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Lincoln Murphy
I focus on Customer Success-driven Growth

Bad Fit Customers are like Pokemon Go Magikarp

Yet Another Pokemon Go Business Analogy

The amazing success of Pokemon Go has been well-documented; from the $200M in revenue in the first month, to the record-setting downloads and engagement — both device and real-world — the game has produced.

That said, Pokemon Go is a terrible game and the reasons why have been documented heavily since it launched. It’s getting better(?), but the missing onboarding process and, frankly, the overall game experience was initially off-putting and the lack of any real instruction or usability guide has been hard to overcome. On top of that, there’s the constant “why are we doing this again?” question that runs through my head when I play.

But that’s the thing; I play. I play Pokemon Go whenever I’m outside, I keep it running and in the foreground on my phone so I can incubate eggs when I walk around, and I am a Level 15 trainer that has won some battles, lead a gym or two, and, honestly… still have no idea how the game really works.

In fact, to make sure I was using the right words in this post and what I said was factually accurate, I found myself stuck in a subreddit dedicated to all things Pokemon Go… a few hours later I came out wiser and yet somehow dumber.

But as I’ve played Pokemon Go, I’ve tried to find lessons that would apply to Customer Success so I could tie the game and my passion for Customer Success-driven Growth together. If you’ve been involved in either of those things, you’ll know that’s a tall order.

But I finally found a Customer Success lesson in Pokemon Go that I can share with you… Magikarp are like Bad Fit Customers. While this is a (hopefully) fun analogy, please don’t let this take away from the seriousness of the issue.

Magikarp are officially described using words like “worthless” and “useless,” yet they’re everywhere you go (not even always by water) and it’s tempting to catch ‘em.

  1. You work hard to catch Magikarp, sometimes they break out, and you end-up wasting resources like Great Balls and Razz Berries that you could use to catch higher-value Pokemon
  2. Sometimes you work hard and waste resources on trying to catch a Magikarp, and they just run away before you can seal them in that Great Ball you don’t have any more
  3. It takes A LOT to evolve them. It takes 400 candies, and you get 3 candies every time you catch a Magikarp, which means you’ll probably never get a chance to evolve them*
  4. You get Stardust anytime you catch a Magikarp; Stardust can be used to power up other Pokemon. This really has no equivalent in business. Bad Fit customers only hurt
  5. Magikarp are a vanity metric; “look how many Pokemon I caught!”
  6. Magikarp start to take the fun out of the game
  7. Magikarp take up space in your Pokebox. When a high-value Pokemon appears, you can’t catch it without going in and transferring Pokemons to the Professor; and then the high-value Pokemon runs away before you get a chance to catch it

Let me translate those into non-Pokemon speak for you so the analogy is not lost:

  1. You work hard to acquire Bad Fit customers, sometimes they lead you on because they don’t want to say no and you don’t want to miss out, so you end up wasting precious resources like time and money in this fruitless pursuit
  2. Sometimes you work hard, wasting resources on trying to acquire Bad Fit customers, and they just go dark before you can even close the deal
  3. Bad Fit customers have no Success Potential and expansion (upsell, cross-sell, etc.) is 100% tied to success; so no success, no expansion
  4. Unfortunately, Bad Fit customers don’t bring Stardust that magically benefits other customers; the analogy falls apart here. Okay, maybe learning from those Bad Fit customers is like Stardust… but at some point that analogy also falls apart
  5. Bad Fit customers are a vanity metric; “look how many logos we acquired this quarter” … yeah, but are they a Good Fit? Do they have Success Potential? Will they expand?
  6. Bad Fit customers hurt morale… when customers churn — or sometimes worse, when they stick around — that impacts the way your employees feel. Frankly, it sucks to work for a company that has customers that aren’t — and can’t ever — be successful
  7. When you find a high-value, Good Fit Customer, if all of your resources are going to chasing and attempting to serve Bad Fit customers, you can’t react to that opportunity fast enough and the customer might run away before you get a chance to acquire it!

If you needed a fun analogy to be reminded why you shouldn’t acquire Bad Fit Customers, well, there you go.

*With 400 candies, you can evolve Magikarp into the powerful Gyarados, but the chances of that happening are slim to none; you’re better off figuring out where Gyarados spawn (apparently by the ocean) and hanging out there. Hey, there’s another lesson in there.

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Lincoln Murphy is a world-renowned Growth Architect, Consultant, Author, and Keynote Speaker. As founder of Sixteen Ventures — and previously leader of Customer Success Evangelism at Gainsight — he’s used Customer Success to drive growth across the entire customer lifecycle for more than 400 SaaS and enterprise software companies over the last decade.

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