#3usefulthings — #3 — About startups: gathering feedback, dealing with changes and HXC
#3usefulthings is a series of small blog posts with short overviews of some interesting and useful facts. Previous issues: 1, 2, 4, 5, 6.
Thanks to my colleagues and this Twitter thread I’ve spent the last weekend reading different useful articles around startups and business.
1. First Round — a great source to be added to your mailing list. It has big detailed interviews (which could be also listened as podcasts), interesting case studies and real examples of different useful business approaches.
You can start with this list and completely forget what you were going to do for the next 2 days and add a dozen articles to your own “read later” limbo.
Or you can learn a new term HXC = high-expectations customer and dig down how to communicate with those customers. If your product exceeds their expectations, it can meet everyone else’s. Sounds obvious, but what you should start and how you can be sure that you really know who is your HXC?
2. To improve your product for your paying customers, only talk to your paying customers. One more great article from Intercom about customer feedback.
How often do you think about asking different types of customers separately and not mixing them? Are you asking about the product onboarding only those customers who recently joined the product and not everyone? Do you separate the noisiest users from the real majority of them when they are asking for new features? How to make the feedback gathering continuous? A lot of useful tips and thought-provoking examples in the article.
3. How to keep your job as your startup grows. A story from Steve Blank about the adaptation to company growth and resistance to changes.
Have you ever been afraid to lose your identity in a company you’ve already put too much effort to? Steve shares a story about going through the company changes and fear of losing his status and identity as one day he became the one who doesn’t fit the company scale.
What I wish I knew was that if you’re an early company employee, it’s not likely that the skills you have on day one are the skills needed as the company scales to the next level.
Not the person who hired you, the VCs, or your peers–is going to tell you when you’re hired that the company will likely outgrow you.
Startups and VCs have historically operated on the “I’ll deal with this later” principle in letting early employees know what happens as the company scales. The common wisdom is that no one would want to work like crazy knowing that they might not be the ones to lead as the company grows.
Sounds scary? Just be ready to embrace the changes in your life as they will continuously happen.
