Reputation as the trust ledger
Reputation is your track record made public. It climbs slowly — a clean hour where every customer got the uptime they paid for nudges it up a hair. It falls fast: every SLA you break costs reputation immediately, and the bigger the promise you sold, the harder the fall. One bad outage can wipe out days of careful, boring reliability.
Better customers only come knocking once you've earned the standing to attract them. As your reputation crosses into a new band — Unproven, Regional, Established, Industry-leading — a fresh tier of customer archetypes becomes reachable. Delighted, high-value tenants also talk: a public recommendation lifts your reputation and brings referrals, while an angry departure does the opposite.
Because breaking a promise costs more than never making it, accepting a customer is a real bet. Sign someone you can comfortably serve and deliver, and reputation compounds in your favour. Cram on customers you can't keep happy, and the breaches drag it down faster than clean hours can rebuild it.
Detailed explanation
Reputation is a 0..1 scalar. Clean hours add a small fixed amount; SLA breaches subtract per breaching customer per hour, scaled by tier (a Platinum breach hits several times harder than Bronze) and capped per hour so a single fleet-wide outage can't instantly zero you. Difficulty widens the gap — on harder settings breaches bite more and clean hours are worth less. Churn and turning away serviceable business cost reputation too; public praise and band milestones are the visible feedback.
Each customer archetype carries a minimum reputation to appear in your prospect pipeline. The named bands are keyed to the reputation gate thresholds; crossing one unlocks the archetypes gated at that level and posts a milestone to #news. The ladder (which band unlocks whom) is surfaced so you can see what the next rung buys you.