Amazing Users

On the heels of the Mt. Gox collapse, Danny Crichton of TechCrunch runs a follow up story discussing the risks users take when engaging with new products. I could not agree more. Silicon Vultures proclaim the culture of lean startups: get your product to the market as fast as possible and collide with your users! Really? Do we have to treat the early adopters as lab mice, experimenting on them and repeatedly crushing on them? Can't we do more homework in house and among our closest friends and family members? And first of all: eating our own dog food!

Over my entire business career I have been very sensitive to protecting the investments our users have contributed into our products. Investors are greedy. Well, this is their nature. But it is up to the management team to balance the satisfaction a company returns to the investors versus the satisfaction we owe our early customers.

It all really comes down the the investment horizon. If it is short, lean and pivots are the right way. If it is longer, for really big return, the extreme lean approach is not the way to go. Satisfying customers is no longer enough. Companies need to go a step further and excite or even amaze them. Fabian Hieronimus in the Forbes story lists 10 directions to achieve this: extreme simplicity, premium quality and design, exceptional service, innovative technology, exclusivity, hedonism, mystique, taboo breaking, co-creation, authenticity. Doing this never comes cheap. But patience and delivery that exceeds expectations is almost always rewarded. Satisfied customers are a value. Amazed customers are a huge value and the only way to make it to the top.