Today, we're going to look at scaling your business by working backwards.
You know, this is a different way of thinking.
Traditionally, or the classic way of thinking about this is, well, let's figure out what
does our business produce, what products can we make and then how do we sell them to customers.
A better way to do it is to do it backwards.
Start with the customer.
What does the customer need and then figure out how to deliver that to the customer, even
if that means partnering with other business to help solve that customer need.
This is a very different way of thinking.
So when we're talking about working backwards, we mean we start with the end customer.
What do they need?
And then work backwards.
We don't say, what do they need?
What have we got?
What do they need?
Whether we have it or not.
Do we partner with others?
Do we build it?
Do we create it?
And as part of this, the story that helped me understand this and implement this in my
own business was the Airbnb story.
Now when Airbnb first started, you know, they had their first postings, but nobody was booking
the rooms.
So the CEO and the CFO actually went to this lady's house to find out what was going on.
Now obviously this is not a sustainable thing for the CEO and CFO to be going to a customer's
house.
But they did and they noticed that something was lacking in the photography.
There was something wrong with the presentation.
It didn't look safe or refreshing, it was just done, you know, on somebody's cell phone.
And as it turns out, one of them happened to be a great photographer.
So they took amazing photographs, reposted them, and immediately there was a response.
They quickly learned that they needed to get professional grade photography to do this.
Now what was the principle they were using here?
They went to the customer and they imagined that their customer's customer, right?
The person who was posting their home needed to have amazing photographs so that somebody
would book and stay at their home.
So they used a principle in which you do unsustainable things to learn to scale.
Or another way of saying it is we do unscalable things to learn to scale.
What do I mean?
Obviously the CFO and the CEO could not go to every single person's house.
This is not a sustainable or scalable business by any means.
But what they did do is they figured out what was necessary to unlock how to scale.
In this case, they started putting and contracting with professional photographers in every city
to make sure the photographs looked amazing.
So that is one of the big key ideas we want to talk about.
So what do you need to do, even if it's unsustainable, calling customers, going one-on-one, connecting
with a customer to find out what does the customer actually need, then work backwards.
And in doing that, we're also looking then at what is the total customer experience.
Not just what's their initial experience, but their total experience.
We want to go through that process.
When our organization offers somebody to sign up for a conference or event, I will sign
up myself because I want to see what's the entire experience like.
And then the third idea we're going to talk about is dogfooding.
So three ideas.
How to do unsustainable things so we can learn to scale.
Two, what's the total customer experience.
And three, dogfooding.
In other words, it refers to eating your own dogfood.
Bit of a gross metaphor.
But what it means is, do you like your own products enough to use them yourselves?
So let's take each of those three items and break them out.
So let's start with the product development.
Starting with the customer and working backwards means we can ask ourselves a couple of questions.
So here are seven questions.
And you can just pick one.
It would make a massive difference, but you're welcome to do more than one.
Question number one.
What things can we do that do not scale, but will teach us what the customer needs?
Number two.
How can we go out into the world and meet our customer and discover their experience
in their natural environment?
Notice the CFO and CEO at Airbnb did not invite the lady to their head office.
They went to her home.
So that's the question.
How can we go out into the world and meet our customers in their natural environment?
Is there something you can do to meet your customer in the natural environment?
Number three.
Do we move our products, how do we move our products from being liked to being loved?
