Kevin Hale, co-founder of Wufoo which is an online form builder that helps you create contact forms, online surveys, and simple payment forms talked about the products that users loved. First of all, the growth depends on two concepts or variables: conversion rate and churn.
The best way to get to $1 billion is to focus on the values that help you get that first dollar to acquire that first user. If you get that right, everything else will take care of itself.
The most important thing is to build something that people just wanted to use. We wanted a product that people wanted to love, that people wanted to have a relationship with. To do this we can use two metaphors which are acquiring new users as if we are trying to date them and existing users as if they are in a successful marriage. Human beings are relationship-manufacturing creatures. r people who are very good at product is that they discover so many other moments and make them memorable: the first email you ever get, what happens when you got your first login, the links, the advertisements, the very first time you interacted with customer support.
There’s a big problem with how everyone starts up their company or builds up their engineering teams. There’s a broken feedback loop there. Before launch, it is a time of bliss, Nirvana, and opportunity.
A way of creating high-quality software, need to inject some values like responsibility, accountability, humility, and modesty. We call this SDD (Support Driven Development). A great example is Kayak. They installed a red customer support phone line in the middle of the engineering floor, and it would just ring with customer support calls. Well, after the second or third time that the phone rings, and the engineer get the same problem, they stop what they’re doing, they fix the bug, and they stop getting phone calls about it. It’s a way of having QA in a sort of nice, elegant solution.
John Gottman talks about the reasons for marriage break-ups (loss of existing customers) include criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling. He calls them the Four Horsemen. Criticism is when users start complaining and criticizing you for not listening to them. Defensiveness, you see this all the time especially in companies, as they get older. But stonewalling, this is something I see happening with startups all the time. You get a bunch of customer support calls coming in, and you just think, “I don’t need to answer, I don’t need to respond.” That act of not even getting back to them is one of the worst things you can do, and it’s probably some of the biggest causes of churn in the early stages of startups.
There’s an article that was put out by the Harvard Business Review several years ago by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema and in it they talk about the discipline of market leaders. They say there’s only three ways that you achieve market dominance,
- best price – focus on logistics, e.g. Wal-Mart and Amazon.
- best product – focus on R&D, e.g. Apple.
- best overall solution – being customer intimate e.g. all luxury brands follow.
The third one is the only one that everyone can do at any stage of their company. It requires almost no money to get started with it. It usually just requires a little bit of humility and some manners.
In conclusion, it is necessary to build a product that costumers really love and use. You should always follow customer feedback and always keep in touch with users.
Gayane Sahakyan's Personal Blog 