How well do you know your customers?
We owners of Web-based businesses love to gloat about how many customers/users we have. But do we really know any of them? Sure, we can calculate their lifetime value and figure out how many times they’ve logged in over the past 90 days, what brand of mobile phone they use, and how much they spend a month. But we wouldn’t know who they were if they walked in our front doors.
John
on 08 Jul 13Jason == Iconoclast
Andrew
on 08 Jul 13Tools for getting to ‘know your customers’ has become big business. But really how can a tool do that for you. Human to Human contact either via face-toface, email, phone or even facebook is really the only true way to get to know who your customers are. Everything else it just segmentation and thin facades. Great post Jason I hope you can influence more people in the software industry to get out of our desks.
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ecbp
on 08 Jul 13Well put Jason, we tend to forget there’s a human (just like us.) behind every number.
GregT
on 08 Jul 13Are you going to follow this ‘high touch’ idea in perpetuity, or is it more like a focus group to define the product and so forth?
It’s hard to see how it could not be the latter, and even dinosaurs like IBM and Microsoft do that. Of course, the CEO doesn’t to it personally the way you intend to.
Anthony
on 08 Jul 13I come from a design thinking background where the mentality is to get to know your users deeply as you design for them (more physical product than web focused). I’d be curious to see how this could apply for the web as well. Even for people creating physical products, it’s hard to know the customer as you scale. One company that does a really good job of that is Harley – they send executives all over the world to meet riders and reconnect with the roots of what it means to own one of their motorcycles. Is there a way to do that for the web?
Jason Fried
on 08 Jul 13“Are you going to follow this ‘high touch’ idea in perpetuity, or is it more like a focus group to define the product and so forth?”
I don’t know. It’s how we’re doing it today so that’s what we’re focused on. If it becomes unsustainable or not helpful at a certain point, we’ll make adjustments. Right now it’s fantastic though.
Juan Ruiz
on 08 Jul 13Jason,
This one reminds me of this post from Derek Sivers “Human Intervention as a Competitive Advantage”
http://sivers.org/hi
Cheers
This discussion is closed.