Courtesy of VoucherCodes.co.uk

In great stories (like Harry Potter) the hero is prepared to die to save the day. Your company should be willing to die for your customers. But to think this way you have to care about the people with whom you do business. Viewing them as a necessary evil won’t do.

Who do you care enough about to die for?

I’m not sure where I discovered Derek Sivers, but his writing and videos are quickly becoming my favorite sources of inspiration (just ordered his book today). Here are 5 tips from Derek’s video for anyone who deals with customers:

1. answer the phone. I’ve been making a concerted effort to answer my phone more. I’ll confess that it’s incredibly hard for me to break focus on a project to take a call and then get back into the groove of what I was doing. So I have a tendency to let calls go to voicemail and then call back a few customers in the same blocked off time period. But as a customer, I really love it when I feel like I can get a hold of someone if I have a question about a purchase.
2. changes require pizza. Any designer or developer can relate to that dreaded feeling you get when a client looks at the site you just built for them based on their specs and says, “Can you just change these 3 things.” Usually the customer isn’t taking into consideration how much effort you invested to make the site in the first place or the time it’s now going to take you to change it. So when you get a request to change something, ask the customer for a pizza. Or a cup of coffee. Or something else that you’d appreciate around the office. Asking for a token item in return humanizes the request.
3. connect customers with feedback. Derek’s CDbaby example was forwarding comments from CD buyers to the artists who designed the CDs. In our case, I forward the results from user testing or surveys back to our customers. In fact, I ran a survey last week for a Rails development shop to help them determine the product/market fit for their application. The results were incredibly insightful and inspired confidence to begin marketing the application more aggressively.
4. special requests at the end of the order. Our main contact at pooltables.com had his first child while we were working on the project. I got the name of his wife and daughter and sent them a congrats card. It took me less than an hour to run to the store, sign a card, and drop it in the mail. But the impact on the client out-shined all of my hours of work on his site. Derek’s suggestion is to provide an opportunity for your customer to tell you what they want by creating space for it in the order process.

People remember you more for the little ways you make them smile, than all the business-school stuff you do.

A leading Magento community developer talked to us about forking the platform. We almost did it. Our philosophy was “happy developers lead to happy customers”. When developers can build more stuff with less headache, it translates into faster innovation. Faster innovation equals cost effective solutions for smaller retailers so that they can compete against the big fish.

But we didn’t have a good feeling about the fork, so we set out in search of something new. We wanted a solution that met the following criteria:

1. thorough documentation
2. responsive support
3. straightforward theme structure
4. module revenue opportunity
5. rapid store development

Most commerce platforms fall short in one of the following areas:

• product configuration
• simple theme-ability
• marketing channel integration
• store usability
• fulfillment process integration

Usually you end up with a store that is either simple to theme/design but without key features OR it has the functionality you want but is so complicated that it takes a lot of time and money to implement. We wanted an elegant balance with the ability to quickly build something if we need it. After downloading a lot of different ecommerce demo stores, LemonStand was the most impressive. We originally looked at it last year, but it just didn’t meet our needs at the time. LemonStand has really blossomed this year. The core is solid. Theming is logical. 80% of the features I want are there. And the support – wow.

LemonStand is SWEET

Good support starts with great documentation. Documentation for LemonStand is refreshingly well-organized. When you’re building a store, you don’t want to waste an entire morning trying to track down information about how the system works. Forums for LemonStand are 1,000% better than Magento because the creators of the system actually monitor threads and respond. And our support tickets were addressed in under a day. I honestly don’t know how their customer service is this good as a small, bootstrapped software company.

While its strengths far outweigh weaknesses, there are a few gaps in LemonStand’s offering. The most obvious missing feature is layered/faceted navigation. We had to build a module ourselves for our first store to help users narrow results within the store’s 7k products. This feature, by the way, is the top-requested module and I’m told that it’s high priority for a core update. Other needed additions include one-click checkout page and Google merchant feed. They’re both within reach if you have the chops to develop it yourself, but it would be nice to see them as pre-built modules.

