Big Companies Don’t Want to Do Better

I’m writing this on a United plane, on the tarmac. We’re grounded because O’Hare International isn’t accepting any incoming flights; they are, however, still letting departing flights depart, which means I’m going to miss my connection. This, the United customer service agent would like me to understand, is beyond their control. Lucky for them. Now they don’t have to pay for my hotel room.

This flight home comes at the end (or, God help us, possibly in the middle) of a torturous flying-for-work experience, which kicked off three days ago with a 3-hr delay en route to Boston, and which has, today, been followed by two delays, a terrible recommendation from a United agent that I rebook, the loss of the business-class seat I paid for, yet another delay — make that two — make that three — and finally boarding, praying to take off, seeing the doors to the aircraft close… and seeing them open once again, without us having moved an inch.

I have been stared at with poorly masked disinterest by someone wearing a customer service badge.

I have watched people who requested an upgrade to business class take the spot I actually paid for in business class. (I know it’s first-world but fuuuuuck.)

I have been offered a — wait for it — cup of water while sitting on the tarmac for 45 minutes.

With unimaginable empathy, I have been reminded by the flight attendants, “We want to get home as much as you do.”

And I have asked myself — as you’re asking yourself now — “Why on earth did you fly United?”

But let’s not kid ourselves. Every airline is evil except the little ones. If you need to take an international flight, you need to fly on the devil’s backside or be rich enough to avoid him (aka fly Virgin, or so I’ve heard).

Do You Have to Try Once You’re Over a Certain Size?

A hundred thousand years ago — or eight — the government of Canada (ahem our taxes ahem) bailed out Air Canada, possibly the second-worst airline on the planet. They gave a company a billion dollars — or, put differently, every single Canadian gave Air Canada about $33.

Bailouts are not rare for large companies. Here’s a list of American bailouts

Small businesses and startups don’t have anything resembling that kind of parachute. We don’t get to look forward to a big influx of cash — some deus ex machina rebirth strategy — if we fuck up our businesses. We fuck up and we shut down or get booted by the board. Maybe we go apply for a job at General Motors (who still owes the American taxpayers $11B). We certainly don’t get a bailout.

And that’s fine.

We’re not asking for one.

But what would it be like if big companies tried nearly as hard as the little companies do? If they had to try? Consumers would be happier. But perhaps there’d be a downside. Perhaps it would make it harder for small businesses to show their edge and become medium-sized businesses. United’s shittiness creates a space for a really good airline to gain share.

The Wondrous Thing About Competitors That Aren’t Really Trying

I’m flying home from Wistiafest, which was a terrific event. The prevailing theme across nearly every talk at Wistiafest was this: build a brand and business around a mission. Too often differentiation happens at the feature level; the opportunity is when it happens at the business level. Visualize a tree: the leaves are our features, and the roots are our business. If we can differentiate at the root level, we can grow an entirely different species of tree.

They say every business has approx 16 competitors (or that’s what Joanna Lord said in her talk on Tuesday, and I trust her because she’s brilliant). It just so happens that Airstory has, among our 16 competitors, Google, Dropbox and Microsoft.

Those are scary names for any business.

They’re particularly scary for a 5-person scrappy upstart. How scrappy do you have to be to gain even a smidgen of market share against some of the heaviest hitters in tech? It’s interesting to ask that very question while sitting in the audience of Wistiafest, the event run by the video hosting service Wistia, which has managed to thrive even as YouTube and Vimeo have added private video hosting to their suites. The team at Wistia has woken to the bad news that their biggest competition has entered their space, and they’ve more than survived it.

Users have stayed with Wistia. I had a chat with Wistia cofounder Chris Savage about exactly this — I don’t have details to share (nor would I) save that, when faced with the chance to jump ship in favor of hosting with a Google-owned property, Wistia users stuck and stick with Wistia.

Just because Google can afford to do anything — and to take the scrappy upstarts out of play — doesn’t mean they’ll actually succeed. How many problems can you honestly throw money at? Money is so rarely the answer. If it were, Wistia would be out of business and people like us would be hosting our videos with YouTube’s private hosting services. YouTube has more money. YouTube has more resources. But we’re not switching to them.

Google has more money and resources than we do at Airstory.

So does Microsoft. So does Dropbox.

They’re also concerned with and distracted by things that we don’t need to think about. We have no self-driving cars competing for a speck of our attention. We get to build a single solution for a target market.

Certainly there are businesses that will not want to use Airstory until it’s got huge backing or crazy revenues. In a demo a few weeks back, I showed the content team at a tech company how Airstory could simplify their workflows and help them actually hit more deadlines; the demo ended with the middle manager — not the writers — asking me why we weren’t funded. It wasn’t enough that we were self-funded and doing reasonably well.

But what really stuck with me was this: not one of the content creators on the call was able to make a case for their team to use Airstory. (That’s clear because, well, that team is not using Airstory today.) They knew the features and how Airstory would make their lives better. But they didn’t have a compelling enough reason — enough of a push from within — to say, “Forget that Airstory is indie. We should use Airstory because they get us in ways Word doesn’t.”

That didn’t happen.

It didn’t happen because we haven’t given content creators, journalists, etc anything bigger than features and benefits. We haven’t shared our mission with them. And it’s truly in our mission that we can differentiate — that we stand a chance of speaking to our audience and forming a real connection with them. That’s the wondrous thing about having enormous competitors: they don’t care as much as you do. The big guys are solving for shareholders, employees and customers; we’re solving for just two of those three.

Middle Managers Like Funded Companies. Doers Like Companies That Make Them Feel Something.

The vast majority of the attendees of Wistiafest were in the video production and creative space. The people that buy most into Wistia may not be the higher-ups in an organization. Not the people managers. If the attendees of Wistiafest are any representation of the whole of Wistia’s userbase, it’s the people in charge of video content that find, adopt, love, stick with, recommend and in-every-way support Wistia.

Wistia has made business video production human.

Airstory will do the same for business writing. We’ll power changemakers. That is the decision I’ve found myself coming to, as I write from my Chicago hotel room. I missed the connection back home. All the airport hotels were booked up, so I’m a 40-minute cab ride away from O’Hare. I’ve got a little over 5 hours of sleep ahead of me before it’s back to the airport and praying for my flight to actually happen.

Somehow, I’m optimistic.

I’ve had two realizations in the last 12 hours of disastrous travel (which has made these hours far less disastrous).

One, we’re all in this together. Honestly, no point in my getting worked up about the customer service agent, even if she seems horribly ill-suited for her role. We’re in it together.

And two, the big companies are doing the minimum. Which means the opportunity for us is huge. Our naïveté, our guts, our small size and our willingness to go foolishly out on a limb for our customers — it’s all the stuff that the big guys don’t have and that just might carry us all the way. What’s not to be optimistic about?