How Operations Builds a Business: Customers First

Companies require operations to grow past where the sheer will and sweat of founders will take it. When a company hires its first employees, some will build product and a few will sell it, typically leaving an entire swath in the middle, operations, up to a founder. Most early startups have no person directly tasked to operationalize the business; some leave it up to the collective team to hodgepodge it together (you send the contracts to clients, I’ll figure out how we get a new phone line, you look for new office space, etc.) and others deal with it only when it becomes painful.

I’ve written this series of posts as a primer for anyone who finds themselves in the seat of having to figure out the middle bits, with devs working on one side building and sales sitting on the other selling. You may be a founder or a generalist like myself, so I present what I’ve learned so you can shave a bit of time off of having to struggle yourself; as there is no true playbook for building a business or it would be a lot easier to figure it out.

Customers Come First

Customers are the first challenges you’re going to tackle which requires operations. They have to come first and require a lot of attention; sales and product are building and selling and won’t have the time to worry about how individual customers are being serviced. In fact, I’d argue you don’t want them thinking about individual customers at this point, sales can’t get slowed down by account management and devs should stay focused on delivering on the big vision.

What do you have to model to be successful in managing your first customers? Solve for getting them using, then using more, and don’t let them churn.

Very early in the life of your company your customers will be friends and former clients; these people will want you to succeed and will give your product more of a chance than the general market will. They will be more accepting of jankiness and bugs as long as you’re forthcoming and transparent about how you’re fixing them. My advice with early clients is always reply to them, no matter when they reach out. Be personal, a sincere apology or collective troubleshoot will go a long, long way with early clients who are in some cases as emotionally invested in your company as your are. Listen to their feedback and really take it in, they’ll be providing it to improve your product, not just to complain or ask for features specific to making their very unique task easier; that will come later. This group of customers will be immensely valuable for you because of the time they’ll give you when the product is not “ready” yet. Think of them as basically a focus group paying you to use your software. Remember:

• Never say no
• Listen, listen, listen
• Thank them often
• Apologize when you mess up, and mean it
• Get them promoted; any chance you have go to their office and show how your product is helping their team work better, while specifically highlight how well your buyer is doing, do it.

During this time, take the opportunity to start operationally modeling what you’re learning interacting with your first few customers so you can apply it to when you have 10 hires on the customer support team. At the point when the team is up to 10 they will work with customers not as invested in your success or as understanding, thus it is important to build a repeatable system which is both effective and representative of the tenants of how you want your customers to feel about interactions with your product / brand. Lay the groundwork for:

• Tone of interaction; this will go a long way. If you think customers are “annoying”, the fifth hire on your team will be calling them “assholes” and forwarding emails about how “dumb” they are. Don’t do it, customers are never bad, it’s your job to understand why they’re frustrated.
• The on-boarding journey: You’re 1 of 1, your team will not have had the same hours you had working through bug fixes or QAing product updates, thus the on-boarding process should not require knowledge of those battle scars to execute. Create a process which can be as simple as a deck to teach customers to use your software or as complex as a multi-week training and implementation regime. Whichever it is, ensure it is easily understandable and able to be completed by anyone on the team. If you do your job well, the team won’t have to do the painful things you did.
• Monitor Usage: you’ll need to understand how much your users are using the product. The non-friends and family clients will judge you on just what you sold them; if they don’t use it you will lose them. Give your team a way to not only see usage but understand what a “happy” level of usage is, then have them work with every client to get them to this level.

By the time you’re hiring the first manager for of the customer success team, the foundations for how you interact with customers should be in place; tone, journey, and what makes them “happy”. You will need to continue to revisit the process as the product improves and as market moves, but the core tenets and philosophies should be in place.

Next: Preparing for the 10th sales hire.