The email from Priya Menon landed at 11:47 PM on a Sunday.
Karthik Rajan read it three times, each pass draining more colour from his face. He was sitting in the half-dark of his Koramangala apartment, laptop balanced on his knees, the Bangalore skyline bleeding orange through the window. His girlfriend had fallen asleep an hour ago. The world was quiet, except for this email.
Karthik — Let’s not dance around this. We’ve been partners for fourteen months, and your platform has real potential. But potential doesn’t pay my board. I’m giving you seven days to fix three things, or Nexon pulls the contract. I’ll be in Bangalore on Friday. We’ll talk then. — Priya
Below her signature were Three bullet points
Onboarding Issues
Your onboarding team is a mess. Two of my regional managers say your support staff are rude, slow, or both. This is a people problem.
Marketing Targeting Concerns
Your marketing keeps sending us leads that don't convert. We're spending jointly on campaigns that attract tire-kickers.
Pricing Justification Gap
Grayline Solutions just pitched us at 30% less than your rate. I'm not asking you to match it. I'm asking you to justify the gap.
Monday - Day 1
He called an all-hands at 9 AM. Eighteen people filed into the glass-walled meeting room on the third floor of their WeWork. Karthik stood at the whiteboard, sleeves rolled, marker in hand.
"We have a week," he said. "Our biggest client is about to walk. I need everyone focused on three problems." He wrote them on the board: PEOPLE. MESSAGING. COMPETITION.
Divya Suresh, Head of Customer Success, shifted in her chair. "Which client?"
"Nexon."
The room went cold. Everyone knew the math.
"Priya's coming Friday," Karthik continued. "By then, I need solutions. Not ideas. Solutions."
After the meeting, he pulled Divya aside. "The onboarding complaints — they're pointing at your team. Specifically at Raghav."
Divya's jaw tightened. "Raghav is my most experienced guy."
"Raghav is also the person three clients have flagged in the last quarter. I've seen the tickets, Divya. Late responses, dismissive tone, one email where he told a client to 'read the documentation more carefully.' Direct quote."
"He's going through a divorce. I've been giving him space."
"I respect that. But he's also been telling junior staff that our onboarding playbook is, and I quote, 'a joke written by people who've never worked with real clients.' Two juniors came to Meera in HR last week. They said they're afraid to ask him questions."
Divya was silent.
"I'm not asking you to fire him today," Karthik said. "I'm asking you to have an honest conversation with him by Wednesday. If he can't reset, I'll have to make the call. And I'd rather you be part of that decision than blindsided by it."
Tuesday - Day 2
Karthik sat with Nisha Iyer, his Head of Marketing, in the corner booth of Third Wave Coffee. Nisha had her laptop open, a spreadsheet glowing with acquisition data.
"Here's the thing," Nisha said, scrolling. "Our campaigns are performing. CPL is down 18% quarter over quarter. We're generating volume."
"Volume of what?" Karthik asked.
Nisha paused.
"Priya says our joint campaigns are attracting the wrong buyers. Small firms, price-sensitive, high churn. The leads that convert for Nexon are mid-market ops teams with twelve-month planning cycles. We're targeting founders and freelancers because they click more."
Nisha leaned back. "Because our ICP document still says 'startup founders and SMBs.' That's what we launched with."
"We launched eighteen months ago. Our product has changed. Our best clients look nothing like our original ICP. When's the last time you sat in on a Nexon QBR?"
"I haven't."
"That's the gap." Karthik pulled up a Notion doc. "I went through our top ten accounts last night. Eight of them are mid-market companies, 200 to 1,000 employees, buying for operations teams. Our marketing is still talking to ten-person startups. We're spending money to attract people who'll churn in sixty days."
Nisha stared at the screen. "So we need a full repositioning."
"We need a scalpel, not a chainsaw. New landing page by Thursday. One case study rewritten around Nexon's use case. Updated ad audiences. And a one-pager for Priya showing we understand who her real buyers are."
"That's four days."
"That's the job."
Wednesday - Day 3
The confrontation with Raghav didn't go the way anyone expected. Divya had scheduled a one-on-one for 2 PM. By 2:15, the glass walls of the meeting room were doing what glass walls always do in startups — broadcasting private conflict to every desk on the floor.
Raghav's voice carried. "You're making me the scapegoat because Karthik needs someone to blame."
Divya kept her voice level. "This isn't about blame. Three clients flagged response times. Two juniors said they're uncomfortable asking you for help. That's a pattern, Raghav." "I built this onboarding process. When we had four clients, I was doing sixty-hour weeks while Karthik was pitching investors. Now I'm the problem?" "You built something great. But the way you're showing up right now is undoing it." The room went quiet.Then Raghav said something that surprised everyone: "I know."
He sat down. He rubbed his face. "I know I've been difficult. I just — I didn't think anyone noticed. Or cared.""We notice," Divya said. "And we care. That's why we're having this conversation instead of handing you a letter."
They talked for another hour. By the end, Raghav had agreed to three things:
A formal apology to the two junior team members
A structured weekly feedback loop with Divya
A two-week check-in to assess honestly whether it was working
Karthik watched from his desk. He didn’t intervene. That was the hardest part — letting Divya lead.
Thursday - Day 4
The competitor problem required a different kind of thinking.
Grayline Solutions was a copycat. Everyone knew it. Their product was thinner, buggier, and six months behind DataBridge on features. But they'd raised a fat seed round from a fund that didn't care about margins, and they were buying market share with below-cost pricing.
Karthik gathered his co-founder, Arjun (not the investor — the CTO), and Nisha in the small conference room.
"We can't win on price," Karthik said. "If we drop to match Grayline, we bleed cash and signal desperation."
"So what do we signal instead?" Arjun asked.
Karthik opened a folder. Inside were three documents:
- A Nexon ROI analysis
- A Grayline feature comparison
- A one-page cost-of-switching calculator
"We signal cost of failure," he said. "Priya doesn't care about saving 30% if switching means four months of re-implementation, data migration risk, and a support team that doesn't know her business. We need to make the switching cost visceral."
Nisha nodded slowly. "We make the comparison not about price per seat, but about total cost of ownership."
"Exactly. And we bundle it with the new positioning. We're not cheaper. We're the reason your operations team sleeps at night."
Arjun grinned. "That's almost a tagline."
"Make it one," Karthik said. "I need it on the new landing page by tonight."
Friday - Day 5
Priya Menon arrived at 10 AM. She was shorter than Karthik remembered, sharper than her emails suggested, and visibly tired. She accepted coffee, declined small talk, and sat down.
"Show me," she said.
Karthik walked her through it. The HR changes — Raghav's reset, the new feedback structure, the two-week checkpoint. He didn't sugarcoat it.
"We had a culture gap in our onboarding team. One person was protecting ego instead of serving clients. We've addressed it directly, and if it doesn't hold, he's out. You'll know either way in two weeks."
Priya's expression didn't change.
"Go on."
He showed her the marketing overhaul. New ICP documentation. Revised ad targeting. A draft case study built around Nexon's actual results — 34% reduction in manual ops time, quantified. A landing page that spoke to operations leaders, not startup founders.
"This is what should have existed six months ago," Priya said.
"You're right. It should have."
Then the competitive response. The total cost of ownership analysis. The switching risk breakdown. A twelve-month roadmap showing features Grayline couldn't match.
Priya studied the documents for a long time. Then she looked up.
"You know what Grayline told me? They said they could do everything you do at a third of the price. I asked them to show me one mid-market client who'd renewed. They couldn't."
She closed the folder. "I'm not pulling the contract. But I'm restructuring the terms. Quarterly reviews, documented SLAs, and if your onboarding NPS drops below 40, we renegotiate. Fair?"
"Fair," Karthik said.
After she left, Karthik sat alone in the conference room. The whiteboard still had Monday's three words: PEOPLE. MESSAGING. COMPETITION.
He added a fourth: TRUST.
Then he picked up his phone and called Divya. "Tell Raghav — we bought him two weeks. And tell the team we bought ourselves a quarter. That's it. A quarter."
He hung up, looked at the skyline through the glass, and got back to work.