Your customer is the bottom line

There are many approaches towards building a healthy startup business that will take off, grow end endure during both good and more challenging times. But honestly I cannot think of a better one than to treat your customer as the bottom line.

The math behind it is simple: Every time you delight a customer by solving her problem and giving her a delightful experience more than worth the money, she’s paying, she will stick around. And not only that. She will also be advocating your product and brand to those she knows or comes in contact with who are experiencing the same sort of challenges as the ones, you helped her solve in the first place.

When I think about it there is actually no real viable long term alternative to this approach. Of course there are numerous other ways you can optimize for growth, gain initial traction and stretch your available funds to last a bit longer, but over the longer term? Don’t think so.

The problem with a lot of more tactical approaches towards building your bottom line is that they are inherently short term. They may put a band on the sore or enable you to play through the pain barrier, but they don’t fundamentally cure or fix anything.

You will always be in the need to come up with new approaches, new tricks, new creative ways of doing things, and chances are that the positive effects of these things will vane over time. And then you’ll really just be playing catch. All. The. Time.

So focus on the customer and delighting her. Make that the primary outcome of everything you do in your startup. If you’re looking at doing something that cannot be directly related towards a positive contribution to this outcome, think hard about whether you need to do it. Be tough on yourself. And eliminate all necessary distractions in order to focus on – you guessed it – delighting the customer.

If you’re looking for proof that the approach works, look no further than to Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos. He is notorious for always wanting to put the customer and customer satisfaction first. Often to the extreme and – sometimes, I would argue – to the detriment of his own team. That’s more than dedication. That’s obsession. But the results speak for themselves.

Of course your not Jeff Bezos, and your startup isn’t Amazon. But there are still things that you can do in your everyday operation to put the delighted customer left, front and center of everything you do.

You can start by really taking customer success and support seriously. Stop looking at it as a support feature, you need to have but don’t really invest in. Invest heavily in it. Put some of your best people there. Give them the mandate to truly listen to customers and feedback, and allow them time and space to turn that feedback into thoughtful suggestions for things your startup can do on the product side in order to further delight customers.

That’s not to say that you should just go with any whim and whichever customer yells the highest about something they may think they want or need or something they want you to remove. Far from it. But it is about keeping an ear to the ground and maintain a balanced approach to listening in that will help synthesize the most crucial nuggets back into both your product and everything surrounding it.

Your product will most likely be all the better for it. It will delight customers more and help attract new ones. And it will fuel the success of your business and your bottomline in ways that nothing else can.

(Photo by saeed karimi on Unsplash)

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