Looking back at the last 1.5 yrs since we started Performable, one thing is very clear. The single best decision we ever made was to make customer service everyone’s job.

Everyone on the team is assigned a day on our support calendar when they answer the phones, reply to all emails and proactively reach out to customers to see if they can be helpful. This customer service focus has grown from a company mantra to a company religion. Obsessive customer focus shapes everything we do, from how our dev team builds our product to how we recruit new team members.

Yesterday my co-founder, Josh Porter, gave a great talk at a MassTLC SaaS event that shares our greatest secret weapon, customer driven management.

We’re always looking to do a better job. If we missed anything please let me know below in the comments and we’ll send you an awesome Performable t-shirt.

Please consider voting this up on my favorite news site if you enjoyed it.

At Performable we are building the Salesforce.com of Marketing.

Along the way we have expanded our service to better meet the needs of our customers. Lots of startup people viewed this evolution as “pivots“, a term made famous by Eric Ries and the Lean Startup movement.

I didn’t really see our evolution as a series of “pivots” but I can see how others saw them as such.

At SXSW this year I presented the following Case Study on Performable and our early evolution:

Please let me know if you found this presentation useful.

Last weekend I was at SxSW to give a talk on Startup Pivots at the Lean Startup event held there. It was an excellent event put on by Eric Ries and Dave McClure. All the stars of the game were there; I was honored to be included.

I have been trying to decrease the number of startup events that I speak at and attend this year so I can focus all my energy on Performable. Despite this I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to share tacos and margaritas with my friends down in Austin.

While I was there I experienced something that has happened to me many times before. It always goes down like this:

Stranger: (walks up to me cold) “Hi, I’m XYZ from startup ABC.”

Me: “Hello, nice to meet you.”

Stranger: “I’m a competitor of yours.”

Me: “No, you are not my competitor.”

At this point the stranger becomes really confused, it is clear that he has been following the daily changes at my company, so he believes he has a good handle on what we are working on.

So why don’t I see that startup as a competitor?

I believe a startup only has one real competitor, indifference.

People not caring enough about your product is your true competition, not some other startup.

Please stop sweating other startups in your market. (Stop reading Techcrunch please.) They do not matter. Always solve for making people care.

Who are your competitors?

Note: I wrote this post on my phone so please excuse any typos or errors.

The best way to save a disgruntled customer is to provide a great customer experience when things go wrong.

Joshua Porter (@bokardo), my co-founder at Performable, wrote a great summary of  a recent post by Zendesk’s Justin Flitter on the steps to fix a negative customer experience.

Some of the steps they suggest include:

Make contact and call/talk to the person, asking questions that dig deeper into what happened

Print out the blog post and read it during a staff meeting, even a board or management meeting

Reply with a personal comment on the blog post from a senior person and the store manager to demonstrate awareness and appreciation

At Performable we’re obsessed with providing the best customer experience humanly possible. Sometimes we nail it and sometimes we suck. The important thing is that we continue to focus on improving it every single day and consistently WOW-ing our customers.

Why the obsession? We believe that marketing is broken and sucks today. Outbound, inbound, whatever.. At the end of the day people hate marketing and marketers. They hate marketing because it is still interrupt driven, it is still about distracting me and not about delivering value.

Our goal at Performable is to revolutionize marketing, to kill the spam, and to teach marketers that the point is delivering value to their customers, not once but over the entire lifetime of the relationship, or as Seth Godin would say “embracing lifetime value“.

Once you change your mindset to embrace the lifetime value of a customer, to focus on building relationships and not just interrupting people the more important it becomes to invest in providing amazing customer experiences.

How do you measure your customer experience?

I am looking forward to 2011!

This year I intend to invest more time with my family and friends, build a great company alongside an incredibly talented team, and to push myself to grow, learn and better myself.

Looking back at 2010 I am grateful for my family, my amazing team at Performable, that I get to spend my days focused on solving hard problems, and for all the great people that I have met because of this blog.

I spent a few minutes digging through my stats to see which startup posts were most popular over the last year. What amazes me is not this list of posts but that I met hundreds of people because of these blog posts. That is truly awesome, thank you.

Top Startup Posts in 2010

1. 3 Startup Lessons I Learned the Hard Way – (October)
   • 18 Comments, 273 Tweets, 52 Facebook Likes
2. Data-Driven Startups – (July)
   • 22 Comments, 350  Tweets, 23 Facebook Likes
3. 3 Warning Signs That Your Product Sucks – (August)
   • 16 Comments, 109 Tweets, 3 Facebook Likes
4. Creating a Data Driven Startup – (October)
   • 16 Comments, 46 Tweets, 1 Facebook Like
5. 8 Startup Lessons from Constant Contact – (June)
   • 10 Comments, 190 Tweets, 1 Facebook Like

How people found these posts (referrers)

1. Hacker News
2. Google Search
3. Twitter
4. Delicious
5. Facebook

What were the best lessons you learned in 2010?

