Building a community of promoters
Or why we’ve started measuring our Founder Net Promoter Score
The way we interact with people in our ecosystem is important to us.
So begins the email that every founder who meets with Oxford Capital for the first time will receive from today. Effective immediately, we will be canvassing every founder after our first meeting to gauge how they feel about their first interaction — typically a one-hour meeting or call — to gain feedback on how we can do better, provide an opportunity to submit an anonymous complaint and answer the all important question:
How likely are you to recommend us to a fellow founder?
The consumer techies among you will recognise the classic NPS question. For everyone else, NPS stands for Net Promoter Score: it asks consumers of a product or service to rate how likely they are to recommend said product or service to a friend on a scale of zero to ten. Anyone from zero to six (inclusive) is deemed a detractor, while nines and tens are classed as ‘promoters’.
We are quite keen on NPS as a measure and Tom has written about it on more than one occasion.
But why bother to measure our own NPS?
Put simply, we love founders and it is important to us that they like us back. We think we do well on this front, but so far the evidence is only anecdotal. For example, one of our recent investments was a direct referral from another founder that we backed. Separately, we are often told by founders that they have ‘heard good things’ and we already track the number of companies that are introduced to us by other founders we have met along the road — surely a function of how favourably we are perceived by founders.
In the companies that we look to back, we prize those who are driven by the data they expertly collect. Those who make frequent incremental single-variable changes to their approach and then measure the impact on their KPIs: By holding ourselves to the same standard, we too aim to continuously improve on the service we provide. In this case, the experience we provide to founders who spend time talking through their businesses with our team.
What people think of you matters
We believe that our reputation with founders can have a direct impact on returns: a fund that is regarded poorly by founders is unlikely to see the best entrepreneurs knocking on their door to spend an unpleasant 60-minutes when they have a raft of other funds to choose from.
When it comes to Venture Capital, it pays to be courteous, knowledgeable and forthcoming with the people who put the ‘V’ in to ‘VC’.
Founders,
When we meet with you: we will be on time, come prepared, take notes, pay attention, offer direct feedback and be forthcoming about the next steps we will take and our decision making process.
We will then ask you how we did on our first impression. Whether we end up investing in your venture or not, we hope that you had a good experience and that you will recommend us to others. If you are not and would like to make a complaint, you will be able to do so and may elect to receive a response from us. Otherwise, your feedback is always strictly anonymous.
By responding, you help us get better at what we do best: finding the best founders and funding them to achieve their greatest business potential.
Coming up in my next post: How we built our very own NPS feedback bot.
