tipping over, but never at rest either. And because you're still productive, still delivering, you don't flag it. You don't even give yourself permission to flag it. You just keep going.

That's not a healthy place to be. I know this. And yet….

I've lived this before. Different setting, same pattern.

For years I was in senior leadership and exec roles at companies like CloudBees and Snyk. I flew constantly. I was in a different city every week, usually a different country. Early flights, late dinners, hotel rooms that all looked the same. There was a buzz to it. Peak startup bubble. ‘High-performing teams’. Driving each other on, the energy of building something that mattered. I loved it, honestly. And I told myself, over and over, that I was doing it for my family. Building a career, earning well, providing. And there was some truth in that.

But there was also a version of events where my kids were growing up and I was somewhere else. Where bedtimes happened without me more often than with me. Where the small, unremarkable moments, the ones that only become important in hindsight, just quietly passed by while I was in an airport lounge telling myself it would all be worth it.

When I stepped away from that life, I made a promise to myself. I wouldn't let it happen again. I'd be present. I'd be there.

And now I am there. I work from home. I'm in the same building as my kids almost every day. And I'm doing the exact same thing.

The difference is that this time, the gap is pernicious. When you're travelling, the absence is obvious. You're not there. Everyone knows it, including you. But when you're on the sofa, laptop open, technically in the same room, you can tell yourself you're present. You're not. You're physically home and mentally somewhere else entirely. And honestly, that’s worse, because at least when I was flying to San Francisco, Boston, or Raleigh, nobody was pretending I was available.

The justification has changed, but squint and it’s the same pattern.

There's a cognitive cost to all of this that I don't think we talk about enough. The density of what I'm absorbing and producing on any given day is extraordinary. I'm context-switching between code, copy, strategy, infrastructure, customer conversations, open source projects, and the AI tools mean I can make meaningful progress on all of them in a single day. That sounds like a good thing, and in many ways it is. But my brain hasn't upgraded alongside the tooling. It's the same brain it's always been. Damn you AuDHD.

And that brings me to the title of this post and the phrase that won't leave my head: touch grass.

Internet slang for "you're too online, go outside." But beyond the dig, there's something important buried in it.

The literal version first. Getting outside, away from screens, into open air. It's a basic need that we've started treating as optional. I've kept a daily walk habit for the last couple of years. An hour ideally, at least thirty minutes. It's the time where I process things. Where the background threads in my head actually get to run. Where the half-formed idea from the morning becomes a clear thought by the afternoon. Where the stress settles, just enough, to let me think straight.

That habit has been gradually eroding. It seems to correlate pretty directly with how much more capable the tools have become. There's always one more thing to do before I head out. One more thing turns into three. The walk gets shorter, then gets pushed to later, then doesn't happen. And I don't notice until I've gone a week without proper time away from a screen and I feel like my head is full of static.

I don't think that's an accident. When the thing that keeps you sane is the first thing you sacrifice to the work, something has gone wrong. You're not processing anymore. You're just accumulating, and none of it is getting the space it needs to settle.

When I walk, things change in an important way: the hum quiets down. The constant noise I carry around all day, the half-finished thoughts, the next thing on the list, the background anxiety about everything I haven't done yet, it doesn't disappear, but it drops to a level where I can actually think and process.

We're not built to stare at screens for sixteen hours a day. We know this. Everyone knows this. And yet when the screens are showing us things we're excited about, things we're building, things that feel urgent and important, we act like the rules don't apply. But they do apply, even if your brain is pretending otherwise.

But touch grass means something beyond the literal, too. It means reconnecting with the things that make us human in ways that have nothing to do with output. Spending time with people you love, not while half-looking at your phone checking in on your background agents, but actually being there. Belonging. The kind you can't get from a Slack channel or a Twitter thread. Caring for people. Being cared for. The stuff you know matters but deprioritise anyway when the work feels important enough.

