Success in Startup Means Listening To Your Customers

Customers will tell you what don’t want to hear — if you’re lucky

The customer isn’t always right, but rest assured they will tell you what’s wrong.

And that’s a crazy valuable opportunity waiting to happen.

I was reminded of this again last week when I sent out the new Teaching Startup web app for beta testing to a handpicked group of top entrepreneurs.

A little backstory: Teaching Startup has been a newsletter product that has worked extraordinarily well for over six months now — increased adoption, increased engagement, growing revenue. It’s an advice product via newsletter, so it lacked a central repository. Thus, the web app is an effort to take the product position from “answers-in-your-inbox” to “answers-on-demand.”

The beta was, in my mind, perfect. It was one small functional step that opened up an entirely new paradigm — completely useful, low friction, and a little ugly.

Then the feedback came in.

I won’t go so far as to say it was overwhelming. In fact, if anything, it was overwhelmingly positive. However, the suggestions all pointed to one small tweak I needed to make. The next version, which is going out to early access for all members this week…