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CHAPTER
EVOLUTION

Say no by default

If I’d listened to customers,
I’d have given them a faster horse
.

—HENRY FORD

It’s so easy to say yes. Yes to another feature, yes to an overly optimistic deadline, yes to a mediocre design. Soon, the stack of things you’ve said yes to grows so tall you can’t even see the things you should really be doing.

Start getting into the habit of saying no—even to many of your best ideas. Use the power of no to get your priorities straight. You rarely regret saying no. But you often wind up regretting saying yes.

People avoid saying no because confrontation makes them uncomfortable. But the alternative is even worse. You drag things out, make things complicated, and work on ideas you don’t believe in.

It’s like a relationship: Breaking one up is hard to do, but staying in it just because you’re too chicken to drop the ax is even worse. Deal with the brief discomfort of confrontation up front and avoid the long-term regret.

Don’t believe that “customer is always right” stuff, either. Let’s say you’re a chef. If enough of your customers say your food is too salty or too hot, you change it. But if a few persnickety patrons tell you to add bananas to your lasagna, you’re going to turn them down, and that’s OK. Making a few vocal customers happy isn’t worth it if it ruins the product for everyone else.

ING Direct has built the fastest-growing bank in America by saying no. When customers ask for a credit card, the answer is no. When they ask for an online brokerage, the answer is no. When they ask if they can open an account with a million dollars in it, the answer is no (the bank has a strict deposit maximum). ING wants to keep things simple. That’s why the bank offers just a few savings accounts, certificates of deposit, and mutual funds—and that’s it.

Don’t be a jerk about saying no, though. Just be honest. If you’re not willing to yield to a customer request, be polite and explain why. People are surprisingly understanding when you take the time to explain your point of view. You may even win them over to your way of thinking. If not, recommend a competitor if you think there’s a better solution out there. It’s better to have people be happy using someone else’s product than disgruntled using yours.

Your goal is to make sure your product stays right for you. You’re the one who has to believe in it most. That way, you can say, “I think you’ll love it because I love it.”

Let your customers outgrow you

Maybe you’ve seen this scenario: There’s a customer that’s paying a company a lot of money. The company tries to please that customer in any way possible. It tweaks and changes the product per this one customer’s requests and starts to alienate its general customer base.

Then one day that big customer winds up leaving and the company is left holding the bag—and the bag is a product that’s ideally suited to someone who’s not there anymore. And now it’s a bad fit for everyone else.

When you stick with your current customers come hell or high water, you wind up cutting yourself off from new ones. Your product or service becomes so tailored to your current customers that it stops appealing to fresh blood. And that’s how your company starts to die.

After our first product had been around for a while, we started getting some heat from folks who had been with us from the beginning. They said they were starting to grow out of the application. Their businesses were changing and they wanted us to change our product to mirror their newfound complexity and requirements.

We said no. Here’s why: We’d rather our customers grow out of our products eventually than never be able to grow into them in the first place. Adding power-user features to satisfy some can intimidate those who aren’t on board yet. Scaring away new customers is worse than losing old customers.

When you let customers outgrow you, you’ll most likely wind up with a product that’s basic—and that’s fine. Small, simple, basic needs are constant. There’s an endless supply of customers who need exactly that.

And there are always more people who are
not
using your product than people who are. Make sure you make it easy for these people to get on board. That’s where your continued growth potential lies.

People and situations change. You can’t be everything to everyone. Companies need to be true to a
type
of customer more than a specific individual customer with changing needs.

Don’t confuse enthusiasm with priority

Coming up with a great idea gives you a rush. You start imagining the possibilities and the benefits. And of course, you want all that right away. So you drop everything else you’re working on and begin pursuing your latest, greatest idea.

Bad move. The enthusiasm you have for a new idea is not an accurate indicator of its true worth. What seems like a sure-fire hit right now often gets downgraded to just a “nice to have” by morning. And “nice to have” isn’t worth putting everything else on hold.