Maybe people like your products, but do they love your products? What can we do
to move that? And the best way to do that is to ask your best customers. Look, every
business has some raving fans. People who will have an open discussion with you. So
we like to call our raving fans and say, hey, you know, what can we do to this
product to make you really love it, not just like it? And it's amazing. I will
tell you this one thing about this particular question you might ask. It's
often the tiniest things. You might think, well, they're going to ask for major
development or they're going to ask for a whole new service. You'll be surprised
how tiny some of the things are. Some of the things that our customers have
suggested have literally been minutes to fix. Like when I register for the event,
can I immediately get the links I need so that I can access the information I
need straight away? Sure. Hang on, that'll take a few seconds. Or it's just
that we haven't always gone through the experience ourselves. And so we don't
know what it is they feel or we assume they know where to click, what to do,
where to go. Because we understand it, we assume they do. And often it's these
tiny little refinements that move you from like to love. You know, even, you
know, when we do conferences, we've learned that it's these tiny refinements,
it's the clarity of language, these tiny little upgrades and changes that help
people move from like to love with our events. And we've seen much higher
conversion rates of people buying our products at our events because we've
learned these tiny refinements and continue to learn. Question number four.
What is the invisible gap between our product and our market? We think that
they're connected but often there's a gap we don't see. Once again, you could
ask your customers simple questions. You know, people love to answer your
questions. Say, phone people and say, thank you so much for being one of our best
customers. Would you mind spending a few minutes and explaining to me, you know,
what is you enjoy, how to use the product. And if you can get into their
natural environment, where they're using the product, this would be amazing.
Question number five. How do we get customers to use the word a company name
and love in the same sentence, right? How do we get, in our case, how do we get
people to use the word brilliant and love in the same sentence? How can we get
people to fall in love with what we do and tell others about it? This, when
people are naturally excited, it's like permission marketing. We've just given
them permission to talk about the product. You know, I was, I heard a
fantastic story about a concierge in a hotel and what had happened was a family
came. They had a young child with them. They were there for a few days and when
that family got to the airport, they found out that their, that her little
favorite cuddly toy or teddy bear wasn't with them. They'd left it in the hotel.
This child had never been separated from this little toy, this teddy bear, in her
whole life. And so they frantically called the concierge who said, I will, I
will track it down and get it to you. Well, and they happened to find the
little teddy bear in the lost and found, very fortunately, but obviously knew they
could not get it to the family before their flight left. So what they did, now
listen to this, tiny little refinements, they took the teddy bear and took
photos of it sitting at the poolside and then photos of it on the playground and
then all these different photos eating, photos relaxing, and they sent these
photos to the family to reassure the child that Teddy was having amazing time
and we'll see them the next day. And of course they FedExed the teddy bear to
the child. It's these little things, it's the tiniest little things. I heard another
story about a great restaurant and this couple was celebrating a, you know, a
major anniversary, you know, like a 25th anniversary. And, but he had left the
the fancy bottle of wine that he'd been saving for years for this event. And so
he, so as they were, you know, checking and he tells the server who calls the
manager, well the manager sends somebody to this guy's house, gets the wine and
drives it back for them to have that exact wine. You know, it's these tiny
refinements, it's these small things that make people move from like to love in
your business. Okay, question number six. What is the sweet spot for building
trust with our customers?
Again, hint, it's the tiny refinements.
What is the sweet spot?
Where is it that when you do that one thing,
you get a disproportionate response
to your product or your service?
And number seven, what do we not want in our product?
Sometimes, you know, inadvertently,
we put things in our products.
I remember when I was running a software company,
you know, one of our engineers
just threw up a tiny little window,
literally was this tiny little window
with little scroll bars.
We had to put all this information in.
Originally, it was just a little test window.
Well, that little window got a life,
and our customers hated trying to get
into that tiny little window and scroll around,
and it literally took the engineers three seconds
to just make it bigger, and now you've got a big window.
What do we not want in our products?
Frustration, what do we not,
we don't want to force the customer
to pay the price to use our products, right?
So we want them to love our products.
I hope those seven questions help you
to really help you scale.
Start with the customer experience and then work backwards.
Okay, I wanna talk then to the second category of stuff.
So these first seven questions were all about
what can we do that doesn't scale to teach us to scale?
The next set, we wanna talk just very briefly
about some powerful questions we can ask
to improve our customer experience,
the whole end-to-end experience.
