Adii Pienaar

The Lean Startup approach to creating new business has become massively popular amongst online entrepreneurs for one reason: it works. The Lean Startup methodology with regards to customer development (broadly) dictates that we can create better products (and thus business) through continuous learning via being in constant contact with our customers.

I believe that this approach works well, but only after you actually have a first version (whether it's MVP or more extensive) out in the wild. I've got a couple of cautions (which I've listed below), but it is summarized well by this well-known quote from Henry Ford:

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would've said faster horses."

Vivek Ravisankar has a nice post about this, where he explains how he stopped asking users which features they wanted to see in the product and instead asked them which problems they were facing. Doing that, he has enabled himself (or his team) to solve the problem in their own way. For Henry Ford this meant designing the Model T Ford, instead of trying to create faster horses.

Here's a couple of reasons why I'd suggest avoiding customer feedback prior to releasing version 1.0 of your product:

1. Confusion. Imagine this: you have identified a big problem and have an idea of how to solve this (which you've validated with your potential target market). Now you start talking to users about the features & specifics of your solution and they are just brainstorming like crazy, spewing out the one suggestion / request after the other. Problem is all of this is theoretical and based on assumptions, which makes your task of figuring out what should go into 1.0 very confusing. (This same process has much more value when you have a 1.0 out there and users can base feedback on actual, existing features.)
2. It distracts from your core strategy / vision. You're the entrepreneur & visionary here, which means you're in the best possible position to execute your vision. Trying to combine your vision with those of hundred other potential users is a challenging task at best, because you're likely to get 100 different visions. I'm not advocating naivety by just trusting your own vision and gut, but I'm suggesting caution here. Early criticism is like kryptonite to most entrepreneurs and this is likely to halt your motivation to get 1.0 done.
3. Users generally don't know what they want; much less so before version 1.0. This may sound incredibly condescending, but unless your users are experts in the same field as your product, they likely don't know what they want. I say this, because many people are like sheep when it comes to features: "I've heard I absolutely need X, Y & Z for my new website". But the truth in most of these instances is that someone is trying to make money and thus peddling superfluous features that most users won't ever need. Don't discount what your prospective users have to say, but do your own due diligence on every feature request and make sure you're not the one peddling the superfluous features.

I hate feeling like things are in limbo; especially in business. I guess this is a natural consequence of the fact that I'm not the most patient guy you're likely to ever meet.

At the moment, it feels like we're working on 4 / 5 of the biggest projects ever at WooThemes. And with release dates being very unclear, even though they're imminent, we're holding off on announcing the details of these projects to avoid having pie on our face if we miss promised launch dates.

These are the kind of projects that will change WooThemes and it will greatly influence our strategies moving forward. These aren't just the announcement of a couple of new features or just the addition of a new business segment. These truly are the kind of things that - as an entrepreneur - you get incredibly excited about.

The problem is that whilst we're "secretly" slogging away at wrapping up the final tasks before launching these projects, everything else seems insignificant and in limbo. We're still handling the routine stuff as well and making progress beyond just these projects, but it feels like announcing those things feels so inferior to the bigger fish that we are frying behind the scenes. The whole of WooThemes feels like a slow news day at present, even though it's probably the most exciting period of our history thus far...

How would you handle this kind of limbo?

I recently ran an extensive user survey at WooThemes to get some validation for ideas that we were toying with for a new marketing strategy. One of the aims of the new strategy is to increase customer lifetime value (and related metrics such as user engagement & user retention), and so we set out to gauge how happy our customers were at the moment (happier customers are more likely to spend more money with us).

To our satisfaction, almost 10% of our users actually completed the 5-minute survey and of those that completed the survey, 92% said that they were very happy with our products, technical support & customer service. 92% obviously means we're doing something right.

But I wanted to delve in deeper and I've slowly been getting in touch with every single user from the 8% that said they weren't very happy with us at the moment. I wanted too figure out what exactly we did to make them feel that way in the first place & how we could potentially rectify their situation or at least improve it for other customers in future.

In addition to speaking to the customers that actually responded, I also "investigated" the customers' records and the history of their interactions to get a holistic view of what happened in the past. From this, one thing stood out for me: most customers don't give you a second chance.

To elaborate, I found that most of the unhappy customers had one bad experience via our ticketing system / helpdesk and then just left. They didn't keep hammering on the ticket where they had the bad experience, heck they didn't even respond again. Neither did they e-mail us to "escalate" the matter.

This means that, that one shitty experience for the customer was never highlighted on our radar and we thus didn't know that the customer was unhappy. It also means that we never had the opportunity to prioritize that customer and fix the situation (in which case we possibly had a chance to keep them as a customer).

I know that we shouldn't have created an unhappy customer in the first place, but no company is perfect 24-7. Things slip through the cracks and off the radar every now & again...

What I know now though is that there is a small percentage of customers that will never give you an opportunity to rectify their situation and they will likely never be your customer again. 8% may not seem significant, but that's 8% that I'm not happy to lose.

Reading through Ben's post, from which I've extracted the above quote, I found myself nodding in agreement to most of what he said. The quote above made me stop reading though and I found myself unsure of whether I actually believed that.

Why did I consider myself an entrepreneur? Did I start a business to make money?

Regardless of my definition of success, I'd have to agree with that; I definitely didn't start a business not to make money. I know that I've never been able to motivate myself with the potential lure of money and that's not why I come to work every morning. But it would be an outright lie if I said I didn't believe that I would profit financially from starting my own business.

I think this borders on my opinion that the execution of any ideas includes the actual monetization thereof. I would definitely consider myself a failure had a I started a business - even if it was for non-financial reasons - and then I failed to profit from it.

More importantly though, I believe I'm an entrepreneur because I want to be involved with building sustainable businesses. There's obviously an element of "money" involved in that and to be sustainable one needs to be profitable, but the initial aim of creating a sustainable business versus making money sits more comfortably with me.

And once you have created something sustainable, the other "nice things" that Ben mentions (having fun, changing the world, disrupting an industry, creating jobs) comes into play: having a sustainable platform to explore, where money isn't the only consideration.

I'm the business guy over at WooThemes and a big part of my "job" is making sure that our marketing is firing on all cylinders. Taking care of the marketing for such a big business takes it toll, especially when you consider the amount of time it takes to interact with customers on a one-on-one basis (as most of you would agree that these interactions often provide the most value).

It is with that in mind, that I believe that marketing within a startup should be the whole team's responsibility, both as individuals and as a team. Here's a couple of ways in which I think the individuals on a team can contribute to the marketing effort of the mothership:

1. Blogging. If you have a company / team blog, get the whole team to blog and add their voice / opinion to the mix. I know there are many people that hate blogging and they should probably not be forced. But getting the odd blog post out of a team member is really valuable!
2. Interactions across social channels. Every member on your team obviously has their own following of friends, contacts and other interested parties. Having them tweet a link or publish a Facebook status about the company helps spread the marketing message to audiences to which you - as a company - would not necessarily have access.
3. Interacting with your community. I think there's a lot of value in having the whole team interacting with users via the comments on your blog, your forum or any other support structure. Having the team visible to your users increases their perception of how in touch your team is with user problems. Massive marketing win here.
4. Expert Profiles. In a way that almost combines the above three points, I truly believe that individuals should continue to build their individual social profiles, CV's and reputations online. They should be regarded as experts, which holds a significant advantage for your company. Users love to work with experts! So encourage team members to keep up their own graphic portfolio's or maintain a profile on GitHub if they're a developer. Don't try to own them; you employed every team member as an individual.