High Expectation Customers (HXC)

In the previous post, founder of SuperHuman briefly mentioned HXC as a key component of them finding product market fit. In this post, I want to go deeper into the concept of HXC and see how that relates to the process of building true product market fit.

Julie Supan, the branding head of Youtube, Airbnb, Dropbox and Thumbtack, shared her perspective over positioning through the lens of HXC in her interview with firstround capitcal here.

HXC Overview

HXC is key to positioning and to find true positioning (good positioning is important to focus and avoiding confusion), here are the recommended 5 questions to ask as a start:

1. Who is the customer that needs/wants your service or product the most?
2. Why does your product or service matter to them?
3. How do they feel about your product or service?
4. What is the true benefit to them?
5. Will your product exceed their expectations?

As Supan says, the first step to successful positioning is to identify the ideal user -> HXC and here are the characteristics:

1. The most discerning person within the target demographic
2. It is someone who will acknowledge and enjoy the product/service for its greatest benefit.
3. They look things up and research things
4. They have ideas for new types of products or services that can help save money, time and become more productive

The bottom line: if your product exceeds their expectation, it can meet everyone else’s.

Here are a couple of examples of HXC in the context of Airbnb, Dropbox, Lululemon, Thumbtack. HXC isn’t meant to be an all encompassing persona. They are the people that will benefit the most from the product’s greatest attributes and spread the word. The others will say if this works for this tech-savvy friend, it will probably work for me. They are the influencers in this particular domain.

Airbnb HXC: They want to live like a local, experience Paris as if they are living there. They are energized by the idea of staying in unique spaces and feeling welcomed, but are cost conscious too.

Dropbox HXC:They want to simplify their lives. They are trusting, organized, tech savvy, and looking for ways to get some time back in their day. They want to know they are covered, that someone has their back when it comes to their life’s work, which is primarily in their computers.

Lululemon HXC: They are either 32 year old single professional woman, inspired his initial target market and was later followed their 35 year old male counterpart, an athletic opportunist. They own condos and like to travel. They have about an hour and half to work out each day. If you are 20 year old and graduating, you can’t wait to be them. Or if you are 42 with a few kids, you wish you had that time back.

Caution: Early adopters aren’t HXC and vice versa. HXC cared for the company’s vision and value.

Finding the HXC

Well, it comes as no surprise that this is all about research which has a lot of different channels:

1. General population or decision maker surveys
2. Single question and open ended surveys
3. Single questions embedded into sales or marketing calls
4. Phone interviews
5. Customer service channels
6. Product Intercept surveys
7. App store reviews

From the interviews and customer interaction:

1. What are you seeing that was expected and unexpected?
2. What direction are those results pointing you in?
3. How does that align with your current strategy, roadmap and team?
4. Who looks up to this person?
5. Is this person someone people feel they can relate to or aspire to be?
6. Can you put yourself in their shoes and see your product from their point of view?
7. What would cause them to be disappointed by the product what do you have to do to ensure this won’t happen?

How does this relate to SuperHuman’s Product Market fit framework?

The first step of SuperHuman’s framework is to identify the characteristics of the highly engaged, most relevant users and abstract from that their key attributes. The HXC is a short-hand in describing that segment of customers. The key for SuperHuman’s framework is that after that abstraction, find other users/customers who resemble to the set of characteristics obtained.

The other aspect that makes HXC important is to identify how they influence the people around them. This is particularly important for the early stage startups.