People make a lot of mistakes when they launch a startup. One big early mistake is thinking that you need a giant launch to really make people notice. And it’s a mistake because they forget that all of the real work only starts after the launch.
Because the game today isn’t just about how to acquire users, it’s really about how to delight your users.
Steve Jobs is one of the people who understood this really well. He’d always repeat that Apple’s job was to create products that were “insanely great”. And I realized that “insanely great” wasn’t just a synonym for “really good” — his goal was to keep producing moments that were so good, that when you actually think about what went into them, you’d see that it was basically pathological. …
Startups are hard because even the startups that do an incredible job can die. Valar morghulis, all startups must die. At The Family, that’s led us to understand a few lessons.
One is that you have to put a ton of effort into customer service when you’re a startup, because it’s what lets you do things that other companies can’t. When you have a few hundred clients, you can do things that are really magical; when you have tens of thousands, it’s much more complicated.
As a client, we’re all getting more and more impossible to deal with, we’re super sensitive. Before there was a relationship between the price you paid and the quality you got. But then people started to provide incredible services, lots of them for free. Startups are part of that, giving people things that are better and cheaper. That combination creates things nobody would have imagined. At Amazon, for example, Prime became the norm. But years ago, the first e-commerce site took 4 weeks for delivery on average, and everybody was so amazed. …
Let’s talk marketing and sales in the age of COVID-19. Spoiler: You can’t stop doing either of them.
COVID-19 brought together two phenomena when it comes to marketing your business and making sales.
First, there are a ton of people pushing content online. Everyone launched their newsletter, their live show, they started tweeting more, everything.
And now everybody’s exhausted. People got burned out on having multiple Zoom happy hours per day, for work, with friends, their families… Somehow we were in confinement, we couldn’t see people, and all we needed was some time alone.
That means your marketing needs to be better than ever. A crisis is no time for amateurs, because the best of the best are doing the same thing. You have to become in-cre-di-ble at it if you want people to hear you. Use your own unique voice, now more than ever. …
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