Our Startup’s Secret Weapon
June 8, 2011
Looking back at the last 1.5 yrs since we started Performable, one thing is very clear: the single best decision we ever made was to make customer service everyone’s job.
Everyone on the team is assigned a day on our support calendar when they answer the phones, reply to all emails and proactively reach out to customers to see if they can be helpful.ย This customer service focus has grown from a company mantra to a company religion. Obsessive customer focus shapes everything we do, from how our dev team builds our product to how we recruit new team members.
Yesterday my co-founder, Josh Porter, gave a great talk at a MassTLC SaaS event that shares our greatest secret weapon, customer driven management.
We’re always looking to do a better job. If we missed anything please let me know below in the comments and we’ll send you an awesome Performable t-shirt.
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Building the Salesforce.com of Marketing
March 28, 2011
At Performable we are building the Salesforce.com of Marketing.
Along the way we have expanded our service to better meet the needs of our customers. Lots of startup people viewed this evolution as “pivots“, a term made famous by Eric Ries and the Lean Startup movement.
I didn’t really see our evolution as a series of “pivots” but I can see how others saw them as such.
At SXSW this year I presented the following Case Study on Performable and our early evolution:
Please let me know if you found this presentation useful.
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True Startup Competition
March 21, 2011
Last weekend I was at SxSW to give a talk on Startup Pivots at the Lean Startup event held there. It was an excellent event put on by Eric Ries and Dave McClure. All the stars of the game were there; I was honored to be included.
I have been trying to decrease the number of startup events that I speak at and attend this year so I can focus all my energy on Performable. Despite this I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to share tacos and margaritas with my friends down in Austin.
While I was there I experienced something that has happened to me many times before. It always goes down like this:
Stranger: (walks up to me cold) “Hi, I’m XYZ from startup ABC.”
Me: “Hello, nice to meet you.”
Stranger: “I’m a competitor of yours.”
Me: “No, you are not my competitor.”
At this point the stranger becomes really confused, it is clear that he has been following the daily changes at my company, so he believes he has a good handle on what we are working on.
So why don’t I see that startup as a competitor?
I believe a startup only has one real competitor, indifference.
People not caring enough about your product is your true competition, not some other startup.
Please stop sweating other startups in your market. (Stop reading Techcrunch please.) They do not matter. Always solve for making people care.
Who are your competitors?
Note: I wrote this post on my phone so please excuse any typos or errors.
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