On Customers: Just Say No, Or Yes, Or Maybe
Startups live in a reality distortion field all their own. Insulated by the post-it covered walls and whiteboard residue, members of early startup teams are able to remain singularly focused on developing something to ship — whether it’s the right thing or not doesn’t matter. Nothing else matters, everything else can wait.
Then something magical happens — they get their first user. Companies without customers are blank slates, blue oceans, green fields — choose your metaphor. Their only dependency is cash, so they can stay alive. Their isolation is a feature, not a bug.
With your first user, the distortion is lifted like a fog. Now every action rolls back up to real people, not the placeholder that we hold in our minds or map to personas. Real people have real ideas, problems, and frustrations — and they expected them to be addressed.
How a company responds to customers can be predictive to its success or failure. We can be one of three things:
- Reactive — we take the customer’s word as truth and respond inline
- Responsive — we accept and confirm the challenges, prioritizing it as required
- Resistant — we don’t accept their input and intentionally deflect it
While the appropriate response depends on the circumstances, and over-dependence on any of them is likely problematic.
Reactive
Reactive companies are quick to protect their newly kindled fire. It is easy to give weight to any particular customer based on their influence or value to the company. Smart users, of course, are also aware of this dynamic and can readily wield it against you.
Some problems are obvious and need immediate attention. The challenge is that every customer will be important, so everything can’t have equal weight. If every problem is given instant attention, there isn’t room for anything else to happen — including thinking about all the things that you’re doing.
Reactive businesses eventually wind up with a patchwork of features — the knobs on knobs problem.
Responsive
Responsive companies understand that every interaction is part of a lasting experience. Customers often find themselves in frustrating circumstances, some of our creation and many completely of their own — both of which become our responsibility.
Companies that invest early in customer success gain the advantage in that both response time and response philosophy have time to form and iterate. The collection of insights and macros that help manage customer expectations is priceless and only possible through constant interaction and negotiation.
Responsive businesses keep their cool under pressure, but can also quickly succumb to pattern blindness — request volume is not the only proxy for necessity.
Resistant
Resistant companies usually fall into 3 categories — visionaries, leaders or idiots.
Visionary companies are on a mission to attack the status quo and will often find themselves having to intentionally sidestep existing users attempts to re-align with their comfort zone. Visionary companies, of course, run the real risk of being wrong, or, more subtly, missing the small insights that actually add up to make the difference.
Leading companies have the scale on their side. Any particular request has to be weighted against the whole, generally allowing a “no” to be acceptable as it’s impossible to justify. Leaders also, however, can suffer from the hubris of success and isolation. Lacking real competition, these companies can also find themselves choosing their own destiny at the expense of empathy for the customer. Leadership is not vision, per se.
Idiots, well, they’re idiots. These companies are usually driven by extremely strong personalities coupled with widespread micro management. This stew does not yield good broth. Instead, it bewilders itself from the market itself, unable to accept the realities on the other side of the wall. Perseverance is a positive attribute all the way up until it becomes obstinance.
It doesn’t matter how big or small your company is, it’s possible to act this way or all these ways and not even know it. Too often, the problem is discrete and unnamed. Over time, however, those on the front lines realize just what they are suffering through and the challenges it poses.
The next time you say no, consider a pivot, or feel your blood pressure rising — it’s likely a good time to take stock of how often you’re leveraging one posture over another.
There’s no right mix, just a healthy one.
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Gregarious Narain is a serial entrepreneur and product strategist. A reformed designer and developer, he writes on his experiences as a founder, strategist, and father on the regular. Connect with him on LinkedIn, follow on Facebook, or say hi on Twitter.
