This is why we think it’s our job to 100% of the time put community interests ahead of corporate interests.
We feel that there are enough people in the world that are concerned about that corporate stuff. It seems that everyone we talk to these days asks about ‘the enterprise’ or ‘the bottom line’. Yep. Last time we checked, a whole world of people were taking care of that end of things.
We love our clients. We think they are awesome and want them to do very very well. In fact, we want them to be big successes.
So, we totally ignore their corporate interests, technological limitations and funder concerns.
“Your slow performance is the number one reason that your customers are leaving.”
“But we can’t afford to buy new servers.”
“Your slow performance is the number one reason that your customers are leaving.”
“The reason your developer network is dead is because you put too many limitations on your API usage.”
“But our investors want us to keep it secure and tight track of who is using it.”
“The reason your developer network is dead is because you put too many limitations on your API usage.”
“Your user experience is horrendous. Bloggers all over the web are talking about it.”
“Well, that is just not priority right now. We have to get the next release of features out.”
“Your user experience is horrendous. Bloggers all over the web are talking about it.”
It’s not that we are a broken record. It’s that we sometimes have to drive home that customer feedback unheeded because of business interests will lead to the end of the business. Without customers, you will have none of the issues above. You will have no company.
So, in essence, ignoring your bottom line, your technological constraints and your panicked investors is the best thing anyone can do for your business.

4 Comments
bloody refreshing. it’s nailing the boring fundamentals that often make comapnies successful. the friendster article in the times provided insight on that: it was too concerned with solving the big sexy problems, when all customers wanted was to load a page in less than 30 seconds!
kareem
I’m also trying to swing the focus over to customers too, good representation.
It’s great how the web is opening a dialogue in near real time for this power exchange to occur.
Ultimatly, the companies that get this will succeed.
Magnificent position regarding customer needs… Please post a number of articles which describe concrete example of this in action on the part of your team and your clients.
Good suggestion Sheamus…we will definitely be doing that!
4 Trackbacks/Pingbacks
[...] Tara does a nice job of describing the root difference about understanding the new marketing. I like the point about going past the client, right to the clients’ clients. It’s time to tip the scales, I think. I wrote a little post over at the CA Blog about our core philosophy and why we are more concerned with our clients’ clients than our clients. In a world that conspires against the ‘consumer’ (’buy our stuff and shut up’ and ‘we care about you, really, okay we don’t, but we’ve paid a lot of money for this creative, so that you will think that, when we really should have put the money into replacing those crappy parts or empowering customer service to help you’), we are betting the bank on consulting our clients in the other direction. [...]
Heart-care for our customers ……
I’m moderating a round table on Social Media tomorrow at the Digital Marketing Conference in Toronto. So I’ve been thinking about what people might want to talk about. But first, I realised, we need a good working definition of “Social…
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[...] This is why we promote OpenID to all of our clients — as each one adds support for OpenID, all of our client’s clients (our real customers) can then log in and share their accounts across the services that our clients are building. This is a fundamental key to the non-zero sum economics that we preach! People like flexibility, they like control over their data and they like to be in charge of their identity and its destiny. That’s just good business. And the more that we decentralize identity and authentication services, the closer that control moves to the individual. [...]
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