Recently, I've seen a small handful of customers leave DoneDone, some of whom have been using it regularly for more than a decade.
Think about the changes in the things we do, the way we work, and the tools we use since the late 2000s. And yet a piece of software like DoneDone (birthed in 2009) has remained a fixture for several organizations all through it.
These customers have been on our older version—one that we have not added any new features onto since 2018 as nearly all of my time has been devoted to building up DoneDone 2 since then. And yet they've kept using this software; it was worthwhile enough to keep paying for each month every month for years and years.
The reasons they left? A few migrated to our new product (great!) but most left for the reasons you'd suspect—wanting to reduce spending, a merger with another organization that uses a different competing product, the business closed, or the business has focused on something else.
Few left because there was a missing feature—those folks left years ago. You find that the longer your customers hang around, the less they want any form of change to your product anyways.
I used to feel bad about a customer leaving my product. I felt like what we had wasn't enough. But on the long tail end of a product's life, when those customers depart having been with you for more than a few presidential administrations, that feeling changes.
I'm relieved. I'm content. I'm satisfied. They left on their own terms having gotten what they wanted for many years and it was time to move on. What better result is there for a software product?
In life for that matter?