Customers Deserve Empathy

Yesterday my friend Chris Hogg tweeted out a fantastically researched and written piece by Bill Gurley called On the Road to Recap that echoes so many of the things that wildly speculative / unicorn chasing funding has had on companies and investors. It’s all true but oddly I was a little angry at something totally left out and I tweeted this:

Later that day, Bryce Roberts picked up that spark and wrote A Notable Omission. It’s a great piece on how customers reel when we unicorn chase and force startups in to insane growth-at-all-costs mode. Bryce’s writing on the subject is expansive and refreshing, even more so because he’s himself a VC who is amplifying a new (but maybe old?) way of thinking about tech, and testing something new with indie.vc.

Bryce writes:

Perhaps the answer to the Unicorn dilemma isn’t to take the down round or the dirty term sheet. Maybe, just maybe, the answer is to break the addiction to the fundraising markets that worship at the altar of maximizing shareholder value and consider customers an afterthought, if they are considered at all.

Yeah, great idea.

Taking it a step farther.

In academia, there’s a slow change in the language being used for “human subjects” research. It’s a substitution of the word “subject” for “participant” and it carries an important reminder that there are real people who are participating in an investigator’s experiment. There’s a humility to it. Someone might be very sick, they may have a real need, and they may join a study and devote time and energy, all the while randomized to the control group where they’re getting the placebo.

If you’re running a startup, you’re running many experiments. Your customers are your participants, and if you’re doing it right, understanding their needs is key to your success. You might be A/B testing new features, new pricing, or trying to get them to help you figure out your market. You’re collecting data on them, you might even be talking to some of them on the phone or sending them mockups, or asking them to up-vote potential new features.

How we lost empathy

We’ve become comfortable with the cold divide of “them” and “us”. It’s nothing new. We file a Delaware incorporation, take shelter behind a fictitious business name, and some take funding on Day-0 with all the wrong strings attached. Amazing ideas are doomed to trample their customers for hockey-stick-or-broke growth before the first day of engaging with them has even begun.

Another great observation this morning on the glaring omission of customers from the startup principles:

To which Jordan Elpern-Waxman astutely observes:

It’s time for empathy

We owe it to our customers to call them “participants”.

I challenge anyone today building a startup: Build a great company by putting empathy for your customers as the cornerstone of your culture. If you empathize with the problems your customers face you’re engaged, you’re listening, you care, you’re involved. Find a problem for a group of people where you believe in what they do. Empathy will drive you to help them succeed, and it’ll help you succeed.

It’s good for you too

Great products and services will just naturally spill out of empathy.

• Your fundraising strategy will become clearer. Actually, you might decide not fundraise, or you might exercise restraint not to over-fundraise.
• Your employees will rally around the vision.
• You’ll earn the trust of your customers, and they’ll be back to support and advocate for your product or service.
• You might even sleep better at night.

I’m going to keep building empathy in to everything we do here at Fitabase. I love what our customers are doing, and I love helping them do it better. I started this company because I was disappointed by the quality of tools researchers had to collect and measure health data — I felt their pain. Empathy.