THE DREAM IN ACTION

I’ve been thinking a lot about customer development over the past few months. It’s a new way of thinking as a company, it’s a new way of approaching marketing, product building, and customer service. It’s changing, or maybe already has changed, the way companies think about the relationships with their customers, and it’s never been easier to employ this strategy than in early stage technology companies. And that’s exciting.

One of the smartest pieces of startup advice I’ve heard in a while was Andy Rachleff of Benchmark Capital saying, “The most important thing to look for in a founder: Authenticity”. (thanks to @TristanWalker for pointing me to this quote) The same goes for evaluating a startup as a whole, is the corporate philosophy of the company true to it’s actions? Is the company authentic about what they tell customers and partners? Take Comcast for example: They say they are listening to customers, they have a large team scanning twitter to make sure that customers voices are heard, but they sure as hell don’t seem to be listening to customer feedback about their phone support, or cable and internet packages. In short, it’s terrible. They’re not using customer development to drive their product offerings. True customer development focused startups make this a priority, and that helps them brand themselves as authentic.

Companies that that make learning a priority are exciting and they’re the type of companies I want to work with.

Today I was in a mtg about how GE will work to reach out to potential job candidates. Surprisingly, the recruitment practices are on the cutting edge of listening and reaching out to candidates and meeting them on the platforms that they use. They’ve abandon the “they’ll come to us” mentality that will fail every time. I don’t care if it’s a 2 person startup or a Fortune 2 behemoth, you have to listen and engage in customer feedback at the customers level or you will no be able to accurately road map your product.

Similarly, with the work I’ve been doing with Foursquare the team is very interested in the user feedback. To the point that they are intimately aware that the game must develop with user feedback in mind for it to remain compelling. With the recently inclusion of deals ‘in-game’ it’s only become more valuable for users. In the past it was just fun, now Foursquare is benefiting users financially, and that has staying power.

LEARNING companies solve problems quickly while remaining true to their strategy. LEARNING companies keep users and customers happy even when they don’t give them everything they want. LEARNING companies focus on long term value and they don’t let their products get stale. LEARNING companies measure the metric of user/customer engagement and realized that there is valuable data to be measured there. LEARNING companies listen.

If there is one thing that will be consistent with my career, I want to work for LEARNING companies.

image via flickr