Pretty much all of our new product ideas are inspired by customer conversations. Listening is the backbone of new products It’s not uncommon to hear about a recent conversation our CEO had with a user over email or Twitter (his DMs are always open).Ĭompany hierarchy shouldn’t mean the leaders at the top are furthest from the customer. We believe that company hierarchy shouldn’t mean the leaders at the top are furthest from the customer. Most importantly, Astropad’s founders stay close to the customers, too. No one should be too busy to have a chat with someone who uses our products. On the Marketing Team, we often go to customers for content inspiration, chatting with users about how our products fit into workflows. But the Engineering Team also helps out with support requests, giving them a direct line of communication with our users. Instead, make it a casual practice that’s baked into every department.Īt Astropad, our Support Team spends all day talking to customers and relaying feedback to the Engineering and Marketing Teams. In a startup, marketing research and customer feedback shouldn’t be outsourced to an agency or left to a remote silo of the business. Being real will warrant real feedback.Īctive listening requires setting aside your pride, even if that means hearing about your product’s shortcomings. It doesn’t need to be too formal talk like you’d talk to a friend over a cup of coffee. I’ve personally chatted with customers in person, over email, Zoom, social DMs, and on the phone. Active listening means setting aside your pride, even if that means hearing about your product’s shortcomings. If you’re going to develop a genuine human connection with customers (or potential customers), you need to approach the conversation with some humility. You need a human connection to really understand how your customers think and feel. My skepticism with traditional marketing research is that it often feels cold and stiff it’s hard to get the most authentic customer feedback by hiding behind a survey. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” He said: “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. Steve Jobs was a notorious skeptic on these research tactics. And while these tactics definitely serve a purpose, they also have their limitations. In business school, we learned about marketing research tactics, like how to design a quantitative survey and what a focus group is. This is what I’ve had to learn the hard way on the job. After 5 years here, the company has tripled in size, we’ve launched three new products, and I’ve not once had to wear a suit.Īs I progress in my career, I can’t shake the feeling that my business education neglected some pretty fundamental lessons about how to succeed in a startup environment. While most of my peers joined Fortune 500 companies after graduating, I joined Astropad, a bootstrapped tech startup that was just four people at the time. I was never enchanted by the idea of joining the corporate world (entrepreneurship was much more intriguing to me), yet it felt like every aspect of my education was funneling me in that direction - from the career fairs, to the case studies we were assigned, and even the fact that we were required to wear suits for class presentations. I’ve always held a sliver of bitterness toward my experience in business school. 4 things I wish I’d learned before joining a bootstrapped tech startup
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