Over the past decade, I’ve spent most of my professional life building startup businesses. In thinking about what I’ve learned, I realized that the most valuable lessons can be boiled down to three simple lessons:

1. The middle sucks.
2. Your idea doesn’t matter.
3. There is no secret to startup success.

The middle sucks

Most startups die before launching because they get caught in the “valley of death.” The startup “valley of death” lies in between startup success and startup failure and it’s the worst place to get stuck.

Startups get stuck here because they usually fail to raise money and exhaust their finances by spending time on useless business plans and demos.

Business plans are always wrong so stop obsessing about them! And, unless you can pitch a demo as well as Steve Jobs, you are not going to persuade anyone to invest in your startup using one.

You can only raise money by pitching the “Dream” or by selling “Traction” (post on this coming soon). So either bootstrap your startup or raise money in the early “dream” (no code, no plan, just a dream) phase or in the “traction” (the model is working) phase of your business.

Your idea doesn’t matter.

Like almost all startup founders I spend way too much time obsessing about my ideas.

Guess what? Nobody cares about my idea, and they don’t care about your idea, either. Nobody.

People are selfishly motivated first and foremost — they want to know how you are going to help them, not what you think would be cool to build. I never fully understood this until I read The Del.icio.us Lesson by my Performable co-founder, Joshua Porter. Focus all your energy on solving a critical problem. Forget your idea.

Read 3 Warning Signs that Your Product Sucks for clues on whether the problem you’re solving is critical or not.

There is no secret to startup success.

This is where I see most startup wannabes spend all their time. They are so paralyzed by the fear of failing that they spend every waking moment reading Techcrunch (don’t do it, please) and other blogs, reading countless books and attending startup events all in the quest to learn some “secret” they think is going to help them succeed.

Believe me failing sucks really bad but there are no repeatable patterns that lead to startup success. None. Stop looking for one and just f***ing do it (#JFDI).

Starting is the easy part, building a valuable business that people actually care about is really, really hard and humbling. Focus on creating a product that people truly care about and on distributing and monetizing that product.

Note: These lessons originally appeared in my Creating a Data Driven Startup presentation from September 2010.

These are my slides from my Creating a Data-Driven Startup presentation at the MIT Startup Bootcamp in Cambridge, MA  (September 11, 2010).

I was lucky enough to share the stage that day with an amazing set of startup founders: Reddit, Wufoo, 3com, GitHub, A123 Systems, WePay, & more.

I hope you find this presentation useful, please leave a comment if you do.

How do you know if your startup is solving a critical problem?

You can survey your users, conduct user interviews, and run a/b testing experiments to try to get your answer. No matter what method you use, parsing out reality is really hard, especially for entrepreneurs (see Reality Distortion Field & I Don’t Know).

I was talking to Joshua Porter, my co-founder at Performable, today, about a certain app we use internally and how bad and confusing their UI is. Despite this, we use the app almost every single day. And we’re not alone — they have tens of thousands of customers.

Why do we continue to use this app? Because it solves a critical problem; it’s a utility we need to run our business and, despite its shortcomings, the app is better than anything else we’ve tried.

So how do you know if your startup’s product is solving a critical problem? After years of trying to figure this out at multiple startups I’m starting to get the hang of it.

If you repeatedly hear any of the following comments, chances are you are not solving a critical problem:

1. “If you made your app easier to use I would start using it.”
2. “I’m really busy right now but I’ll start using your app soon.”
3. “If your app was cheaper I would start using it.” (contributed by Josh)

Sounds familiar? Is it time to admit you’re in trouble? Don’t panic, just stop now and reevaluate whether you need to resegment your product/audience, change your pricing, or pivot your entire product.

Question: How did you figure out that no one cared about your product? (I’d love to hear about it in the comments.)

If you like this post please consider voting for it on my favorite news site.

Super Conversion Button is a web application lovingly hand-crafted by our team at Performable that lets you create a beautiful, effective call-to-action button in seconds!

At ABTests.com we have seen companies increase their website conversions by double digits by simply changing their call-to-action buttons.

The Super Conversion Button app is absolutely free. I’d love it if you could try it out and let me know what you think about it in the comments below.

Note: This post was cross-posted on the Performable Blog.

These are my slides from my Data-Driven Startup presentation at the Lean Startup Circle in Cambridge, MA on July 22, 2010. Had a great time geeking out on Lean Startup, Customer Development and A/B Testing.