What Customers Mean to our Startup
Last week I had the honor of speaking at the “Engineers turned Entrepreneurs” panel at the 3 Day Startup Global Roundup. Having graduated as an Electrical Engineer and worked as a Software Engineer at IBM, I felt I perfectly fit the bill. Since I’ve been doing my own startups for the past couple of years, I got excited about the opportunity to share some of the wonderful-yet-painful lessons learned through this journey. What I didn’t expect was to leave with a realization that afterwards seemed beyond obvious…
For my startup, our customers are the reason why we are doing this.
As the panel progressed, with questions, anecdotes, suggestions, and answers flying all around, I noticed the same underlying thought in the room that I had before I took the leap into entrepreneurial life. The excitement, the allure of the startup, was mostly on building the product. Creating the technology, designing the solution, that’s what made the eyes of some of the attendees sparkle; something that immediately transported me to a few years back.
Coming from enterprise software, my experience had been in exactly that, building solutions. You contribute a piece of a puzzle, pass the puzzle to the next person, until eventually the complete work gets delivered to a client. By then, you are already working on another puzzle and your only connection with the customer is if you don’t get a support call, so you assume they are happy. And that’s unfortunate, that you have to assume. Because what I now know from living it every day, is that I don’t want to do this hard work for just building a solution. I grew from “product satisfaction” to “customer satisfaction”.
After the event ended and I started walking home, I checked to see if there were any responses in our weekly feedback survey we send to our customers. Here’s the screen-grab of one of them:
Someone taking the survey for the 3rd time, thanking that our company exists. Not with my first startup where we were gathering and (looking to) sell food data, or while getting my degree, and definitely not while working for IBM would I have experienced this. The drive to innovate on the product strengthens my company, but it is the customers that bring the drive to make it happen.
When things get tough, I read the notes we get every week from the people that order from us.
For most people, doing a startup is not easy. It tests your character, your personality, your ethics, your sleeping needs, etc. Of course, seeing revenue, growth, every metric pointing up gives you the sense of satisfaction that keeps stoking the fire. But at some point in the last three years, I realized what mostly fuels my days to endure the startup life was this: happy customers. More than that. It’s waking up and working hard not only for you, but for someone else, and knowing you are changing their lives. I don’t think it’s said enough in startup books/blogs/podcasts about how your continuously talk to your customers to improve your product, can also be the source of your greatest joy. You can get hung up on achieving “the perfect product”, which will never happen, but if your goal is improving somebody’s life every minute/day/week/month, you’ll feel accomplished every day.
Happy customers = Better product = Peaceful you
Sometimes building something without a handbook can feel overwhelming, especially for the perfectionists. You can clearly see it all in your head, the vision is there and it just needs to get materialized. Unfortunately, it might take more resources than you have (at best), because most likely it won’t be exactly how you imagine it. If you shift the onus of what makes your product great away from you and to your customers, not only will you build a better product, you’ll build a happier self.
When every week you get messages like these:
Your customers become so much more than just revenue. For us, they are our rock. They are the source of our drive and passion. Before, my goal was to make the flawless product, and I was never satisfied, now as a Full Fridge co-founder, my goal is to make the life of someone in Austin at least just a little bit better. And while there will always be stress from seasonality affecting your sales, securing leases, or even being 50% away from finalizing your fundraising, I just need one interaction with my customers to make it all worth it.
