How To Earn Customers For Life

Seibel and Caldwell describe founders who treat sales as forcing a product on customers, often through mass emails or lightly customized templates. Seibel suggests asking whether you would respond to the email you are sending.

Seibel asks founders whether they like their users, and Caldwell points to Comcast and Facebook as examples of companies that can feel hostile to customers. They caution startups against copying large companies’ dark patterns or distance from users, since those companies’ scale can obscure how they first earned customers.

The hosts say founders can stand out by speaking directly with customers instead of recreating large-company support structures. Seibel recalls Patrick Collison personally apologizing after Stripe overcharged customers, and Jeff Barr helping his startup get access to EC2 when it was in beta.

Seibel advises founders to take an interest in the people they serve, even if they did not start out passionate about the customer’s industry. A founder selling to coffee shops, for example, can learn about owners’ lives and how the software might help their businesses and employees.

The hosts argue that caring about customers can matter more than raising more money or becoming better known. Customers are more likely to explain their problems and give a company the benefit of the doubt when they believe it is trying to solve those problems.