Your product sucks without loyal customers.
Your company is sinking.
It is pretty hard to impress someone with the best solution for the market while there almost 30M companies are only in US*. Each minute hundreds and thousands of businesses are created, and a lot of these companies are dying in the same year without achieving even small results.
It is pretty hard to impress someone with the best solution for the market while there almost 30M companies are only in US.
Each company is individual, and each company offers a unique solution for the market. Why does it happen that a tremendous part of them lock their doors without meeting their first anniversary?
The answer is surprisingly simple — a market is not the constant, and its needs are changing from month-to-month turning a business world into the rat race where only the smartest and keenest one will survive.
Everyone has an idea that their product is Newton’s apple.
Almost everyone has an idea that their product is Newton’s apple and will make a rocket leap in their area, whereas it is not right to count one’s chickens before they hatch, a good product built requires blood, sweat, and tears, and the most vital resource in a business world — money.
Why are you entrepreneur?
In a modern world, a lot of businesses are oriented on a growth-hacking, best-practices, Steve Jobs inspiration, but almost all of them are forgetting about one important thing during the first year: Why business exists and how does the world work. I do not pretend on a world understanding person title, however, have own vision that I’m sharing.
Business is created for a problem solving, while your company does not solve any problem — get out and run a new game.
The business offers a solution to the market and market evaluates how good the solution is, no one except transparent market cannot do that. How do you think, what is the vote? The vote is money. While you see that your product is cheap and you cannot succeed in selling it more expensive — change your product, it sucks.
The main question is: Why such a smart person with such a wonderful product just fucked up his business?
The market is changing. Your product becomes irrelevant and invalid in a one month after the first deploy.
The market is changing. Your product becomes irrelevant and invalid in a one month after the first deploy. There is only one thing that can save your business from a huge disaster — people.
While money is the most vital resource in a business world, people it is a real force that can identify where this money should go.
If you do not have the first party of attempters — try to start your game from your last check-point.
No one knows what have you been doing before launching your own business and running “unique, wonderful, great, excellent” solution for the market, but if you do not have the first party of attempters before pre-Beta of your product — I have a really bad news for you, try to start your game from your last check-point.
Only Jack Sparrow aware of all his challenges.
Doesn’t matter how old your company and how sustainable your product is. Only loyal customers that were with you since your childhood will run your business in the future, because you work for them, not for your pocket.
Our company lives for three years and we have more than 950 partners. Our core customers are staying with us for more than 2 years, they were our trusted advisors, improvement drivers, and breadwinners.
How do we run an international business from Ukraine and adapting to the market so fast? Customers are the single source of truth that we listen, if customers are not happy we change everything until customers are satisfied, we even changed a coffee-machine, so customer-centric approach is our main value.
We believe that our customers will make our product better and will add value to our new solutions.
While we develop a new feature we spend approximately two or three months to understand what challenges should we cover, how the product should look like, what metrics should it contain, what will we measure as success. To identify a core value of our future product we conduct ten first interviews with different customers and after the first demo is ready we conduct second meetings to identify what else should be enhanced?
Our product creation process is built around partner’s feedback, using this approach we do not develop irrelevant solutions and save a huge amount of resources.
We are not a Facebook, our market is not eternal.
Since our market is not eternal, instead of only new customers acquiring we also focused on a partner’s re-approach. Before the agreement cancellation, we conduct several pieces of calls to understand what will be the solution that will get our customer back in a few months later. We have developed more than three solutions that were based on churned customers feedback, 67% of them have decided to renew our cooperation.
Satisfy your customer needs and move forward or someone else will do that instead of you.
Every business is a car, your customers are your fuel, neglect your fuel and stuck on a desert road, take care of your fuel and your speed will be higher than expected. Satisfy your customer needs and move forward or someone else will do that instead of you.
