Make it Easy for Customers to Love You

Back when I lived in San Francisco, one of my favorite places to shop was Fatted Calf. If you’ve never been there before, it has by far the best selection of meats and charcuterie in the 7 x 7. From the quality of products to the level of knowledge and customer-focus possessed by the staff, it’s an exceptional retailer on every level.

Original Fatted Calf location on Fell St.

So when I moved back to Vancouver, I was already reserved to the fact that I wouldn’t find a butcher shop anywhere close to Fatted Calf. Then one day, I stumbled upon Two Rivers Meats. The wholesale supplier of meat to top restaurants throughout Vancouver had coincidentally opened a retail location in the neighborhood that we moved to.

Two Rivers Meats “The Shop”

At this point, you’re probably wondering where I’m going with all of this. Stick with me…

On one of my early visits to Two Rivers Meats, I picked up a couple of duck breasts for dinner. When I got home, I opened the package and to my surprise, saw the following:

If you’re not someone who regularly cooks duck, you might be shrugging right now. Notice the crosshatch pattern on the duck fat. This is called “scoring”. It’s something you do before cooking meat with a fatty side that you want to crisp up, like duck or pork belly.

In the case of duck breast, scoring the fatty side is almost always the first preparation step. But the butchers at Two Rivers Meats had already done that for me. I then flipped the duck breasts over to remove the tendon (the second step in preparing duck and one that I find particularly tedious). But lo and behold, that was also done!

While this might not seem like a big deal, for a mediocre home chef like myself these two small details probably saved me 10 minutes of prep time (including scoring, removing the tendon, and washing the knives and cutting board afterwards). As a result, my preparation was simply: season with salt and pepper, add a few drops of balsamic vinegar, a grating of orange rind and a bay leaf, and put in the fridge. Less than a minute start-to-finish.

The folks at Two Rivers Meats didn’t need to do this. In fact, almost no butchers do. They know that their customers are making buying decisions based on the quality of the product (so these small details likely wouldn’t change that decision). But in scoring the duck fat and removing the tendon — something that probably took their expert hands less than 30 seconds — they left me absolutely delighted.

I soon discovered that they do this with every product they sell that has “standard” preparation requirements. For example, removing the membrane from ribs or trimming the excess fat from brisket.

So what does this have to do with startups?

Many tech products have “preparation tasks”. Data analytics and machine learning products frequently require that the data be uploaded in a certain format or labelled in a particular way. Hardware products often need setup and installation. Migrating from a competitor’s product can sometimes involve many steps (not to mention a steep learning curve).

Founders, of course, often hope to solve all of this with automation. But in the early days of a startup — when you have limited resources and are still trying to figure out what the end product is going to be — self-service onboarding is rarely magical. In fact, it’s frequently the opposite. Bad, incomplete onboarding often gets in the way of early users becoming delighted in the promise of your new product.

Underpinning that? The eagerness of the founders to “do things that scale.”

Sure, we could format a new user’s data, but we can’t possibly do that for 10 users. Or 100. Or 1,000.

Sure, we could drive to a new customer’s home or office to physically setup their hardware, but we can’t possibly do that for 10 customers. Or 100. Or 1,000.

Sure, we could give one-on-one training to a new user to help them onboard, but…

You get my point.

In 2013, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham wrote an essay titled Do Things That Don’t Scale about this very challenge. Ten years later, many founders (and entirely too many investors) are still convinced that manual tasks are not scalable. That having human involvement in recurring user interactions is inherently bad.

I’ve never understood this.

Think about the contrast between these approaches:

• “Download this CSV template and put your data into this format before uploading it” vs. “Send us your data and we’ll upload it for you”

• “Follow these steps to configure the product” vs. “We’re happy to walk you through the configuration over Zoom, or we can come to your office and do it for you in-person”

• “Click the link corresponding to the product you’re migrating from to get a list of equivalent functions in ShinyNewApp™” vs. “Schedule a call and we’ll walk you through a personalized onboarding to make sure you understand how to access all of the functionality you’re used to with BoringOldApp™ and can take advantage of all the new hotness in ShinyNewApp™”

Lands different, huh?

And guess what? Doing that messy, annoying, non-scalable stuff leads to an increased level of communication with early customers that accelerates the path to product-market fit and can result in long-term differentiators.

So in your early days, when you’re still trying to find product-market fit, don’t be afraid to roll up your sleeves. Make it easy for your customers to love you.

(Just don’t be surprised when those messy, annoying, non-scalable things turn into messy, annoying, scalable differentiators.)