Why Startups Suck At Customer Success

Your customers aren’t going to love your product right away

Joe Procopio
6 min readMay 11, 2020

It used to be you sold someone a product, handed them a wordy and confusing manual, and then walked away.

You can’t do that anymore.

It doesn’t matter if you’re selling a suite of productivity applications or an exercise bike, the level of user complexity baked into the average product increases perpetually and exponentially. Because it can.

Moreover, today’s customer — whether it’s your grandfather with his Fitbit or an executive vice president expecting the quarterly numbers to be reported with a snap of her fingers — they want to spend less time learning how to use the product than it takes to open the box. If there’s a box.

Customer success isn’t a new science — it’s something we’ve been doing for ages. Poorly. But when done right, it’s the difference between the 20-page manual that used to come with a clock radio and the little transparent sticker with the arrow pointing to the power button on your new smartphone.

Let’s figure out how we achieve that higher level of smoothness.

What is great customer success?

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Joe Procopio

I'm a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. NLG pioneer. Building TeachingStartup.com & GROWERS. Write at Inc.com and BuiltIn.com. More at joeprocopio.com