All You Need Is (Customer) Love

For many companies focused on growth, there is too much attention on scaling quickly and not enough focus on the customer experience and building up loyal users and brand evangelists. We forget that customer love is better than like.

My scaling story from my first startup, OTX, revolved around one customer: Dan Rosen, then the head of research at Warner Bros. When my co-founder and I launched OTX in 2000 we were ready to overthrow traditional entertainment market research but there was just one problem…no studio would trust us to test their content online. Online testing was considered unsafe for sensitive theatrical content. And online sample was questionable in terms of being representative. We convinced Dan to take a chance on us and for an entire year our sole focus was on testing Warner Bros content, building a normative database and keeping Dan happy.

This was true customer love. And Dan, in turn, evangelized us to every other studio head. In no time we scaled from $0 to $30M but it wasn’t through chasing a lot of clients. We chased a few and went deep, utilizing a land and expand strategy driven by referrals and word of mouth marketing tactics.

As Reid Hoffman says in this “Masters of Scale” podcast episode, “all the money and all the marketing savvy in the world cannot sustain growth in the long run. You need more than your customer's attention, you need their unflagging devotion. The first step to scale is to renounce your desire to scale. Focus on those happy few. Small batch artisans get this instinctively. Scale entrepreneurs not so much.”

We utilized a similar strategy at Decipher, winning clients over one at a time and largely relying on word of mouth and referrals when we didn’t have any budget for marketing. We had an awesome product and users loved it so much they wanted to share it. Over time as revenue grew and we did have the budget to market, we heavily utilized client testimonials and use-case studies to drive our marketing messaging. When your clients are saying to their peers “you’ve got to try this” you know you’ve really got something special. 

Remember, easy scaling means you’ve got a product that users
love so much they WANT to share it.

Sara Blakely, the Founder of Spanx, also adheres to the “love is better than like” mantra. Sara self-funded Spanx with $5,000 and ran the company out of her apartment. Spanx never advertised until last year and they’re 16 years old – it’s an entirely word of mouth brand fueled by a volunteer sales force of department store clerks.