Delight your users

A friend said to me recently – ‘startups need to delight their users, and have an exceptional customer experience’. And that sounds like a trite, and repetitive sentence. But like a lot of cliches in life, it’s true.

I was thinking recently about how many experiences I have with companies as a consumer or a business user or a citizen that are frankly suboptimal. There’s various reasons for this, such as cost-cutting and misguided M and A. I’ve had a telco experience and banking experience that were awful. And a fintech experience with Monzo recently that was amazing.

For startups to win they need to delight their users. If they delight their users, your users evangelise for you and you have a word of mouth effect that attracts new customers. Often finding any ‘market’ is hard for a startup. It’s brutally difficult to find your first 10 customers. And there’s a lot we can do as founders and in startups to make our early customers have a great experience. There’s the anecdote that Wufoo sent each new user a handwritten note. And this worked for much longer than they thought it would.

So founders. Go out tomorrow and try to make your users happy and give them a delightful experience. If you focus on that, everything else will work out.

At http://www.aforithmic.ai we will be working on delighting our wonderful customers. We do this every week, but we can definitely do better!

peadar[at]aflorithmic.ai is my email so let me know your views if you have anything you think we’re doing wrongly on the customer side.

Great reading on this

http://paulgraham.com/ds.html