My heart leapt into my throat.
I had opened my email and there was a message from Braintree (payment processor).
It said something like this…
Due to insufficient funds, we have disabled your account.
WHAT?!?!?!?
I checked the bank balance…
It was BELOW $0.00
WTF?!?!?
And why would the payment processor send this not the bank?
Well it turns out that a client had disputed the charges on their credit card.
Braintree had pulled the money from our account and had not gotten all of what this client had disputed.
So they did what anyone would do when you owe them money.
Shut the account down.
And that is how we found out that we hadn’t been paying attention to our biggest customer.
I certainly hadn’t.
I wasn’t doing customer facing work at the time.
Not a surprise that I didn’t know.
Apparently no one had been paying attention either.
I spent the next three weeks gathering communication and appealing the dispute.
Feeling like I was playing catch up from behind the 8-ball.
And yeah… company down the tubes.
Couldn’t pay payroll.
Couldn’t pay the AWS bill.
Everyone gone.
I’ve told this story what feels like a thousand times…
The thing is they had tried to tell us that they wanted to cancel.
And I had no idea.
They sent messages about being unhappy but no one was looking at them.
They sent smoke signals. We weren’t even checking the sky.