Hierarchy of needs — business and product advice from a two-year-old

I have a two year old daughter. One thing that continues to amaze me is how she represents our most basic selves. For example, the only thing she wanted on Day Zero was survival. She doesn’t care about achieving a spot on a leaderboard, or making a sales quota. She just wants food, warmth, mom. That’s obvious though. We all know we’d throw everything away to satisfy our survival.

But what comes next? I think we forget. And instead, we focus on helping people with things far above where they really are on a hierarchy of needs.

Let’s look at a few things I’ve found non-obvious that came from watching her.

“Amanda can do it all by herself”

We were having some decent success at potty training. But got stuck. Until she started a daycare surrounded with other kids and friends. One day she came home telling us that her friend at school can, “use the potty all by herself.” And from there on, she was focused on accomplishing this thing.

She craves belonging and connecting with her peers. It’s not enough for mom and dad to show her. She needs to learn from people who reflect her.

We worry about the poor decisions peer pressure induces.

And much worse of course.

But I think we forget how beneficial we can be by tapping into the power of the peer group.

Usually our first stab at trying is to stick a testimonial or two on our homepages. Though it befuddles me how rare that still seems to be. I review dozens of sites of people looking for jobs and needing feedback on their portfolios. 9 out of 10 forget to mention anyone saying anything nice about them.

At Draft, software I created to help people write better, I didn’t stop at just the homepage, I stuck testimonials all along the funnel trying to convert customers. Here’s the signup page:

Why let folks leak at signup? Show them their peers got past this.

Basecamp is taking testimonials to a new level.

Not just 1 or 2 or 3 nice things from peers. Thousands.

It’s also not just about marketing and showing testimonials. A huge success Jason Fried, the founder of Basecamp, has had recently is their Way to Work conference.

Jason opens up about how Basecamp itself gets work done. Here’s one small business showing other small businesses how they’ve achieved what they’ve achieved.

It’s a powerful lever, and it’s completely underutilized.

“No, I wanna do it!”

One thing you realize quickly about toddlers is that they don’t want your help. But they do. But they don’t. But they do. But they don’t :) Try to zip up her sweatshirt? You have a death wish. Unless of course she asks. Which she will, when, most likely, she gets stuck.

Here’s a person who can barely feed herself, and the very next thing on her list of needs is independence.

The lesson from my daughter shows me we need to be very delicate in how we attempt to help others. We don’t want to be neglectful, but we also have to be careful not to break her powerful will to accomplish this on her own.

When I get a new camera, the first thing I do is try to turn it on and take a picture. I don’t want the manual smothering me and trying to take my hand.

But when I often sign up for new software trying to “onboard” me, the manual jumps in my face and tries to steer me to this button and that page, “here do it like this.”

In software I think the balance lies in letting people get stuck on day one exploring a bit. Don’t try to get it all right immediately. But make sure they have all the outlets they can find to reach for a hand. Let people bump into a few things. But don’t smother them with help. Use something like a drip campaign to share subtle clues and resources over time.

Find the right balance, and you’ll see happiness and your corresponding retention rate go up.

“The pink one!”

Brand new humans are obsessed with choice. Even before she could put clothes on herself, she was making very strong decisions about what colors she wanted on her body.

We often forget how powerful it is to give people the ability to make even the smallest of personal choices.

One potential re-design I’ve fooled with at Highrise, the simple CRM software company I manage, is to make the entire site much whiter — remove most of the color except for avatars.

But as we researched how our customers use Highrise, something really surprised me: how many people choose a different header color than the default.

People crave putting their own stamp of personality on the things they use. Even if it’s just picking one of a few color choices for their software.

Basecamp nails this allowing customers to rename the tools of their latest app.

You probably aren’t making it a priority to give people the ability to rename the choices you’ve already spent tons of time making. But it’s funny how often I hear from folks when I talk to them about Highrise: “Oh Deals sound exactly like that I need, but can I call them ‘Leads’?”, or “Cases look great, can I rename them ‘Projects’?”

Giving people the ability to make choices like this is fundamentally important. And I think we can to do an even better job with that at Highrise.

There are plenty more lessons from watching this new human grow up and explore the world with fresh eyes. I hope those few help in your own product and business decisions. I’m sure I’ll have more.

P.S. Hope you are having a wonderful start to the holidays! I’m extremely thankful you’ve picked something I’ve written to spend time on today. :) Have an awesome rest of the week.

You should follow my YouTube channel, where I share more about how history, psychology, and science can help us create better businesses. And if you find yourself overwhelmed while starting your own small business or handling customer support, check out how Highrise can help!