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I’ve never been more delighted by a response to something I’ve written. If your goal is to get rich by building a business I suspect you’ll have an easier time

I’ve never been more delighted by a response to something I’ve written. If your goal is to get rich by building a business I suspect you’ll have an easier time of it if you enjoy serving your customers. And you’re right - startups caring about their customers in the early days does seem like the idealized version of a small business (though I’m sure we all know quite a few that treat their customers terribly and take no pride in their work).

jaclaz 3y ago
What I don't understand is why (in case of a successful business) at a certain growth point these "small business like" startups start behaving exactly like the big companies, providing there once valuable customers the usual bad or non-existant assistance.
- fakedang 3y ago
  VC money, demands to scale, etc.
  - jaclaz 3y ago
    Those are the usual pseudo-justifications given, surely. But scaling should mean "scaling (up) everything", not "scaling (up) customers and income but do not scale (up) service and assistance". In a small business, you sell (say) 1,000 items and serve 1,000 customers per year, of these 50 to 100 will need or want to talk to you about some aspect of the transaction. This will take you half an hour every day. When the items and the customers become 10,000, that will become 5-8 hours per day, and you hire a dedicated person for this assistance. When you reach 100,000 you should hire another 9 people, but you don't and scale to 3 people that simply cannot manage the amount of requests. When you reach 1,000,000 you fire all the 3 people that in the meantime became very competent on solving the problems and outsource the whole assistance to some firm that promises you 100 capable technicians but in reality provides 20-30 clueless people. And you never check whether your customers are satisfied or not, but you pay a consultant firm to harass customers with meaningless newsletters and pointless polls on their satisfaction. At a certain size the "love" for your customers vanishes, which makes me doubt if it ever existed.
    - fakedang 3y ago
      Well what you described is the Google play book, which VCs swear by (and curiously not the Amazon playbook on such matters), so that's what VCs want from their startups.

jaclaz 3y ago

What I don't understand is why (in case of a successful business) at a certain growth point these "small business like" startups start behaving exactly like the big companies, providing there once valuable customers the usual bad or non-existant assistance.

fakedang 3y ago
VC money, demands to scale, etc.
- jaclaz 3y ago
  Those are the usual pseudo-justifications given, surely. But scaling should mean "scaling (up) everything", not "scaling (up) customers and income but do not scale (up) service and assistance". In a small business, you sell (say) 1,000 items and serve 1,000 customers per year, of these 50 to 100 will need or want to talk to you about some aspect of the transaction. This will take you half an hour every day. When the items and the customers become 10,000, that will become 5-8 hours per day, and you hire a dedicated person for this assistance. When you reach 100,000 you should hire another 9 people, but you don't and scale to 3 people that simply cannot manage the amount of requests. When you reach 1,000,000 you fire all the 3 people that in the meantime became very competent on solving the problems and outsource the whole assistance to some firm that promises you 100 capable technicians but in reality provides 20-30 clueless people. And you never check whether your customers are satisfied or not, but you pay a consultant firm to harass customers with meaningless newsletters and pointless polls on their satisfaction. At a certain size the "love" for your customers vanishes, which makes me doubt if it ever existed.
  - fakedang 3y ago
    Well what you described is the Google play book, which VCs swear by (and curiously not the Amazon playbook on such matters), so that's what VCs want from their startups.