So here are seven quick questions you can ask
to improve your user experience, your customer experience.
Okay, what things do we think our customers can do
that they actually cannot do?
Oh, they'll know where to find that link.
They will automatically know to press this button.
Oh, it's obvious that the big red button
is the one to press.
Is it clear that in a login what we're asking for?
Which password are they supposed to put in?
Which, is it the same email address they use to register?
We just assume that they know things
they don't actually know.
So what things do we think our customers can do
that actually they cannot?
Number two, what would be the perfect user experience?
Can we cut steps out?
Can we simplify it?
Can we make it look more beautiful?
What is it we want the customer to feel
through the experience, not just get through the process?
Number three, what if the user experience,
end-to-end, could be a pleasant experience?
In other words, do we have little moments in that process
which are stopping them, which are annoying,
which are necessary?
Can we delete steps in that process and make them simpler?
Number four, let's design for trust.
In other words, how can we put trust
at the top of the user experience?
You think, well, how do we do that?
In other words, when somebody,
okay, put your credit card in here,
we should give them reassurances of,
you know, that your card's not being used,
that we're securing your data, whatever it is,
whatever makes them feel safe and trust this experience.
Number five, what is the sweet spot
for building trust with our customers?
In other words, when we look at all the things we do,
maybe it's that moment in the cart where they get in
and put their credit card information,
that's the sweet spot.
Or maybe at that moment, there's a little video
helping them feel good about the decision
they're about to make.
What is the sweet spot?
What's that moment in the process where we can build trust?
Number six, how can we use customer service
as a branding moment?
Instead of customer service just being the backstop
for dealing with all customer complaints,
what if we can use that and teach our customer service
people to use this as a branding moment?
You know here at Brilliant,
we want you to have a brilliant experience.
What can I do to help?
And going that extra little mile,
again, it's the tiniest thing.
So what we've done is we've given our customer service
people a certain degree of latitude to give away
certain products, to increase that customer's experience,
to make on the fly decisions.
You know, why don't I credit you
three months of your subscription?
Whatever it is, what if we make that a branding moment
where they learn to really trust the brand?
Number seven, what experiences are customers having
that's not good for the long term?
Yeah, they put up with that.
They're not happy, but they put up with it.
But long term, that's not gonna work.
One of the things, you know, in our business, when we host an annual conference, you know,
we were advised that, you know, that there will be early adopters and give them a super low,
you know, rate for the conference. Then you got your normal, you know, rate for the conference,
and then you increase the price the last week or two. You know, the customers put up with that,
but it was not good for the long term. People didn't understand why we were
artificially raising the price. And I know this is a debatable point in our industry,
but for us, we decided not to do that. It was one price, whether you came early,
we came in the middle, you came late, it didn't matter. We just wanted to have a long term
experience that when we said something, you trusted the price. So the trust was more valuable
than just creating hurry to cause them to sign up. Okay, and the last category is dogfooding.
Now, I just want to give you a few thoughts about this. By dogfooding, we mean do you love
your product enough that you yourself use it? How in love with your product are you? Do you
use your product yourself? You know, if you provide content, if you do leadership training,
is your team doing leadership training? You know, our team at Brilliant are literally going through
this material multiple times. Right now, as a recording of this particular training,
our team have gone through this five times. So you might be going through this the first time.
So that means five years, because every time they hear it, they hear it at a different level.
We want to love the very things we're sharing with you, including this very training session.
So we really do consume our own materials. And so what we're doing is we're upgrading
our thinking and our learning so that what we're enjoying, we want you to enjoy too.
So I hope that was really helpful for you as we went through those three big ideas.
You know, what things can we do that may not be sustainable, but will teach us to scale? Number
two, let's look at the whole customer experience. And number three, dogfooding. Do we actually eat
our own dogfood? Do we actually enjoy our own content and materials? And all that is to teach us
to start with the customer and work backwards. Thanks for listening.