We have ideas for new features all the time. On top of that, we get dozens of interesting ideas from customers every day too. Sure, it’d be fun to immediately chase all these ideas to see where they lead. But if we did that, we’d just wind up running on a treadmill and never get anywhere.

So let your latest grand ideas cool off for a while first. By all means, have as many great ideas as you can. Get excited about them. Just don’t act in the heat of the moment. Write them down and park them for a few days. Then, evaluate their actual priority with a calm mind.

Be at-home good

You know what it feels like. You go to a store. You’re comparing a few different products, and you’re sold on the one that sounds like it’s the best deal. It’s got the most features. It looks the coolest. The packaging looks hot. There’s sensational copy on the box. Everything seems great.

But then you get it home, and it doesn’t deliver. It’s not as easy to use as you thought it’d be. It has too many features you don’t need. You end up feeling that you’ve been taken. You didn’t really get what you needed and you realize you spent too much.

You just bought an in-store-good product. That’s a product you’re more excited about in the store than you are after you’ve actually used it.

Smart companies make the opposite: something that’s at-home good. When you get the product home, you’re actually more impressed with it than you were at the store. You live with it and grow to like it more and more. And you tell your friends, too.

When you create an at-home-good product, you may have to sacrifice a bit of in-store sizzle. A product that executes on the basics beautifully may not seem as sexy as competitors loaded with bells and whistles. Being great at a few things often doesn’t look all that flashy from afar. That’s OK. You’re aiming for a long-term relationship, not a one-night stand.

This is as true for advertising as it is for in-store packaging or displays. We’ve all seen a TV ad for some “revolutionary” gadget that will change your life. But when the actual product arrives in the mail, it turns out to be a disappointment. In-media good isn’t nearly as important as at-home good. You can’t paint over a bad experience with good advertising or marketing.

Don’t write it down

How should you keep track of what customers want? Don’t. Listen, but then forget what people said. Seriously.

There’s no need for a spreadsheet, database, or filing system. The requests that really matter are the ones you’ll hear over and over. After a while, you won’t be able to forget them. Your customers will be your memory. They’ll keep reminding you. They’ll show you which things you truly need to worry about.

If there’s a request that you keep forgetting, that’s a sign that it isn’t very important. The really important stuff doesn’t go away.

CHAPTER
PROMOTION

Welcome obscurity

No one knows who you are right now. And that’s just fine. Being obscure is a great position to be in. Be happy you’re in the shadows.

Use this time to make mistakes without the whole world hearing about them. Keep tweaking. Work out the kinks. Test random ideas. Try new things. No one knows you, so it’s no big deal if you mess up. Obscurity helps protect your ego and preserve your confidence.

Retailers experiment with test markets all the time for this reason. When Dunkin’ Donuts thought about selling pizza, hot dogs, and other hot sandwiches, it test-marketed the products at just ten select locations.

Broadway shows also provide a great example of testing ideas on a small stage first. They routinely do a trial run in a smaller city before coming to New York. Testing out of town lets actors get some reps in front of a live audience before the show goes up in front of harsher critics and tastemakers.

Would you want the whole world to watch you the first time you do anything? If you’ve never given a speech before, do you want your first speech to be in front of ten thousand people or ten people? You don’t want everyone to watch you
starting
your business. It makes no sense to tell everyone to look at you if you’re not ready to be looked at yet.

And keep in mind that once you do get bigger and more popular, you’re inevitably going to take fewer risks. When you’re a success, the pressure to maintain predictability and consistency builds. You get more conservative. It’s harder to take risks. That’s when things start to fossilize and change becomes difficult.

If millions of people are using your product, every change you make will have a much bigger impact. Before, you might have upset a hundred people when you changed something. Now you might upset thousands. You can reason with a hundred people, but you need riot gear to deal with ten thousand angry customers.

These early days of obscurity are something you’ll miss later on, when you’re really under the microscope. Now’s the time to take risks without worrying about embarrassing yourself.