It's been an interesting week on the good ship YourPCM. Back into work mode after my trip to Lanzarote to see my folks, the first thing I had to deal with was a pirate ...
Captain Steffi is still in command after a rather interesting week!
This is what we call them when they sign-up, take what they want and bugger off again after just a few weeks. We have powerful discovery tools built in that search for professions around the country. The email I got from them stated, "I've got all the emails I wanted, can you cancel my subscription, please?" Um, ok then ... after just one month as well.
"Here be pirates!"
It's not a pleasant situation to be faced with. It happened before when we allowed exporting during a free trial. People would sign-up for the free trial, grab a load of contacts for free and disappear into the night, ghosting us, and never completing the free trial. So, we put a stop to that by turning off exporting until they've subscribed.
There's not a lot I can do once they've actually paid us some money, but why are they using a different CRM and putting our data in it when YourPCM is clearly superior? People are weird sometimes, pirates doubly so.
And on the subject of churn, I had to cancel a subscription last week as well. Now, £34.99 is not a lot of money for the features and functionality our subscribers receive. But ok, sometimes people don't use a particular part of YourPCM so I'm happy to downgrade their subscription when they need it, all they have to do is choose what they want in the subscriber centre.
But when I couldn't even get them to change their subscription to our £4.99 Minimum Viable Product, just to keep their subscription going and their data intact? That's not the usual "I'm not using this, can I downgrade?" sort of conversation.
For GDPR purposes, as soon as someone cancels their subscription, once the billing period has ended, we have to close down their copy of YourPCM and delete their data. Our MVP strips out virtually every feature, but keeps their data intact and accessible until such time they upgrade again.
"That's why I'm changing to Stripe. Subscription upgrades and downgrades are easy!"
And on a final note, with my sensible developer hat on, I've been redesigning our backend dashboard that keeps track of our subscribers. It was getting a bit unwieldy with so many option switches that the table was extending off the end of my (very wide) monitor and my OCD was playing up.
I've been converting the majority of those Yes/No switches to dropdowns in a popup dialog box, simply to save my sanity. A few tweaks to some other options and charts and I think we're done. A quick and relatively easy change to make life more efficient.
Then I'm back to integrating Companies House data, which is a really interesting project in itself.
Love, light & logic ...
STEFFI LEWIS Independent UK SaaS Developer - Creator of YourPCM & sBlogIt!
Would you like to know more?
If anything I've written in this blog post resonates with you and you'd like to discover more about pirates, do give us a call ...
Based in the charming village of Hanslope in Buckinghamshire, UK, I bring over 30 years of experience in web development. From creating my first website for the Open University in 1993, through being part of the dot com boom, to my explorations in SaaS and AI over the last few years, my journey has been a rich tapestry of web projects, big and small, both funded and bootstrapped.
Originally developed during the pandemic, at the start of 2025, I released the next iteration of YourPCM, version 2, which is all about 'Easy Contact Management for Small Business Owners'. Is it a CRM? Yes, but I don't call it that because people glaze over at the mention of such things. CRMs are boring, difficult to get to grips with, and it's a nightmare to get help when you need it.
YourPCM is none of those things! It's simple to use, well-supported, feature rich and beautiful, right out of the box. It's available on a simple monthly subscription with no long-term tie-in. Book a demo or grab your own 14-working-day free trial and discover why YourPCM is all about easy contact management for small business owners.
My head is in the cloud, my heart belongs to the web, and my soul is filled with such beautiful code ��
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