My kids are still young. Nine and seven. These years don't come back. I know this because I already lost some of them to the last version of this pattern. The exec version. And the fact that I can see myself doing it again, that I can catch myself on the sofa at 10pm, laptop open, kids in bed, wife quiet in a way that means something, that awareness has to count for something. But only if I actually do something with it.

I'd love to be able to wrap this up with a framework. Five steps to reclaiming your life from AI-powered productivity. A neat before-and-after. A morning routine that fixed everything.

I don't have that. (Sorry!)

What I have is awareness. I can see the pattern. I've seen it before, lived through it, come out the other side with enough regret to know I don't want to do it again. And I can see myself doing it again. That tension, between knowing better and doing the same thing anyway, is where I'm living right now.

So I’m writing this post partly as an accountability lever.

I'm going to get the walk back. Every day, an hour ideally, thirty minutes minimum. My head needs space and the walk is where I’ll find it.

I'm going to set clearer boundaries between work and home. That's hard when you work a lot from home and your brain never fully leaves the business. I'm negotiating this with myself, negotiating it with my family, and I don't have it fully figured out. I’m falling short of what I'd like. But that’s going to change.

I have to accept that I'm not going to run every experiment, ship every idea, explore every possibility. That some potential will go unrealised, and that has to be okay.

I think the most important thing, maybe the only thing I'm actually sure of, is that being conscious of this matters. Accepting that you're flawed, that this technology can push you into patterns you've seen before, that you're not immune just because you're aware. That's not a fix. But it's where fixing things starts.

So if any of this sounds familiar, if you're reading this on your phone on the sofa while your family is in the next room, maybe close the laptop tonight. Go for a walk tomorrow. Touch grass. Not because it fixes everything, but because you're a human being, and human beings need more than output.

You already know this. I already know this. The hard part is doing it.

BEFORE YOU GO

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After 2.5 years of weekly issues, it’s time for me to rebalance.

Shipping every week has been great for discipline, but it taxes the same hours I need for product work.

So, I’m shifting to a new cadence of monthly growth essays while I focus on building and growing DevTune.

What this means for you:

• Cadence: ~1 post per month (still on a weekday…

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This edition of The Product-Led Geek will take 8 minutes to read and you’ll learn:

• How to build and sharpen 10 essential growth skills - from analytics and experimentation to storytelling and strategy - using AI as a daily force multiplier.

• Practical frameworks for collaborating with AI effectively: starting small, breaking down problems,…

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This edition of The Product-Led Geek will take 8 minutes to read and you’ll learn:

• What AI is really automating in product growth (and what it’s not)

• Why the most valuable skills in growth are shifting from execution to judgement, influence, and synthesis

• How to audit your own workflow - and “move to higher ground” before the next AI wave …

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This edition of The Product-Led Geek will take 6 minutes to read and you’ll learn:

• How to extend your PLG motion with strategic outbound email campaigns that reach enterprise customers.

• The three common email outbound failure modes

• How to create focused microcampaigns that leverage product usage data to identify expansion opportunities wit…

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This edition of The Product-Led Geek is a practical guide for product and developer tool companies to win the new LLM discovery game and be on the right side of the next big distribution shift. It will take 8 minutes to read and you’ll learn:

• How to systematically benchmark your brand's visibility in AI recommendations across ChatGPT, Ge…

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I’m on a much needed family vacation in Greece 🇬🇷 this week, enjoying the consistently sunnier climate - a welcome break from the changeable weather we’ve had in the UK so far this summer.

So today’s post is a recap of my most popular posts of the year so far.

Let’s go!

GEEK LINKS

3 of the best growth reads from this week

1. Are Sales Reps…

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If you’re new to the newsletter, I’m Ben aka the Product-Led Geek, a product and growth geek who’s spent the last 25 years building, breaking, and scaling products. I’ve led product, growth and design teams, coached founders and product/growth leaders, and made plenty of mistakes along the way. My approach is deeply user-centric, pragma…

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