8:42 AM - Inbox triage
I grab coffee and open the Foyer dashboard. Two Slack alerts came through overnight: one new signup flagged as high-intent (someone named Sarah Chen filled out the form at 11:47 PM, left a message saying "Already using a spreadsheet. This looks like exactly what I need"), and one churn notification for a customer named Marcus Webb who canceled at 2:15 AM. My stomach sinks a little at the churn. Marcus was only four weeks in. I make a note to dig into why, probably after I get through the morning.
The dashboard shows me the numbers: three signups yesterday, which brings me to 18 for the week so far. Revenue shows $2,847 week-to-date. Still tracking toward that target of eight new customers this month, though I'm only at five so far. I open Gmail to find eighteen new emails, mostly inbound from the Facebook group outreach campaign the AI agent ran yesterday.
I have Slack open in another window and I've set it to alert me on new trials. There's Sarah Chen's intake form waiting. I do the same thing I do every morning: I skim the outreach emails the agent drafted, look for the ones that need human review before sending, and approve the rest. The agent - I've trained it pretty well at this point - catches most of the tone issues, but sometimes it comes back with something generic when a customer's actually asked a direct question about integrations. I spot one email drafted to someone named Carol Reyes. Carol asked specifically about whether Foyer syncs with her Square POS system. The agent's draft is a generic "thanks for your interest, here are our features" response. That's not going to convert. I rewrite it to Carol directly: "Hi Carol. Yes, we integrate with Square. Pull your guest list and financial data in from Square, and Foyer handles the rest. You can see that integration live in our 14-day trial." I add a link to her trial dashboard and send it. That takes five minutes.
10:15 AM - The flagged conflict
I get a notification on my Linear board that someone on my team (my part-time marketing VA) flagged a conflict. There's a customer named Jessica Huang who was part of our first cohort - she signed up 47 days ago, so she's past trial but only two months in. She posted in our Slack community (we have a small Slack for active paying customers) asking why she was being charged twice on her May invoice.
I pull up her Stripe dashboard. There it is: two $79 charges on May 3rd. I scroll back through her history. She had a card decline back in April, then she updated her payment method manually, and what happened is Foyer's retry logic charged her for the April invoice plus the May invoice in the same batch. That's a bug on our end. I immediately message her on Slack: "Jessica, I see it. That's a system error on our end. I'm processing a manual refund of $79 to your card right now, and I've fixed the billing cycle so this won't happen again. Refund will show in 2-3 business days. Thanks for catching it." I move to Stripe and process the refund.
It takes maybe ten minutes total, but it matters. Jessica replies within an hour: "Thank you for the quick fix. I was worried this was a bigger issue." That's one customer saved from churning, probably. These moments feel like the actual work nobody shows you about running SaaS. It's not complicated, but it's the difference between someone staying and someone leaving.
12:30 PM - Lunch and the metrics check
I take lunch at my desk and pull up our weekly dashboard. I've been using a simple Google Sheet to track the metrics that matter: signups by day, trial-to-paid conversions, churn, and pipeline.
Week-to-date: 18 signups, which is on track for about 72 a month (I need 32 to hit the 8-per-month target by month six on a 30-day average, so I'm actually running ahead). Trial-to-paid conversion rate is holding at 31 percent. Five churn events this week including Marcus Webb this morning. I've only been running this long enough to see that the wedding planner vertical is sticky - people don't leave once they're using it - but I need to figure out why Marcus Webb left so fast.
I go back to his account. He was in the trial for 9 days, then signed up for the monthly plan, then canceled after 19 days. I check his usage: he imported a guest list on day 11, then never logged back in. That's a red flag. I probably should've noticed that during trial and reached out. Note to self: set up automated re-engagement emails for low-activity accounts. That's something I can ask the agent to help me build tomorrow.
I check the pipeline too. There are 47 people currently in active trials. Of those, I can estimate about 15 will convert in the next week based on historical rates. That feels real. That feels doable.
2:08 PM - A customer question
Email comes in from someone named David Torres. He's five weeks in, one of my early payers, and he's asking: "Can I use Foyer for multiple events at once, or do I have to create separate accounts?"
That's a legitimate question. The honest answer is: yes, technically, but the UI doesn't make it obvious, and the agent hasn't documented that flow yet. I open the admin dashboard and actually walk through it myself. You can create multiple event workspaces under one account. It works fine. It's just not marketed anywhere. So either I'm leaving money on the table by not showing people this feature, or people figure it out and love it.
I write back to David: "Hey David. You can run multiple events under one account. Create separate event workspaces from the settings tab. I'll add better docs for this - good catch." Then I spend 20 minutes writing out the actual workflow as documentation in our help center and slack a link to it to my marketing VA.
That's the kind of thing that happens a lot. The product works, but the person using it is often the first person to uncover gaps in how we explain it. I've learned to treat customer questions like product feedback.
4:30 PM - Pipeline review and a win
I block this time every Tuesday to review who's close to converting and who might be at risk. I have a simple system: I open Gmail, pull up anyone I've emailed in the last ten days who hasn't yet signed up, and I send them a short follow-up message. Nothing pushy. Just: "Hey, quick check-in. Any questions about the trial?"
One of those emails lands with someone named Priya Mittal. She replied to me two days ago saying she was interested but worried about learning curve. I had sent her a link to our onboarding video. She just wrote back: "Watched it. Signing up now." I watch her trial convert to a paid account in real time in the Stripe dashboard. There's a small dopamine hit that never goes away. One customer. $79 a month. That's me, working, getting results.
I check our weekly revenue again: $3,712 this week. We're at nine active paying customers now with Priya, and another customer probably converting tomorrow or Thursday based on their trial activity. That's pace toward about $36,000 ARR if I maintain these conversion rates. Still need to 2x to hit the $72,000 mid-year target, but this is real progress.
5:45 PM - A moment of honesty
I close my email and look at the Slack notification about Marcus Webb again. I check his company's website. He was a high-end wedding planner, the kind who works with five or six couples a year. Smaller customer for us, probably. But the fact that he came in, saw the value, paid, and then ghosted tells me something. Maybe the product wasn't the issue. Maybe he got busy and forgot about it. Maybe he looked at his credit card statement and had a moment of doubt. I'll probably never know.
This is the part they don't tell you about. You can build something good. You can get customers. But you still lose them. Sometimes it's your fault (bad onboarding, buggy feature, missed customer success). Sometimes it's just timing or life. I make a mental note to reach out to Marcus next week with a personal message. "Hey Marcus, noticed you canceled. Would love to know what happened so I can improve things. No pressure at all."
6:15 PM - Wrap
I close the dashboard and pull up Slack one more time. Three more messages in the community Slack from customers asking questions and helping each other answer them. That's something I was nervous about early on - whether people would actually use a community space - but they're doing it naturally. One person is asking about best practices for guest accommodation. Another is sharing a workflow hack about syncing with her Google Sheet. I don't need to moderate that much anymore. The customers are doing it.
I close the laptop. Seven hours of actual work today, though it didn't feel like labor. Three emails I wrote myself. One bug I fixed. One refund I issued. One customer I probably saved from churning. Five new people in trial, one conversion, one churn. That's the real math.
Tomorrow I'll wake up and do something similar. There's no automation here. There's just tools that make me faster, and clear thinking about where my attention actually needs to go. It's work. It's good work. And right now, at one month and three weeks in, it feels like it might actually work.