A few years ago, I was scrolling Insta and came across a delicious looking pizza. Arguably, every single pizza slice looks delicious in the right light. It’s pizza after all. But the friend who posted the story is kind of a food snob, so I made a mental note to order from that pizza joint next time I ordered food. Friday came and I ordered that pizza. Excited, I opened the box and that signature aroma made me drool. I got the first slice and yeah, it tasted like heaven. And something else, there was some handwriting on the inside of the box: “Hey Alberto! Thanks for choosing us. We hope you enjoy it” signed with their name and Instagram handle. What a nice touch. I took a picture, tagged them and shared on my story (I rarely post anything on Instagram, so that means a lot). I also told my friends and acquaintances about that dreamy pomodoro pizza. I encouraged them to try it. I was an advocate, a brand ambassador. How? Why? Great product + great experience + personal touch = good business and free marketing.
A simple, handwritten note is enough to put a smile on someone’s face. It does make a difference and you can see examples of it throughout industries. The personal touch hits different when most everyday interactions are likes, comments, shoutouts and e-mail campaigns. Notes, cards, personal onboardings, all have the same effect. If you’re just starting out, you should consider consumer experiences like the ones mentioned.
At first it may sound counterintuitive. Starting off, you put on many hats. Your small team (or if you’re going solo, just you) is developing the product, getting feedback, submitting to Product Hunt, promoting on social, doing customer support, putting out fires etc. How and why would founders go out of their way and do things such as a thank you note, or onboard clients themselves? Also, it doesn’t scale!
Exactly, it doesn’t scale. And that’s exactly what you should be doing in the early days: things that don’t scale. First of all, you got nothing to lose at this point. Today, Elon Musk’s time would not be well invested going door to door, pitching Tesla. But let’s look at some things unicorn founders did back then, just to get some traction:
Airbnb ($96 billion market cap): Have a crappy apartment listing? No worries, we’ll do an apartment photoshoot for free.
Founders that did indeed go door-to-door were the Airbnb founders. They were not hitting traction milestones and were figuring out how to make money. Paul Graham, founder of YC and an advisor to Airbnb, asked them where most of their listings were located. Next thing you know, the team goes to New York City (where the bulk of their early adopters were) dropping by their listing and offering to do professional photoshoots of the apartments. The listings that had professional apartment photos got 2–3x more bookings. Bingo. Now they had a market validated standard for what a successful listing looks like.
Stripe (currently valued at $36 billion): Are you interested in our product? Do you have your laptop with you? Cool. Let me install it for you.
Dubbed the “Collison Installation” after the founding brothers last name, it consists of physically installing or setting up your software on your user’s computer. Stripe is a payments company, powering how millions of websites receive payments online. All you need is 7 lines of code and you can have Stripe up and running. Back to their strategy, it not only ensures your customer will try it out. The experience of having a founder install it on your computer is very memorable and is goodwill that adds to the switching costs when considering competitor alternatives. They were also fixing bugs well into midnight. Needless to say, they are not doing that personal onboarding anymore (they have millions of customers in 30+ countries) nor are they fixing bugs at 2AM (they have 2,500+ employees). But those unscalabe strategies sure fostered the stratospheric growth they reached.
Every business journey is different but they are all after this: getting more customers and making them happy. Its as simple as it is hard. Doing things that do not scale is also a trial and error way of determining a consumer journey from 0 to conversion. What popped into their head when they saw your landing page? What bugged/excited them? What objections did they have? What is being overlooked? Do all of this at the micro scale before you even think of scaling. Even if tech, growth hacks and buzzy launches alone will not make users flock to your product. You need to go boots on the ground, recruit users “manually”, help them along every single step, follow up, send a birthday card. No bot will do that for you. If you’re staring at your computer making sense of the conversion data, look out the window, you may see your competitor walking your client’s dog.
