Company Cycle, Customer Cycle, and then… others’ cycles

Greg Prudhommeaux

Published in

NextStep Hub for Entrepreneurs in Asia

4 min readMar 3, 2016

Launching something new is challenging. No surprise there.

One of the very difficult thing to deal with is everybody’s points of views.

It has been well accepted now that if you have an idea, you have to share it with others. Let’s say it’s healthier.

Instead of keeping it for yourself, afraid that anyone could just drop whatever they are doing to run back home, steal your idea and start building it in your back (If it happens, then it means the idea was probably not that good).

But when you share your thoughts, your ideas, the situations you are struggling with, seeking for advices, well you pretty much get what you asked for… tones of different points of views.

Now, here are the Million dollars questions : Should you listen to all of them? How do you sort them out? Should you stick to your guts?

At the end, I tend to think that the problem is not really if you should listen to it or not, because well, you pretty much should. Each of those points of views likely represent the voice of a potential customer of yours.

Now, are each of them, actual potential customers that you are trying to focus on at this point?

Company Cycle vs Customer Cycle

Last January, Rob Han from PurpleSpread.com was delivering a workshop about “How to find your Brand Identity?” for NEXTSTEP. Beyond the great tools that Rob delivered to help the audience with their branding, one of the last tip he gave was : “There is a “company cycle”, and there is a “customer cycle”. Be slow”.

Put simply, it means that you are working on your project everyday, for many hours every single day. You see your brand, you live it, you think about it when falling a sleep, when taking a shower and see it in everything you do,… and you will get frustrated about it.

But your clients are on a different pace. Think about it.How often are they in contact with your brand, your products, etc… ? Definitely not as much as you are.

So Rob’s advice is to be slow. Don’t go through drastic changes too often, too fast. It’s not because you are tired of what you have at that moment, because you see it everyday, that your customers are as well tired of it.

When launching the project, you, the entrepreneur, have your vision. You are picturing a form of development and the different steps to get there. Each of those steps, being appart of a certain amont of time, and depending on customers’ responses, traction, competition, probably some kind of seasonality depending on what you are doing, and where in the world you are doing it.

Should you be listening?

If your marketing is good, customers will already picture your company being at a certain stage, however, it’s a pure “Fake it, til you make it”-type of situation. Your supporters, people from who you are seeking advices, are also believing that things are going fast, or at least faster than they actually are, and definitely way faster than you believe they are going. Now you see the frustration I was talking about earlier, don’t you?

So basically, customer acquisition and transformation are slower. You, the man behind all of this, are defining a certain speed to how things should be moving on and, let’s say, that you will always have some of your supporters that will be thinking that you are doing it wrong, too slow, too pricey, too expensive, too low, too high,…

When running the show, you have a sense of what is right or wrong for the project. You know when you will be reaching the other levels that will bring you closer to the targeted goal.

At least you are the one that knows.

Or, well, you should be the one, that whole thing is yours, right?

Maybe you only believe you know,… wait, hold on, do you still believe it?