Explosive growth is ahead for LemonStand. Here’s what needs to happen for them to reach a tipping point:

Step 1: ecosystem of module developers climb on board

The risk with feature requests for any software system is that you can bloat it with useless junk in an effort to try to please everyone. So ideally you want a platform that contains essential functionality in its core while relegating the features that only some sites will use to modules. If done correctly a marketplace of modules will benefit retailers, developers, and LemonStand:

retailers: Get access to more functionality. Pick and choose what features they want for their store. Avoid paying for the development of modules that they don’t want.
developers: Recycle work into passive income. Build reputation within the community for doing outstanding work.
LemonStand: Offer many more features than they could build with their current resources. Capitalize on a curated store like Apple does with apps.

Step 2: marque clients select LemonStand

Big client wins boost image more than you think. When I was working at ExactTarget selling email software we would get a huge client like Home Depot or Best Buy and then mention it during every sales presentation. For Magento it was North Face and TCHO (heck, their entrance splash page is just a bunch of client logos). If LemonStand could throw a few recognizable brands up on their home page as peer validation, then larger retailers would consider it when replatforming. Sell the retailers and the developers will gladly follow. They’re sick of dealing with all of the other junk out there.

At the end of the day the most important success driver is to build a good product that customers love to use. LemonStand is well on its way to competing head-to-head in terms of features and it already boasts stellar support. Watch out Magento.

For too long we split our efforts into smaller project chunks, which usually meant that only 1 or 2 of us would be working on the same thing. It seemed efficient, but I think it drained some enthusiasm out of us. Refocusing the business model and then solving problems together has reminded me of how fortunate I am to work alongside really smart partners.

Sometimes creating constraints can be liberating.

Last year our team decided to pivot away from Magento; but we weren’t 100% sure where to go next. So we went from a very narrow platform-centric focus to random projects for non-profits, law firms, health care providers, and even student organizations on platforms like WordPress, Drupal, and Google Apps. Virtually anyone was a potential customer because of the wide-application options for these systems. We took on our share of scrap work, which any experienced web professional will tell you is the worst kind.

Prime the Pump

Knowledge about customers and products/services increases momentum. And momentum is super important in any team sport, including business. We killed momentum by breaking the pivot rule. Plus I spent far too much time analyzing circumstances when we should have been out talking to customers and trying new things. Without momentum we never reached a tipping point.

Think of business momentum as a well that requires you to prime the pump in order to produce water. At first you pump vigorously but generate very little water. Stall at this point and you’ll have to start over. But if you continue pumping through the initial lackluster results then you’ll generate a steady stream of quality H2O. With momentum established, less effort is required to maintain water pressure. Violating the pivot rule was like walking away from one well to start over at a new one. It felt like we were always working hard but not getting the results we wanted.

Focus on Adding Value

Positioning ourselves as platform experts attracted ultra-complex projects. It was nearly impossible to accurately estimate and bid on work because we were tackling stuff that had never been done before. In hindsight we should have charged 2-3x more and disqualified the prospects who balked at the quote. But a price hike like that would have been impossible without fine tuning our positioning strategy and putting up the cash to align with Varien Magento, inc as certified partners (at the time it cost $5k). We balked at the expense, but could have recouped it in one enterprise deal.

Sidenote: It should be clear that customers don’t buy features, they buy benefits. If you provide a solution to a problem instead of features then clients will gladly pay you more money. The danger facing web services firms in hitching themselves to a platform instead a problem is that their service becomes a feature commodity. That’s why we are now focusing on ecommerce business problems and then adeptly using a number of tools and ecommerce platforms to solve them.

Get Back in the Game

Violating the pivot rule created a painful ride over the last few months. Meanwhile, retailers keep requesting help with their ecommerce stores. Based on our KISSinsights survey, 60% of visitors to this site today can’t find what they’re looking for because they want a) one of the modules from our old Magento store or b) help figuring out Magento development. We still believe that stepping away from Magento was the right thing to do at the time; but we should have leveraged our knowledge of ecommerce customers. We’re going to remedy this misstep.

Instead of jumping into another ecommerce cart community, we’ve become an indispensable resource for retailers and their online stores. We removed the components that customers didn’t value enough to be profitable (super complex development of core platform software) while adding new high-impact offerings for an ecommerce website such as conversion optimization, SEO, user-testing, analytics, and email marketing (see Blue Ocean Strategy).

Customers are already much happier with the best ecommerce mix of services for their business. And elias is finally primed to grow.

The heights of great men reached and kept

Were not obtained by sudden flight;

But they, while their companions slept,

Were toiling upward in the night.

Standing on what too long we bore

With shoulders bent and downcast eyes,

We may discern – unseen before -

A path to higher destinies!

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow