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HELLO
Hi, I'm Michael Christofides. My background is in running Product and Customer Success teams at small businesses, start-ups, and scale-ups. I'm currently self-funding a small business called pgMustard, and do some contracting and consulting to help pay the bills.

MAIN SERVICE
Helping small teams with Customer Success and Product Management.

SECONDARY SERVICE
In the past couple of years, I've also learned a lot about Postgres performance.

THE PITCH BIT
When things are going well, it’s easy to neglect those important-but-never-urgent tasks. Checking in with customers and revisiting product strategy understandably take a back seat to the stream of things that need attention now (yesterday).

But, the benefits of doing these things well can be huge.

With increased attention on customer success, you can catch and resolve issues earlier, and also spot opportunities. This generally leads to happier customers, lower churn, and increased expansion – all of which compound.

Tightening your product strategy can be even more beneficial. Avoiding distractions can lead to significantly faster progress on what matters most to you and your customers.

OK, database performance isn't quite in the same mould, but improvements can delight customers, as well as reducing your Bezos bill (or insert-other-billionaire-here).

In the early stages, it's easy for the founder(s) to retain these responsibilities, or for them to end up owned by other teams. The dev team can handle product management, right? Support can do a decent job of customer success, no? Whilst true, as things take off those people get very busy, and sadly these are the exact things that will be easiest to let slip.

COOL, BUT WHY WOULD I HIRE YOU

I can help you work out where you're at, and guide you on whether (or when) hiring somebody dedicated could make sense. I can also help with projects, strategies, and processes, to improve things in the meantime.

RATE
Per hour: £80
Per day: £400

I prefer to work with smaller clients, as I learn things that help me with pgMustard.

While I am open to working with larger organizations (20+ people), I charge 2-3x more, depending on the project.

AVAILABILITY
I am currently unavailable for ongoing work, but am open to one-off calls or short-term projects.

CONTACT
If you'd like to work together, it'd be great to hear from you.