This is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell, and today, we're going to talk about caring about your customers. We're in the beginning of a YC batch and there are a lot of companies who are trying to get sales, trying to get new customers. Always a good thing. We might describe some of them as flailing. What is the sign of a startup that is flailing when trying to get new customers?

It's like the old aphorism: when all you have is a hammer, everything's a nail. They'll have a product with an idea. They want to bully customers or beg some strategy to cram it down people's throats. They're like, "Why won't they take it? Why won't they take this thing that I'm trying to get them to buy?"

"I'm trying to help you!"

Yeah. "I have this thing and it's good. What's wrong with you? You're making a mistake to not want this thing!" That's a lot of people's first experience with sales. That was my experience. "These people are dumb. Don't they realize how brilliant my software is?"

Or trying to get them to feel sorry for you. Just please use this. If you could just use this thing, I'll be your best friend. That also translates into a lot of actions: mass emailing, mega spamming, templated emails with one word of customization.

Quick point on that. You should always say to yourself, if I received this email that I am sending, would I respond? Because hilariously, a lot of people send a lot of email that they themselves think is horrible.

When I asked this question to the founder — would you respond to this email? — they don't even think about it. Absolutely not. I've regularly archived emails that look exactly like this.

I think this is going to tie into the theme where you don't think your customers are smart or something.

"We actually don't care."

"Hey, it's not for me, but maybe they want it."

Yeah. Maybe these. If we were going to unpack the psychology of why people do this, why they're making these silly motions, I think a lot of it is based on VC marketing. I think a lot of it is customers are not an end. Serving customers is not the end of my business. Serving customers is a means to getting VC dollars. We all know that VC dollars — that's the goal.

That's what we're here to do, right?

That's all we're here to help you with is how to get VC dollars. Customers — no. When we were in this situation with the founder, very recently this started clicking in my head. "Oh shit. Can we take a big step back? Do you like your users? Do you like them?"

Yeah. That's not what they expect you to say. Why are we talking about whether I like my users?

These people are trying to build things for. Do you like them? You brought this up. A lot of companies don't like their users. Any examples?

To speak from personal experience, Comcast, who dislikes their users so much, I think they're renamed to Xfinity.

That's part of a rebranding. Let's try again.

Maybe they won't remember. Every experience I've had with them — maybe you have the same one. You can tell that the whole thing was designed with the implicit assumption that they don't like their customers, and their customers are bad. Everything that you try to do, they want to make it bad. It seems to be baked into the whole thing.

It's pretty weird.

They don't have a lot of competition. We can talk about why that is. That's probably a different part.

It helps that they're running a wire to your house.

Right.

That's a big part of it.

Yeah, I'm still a customer. Let's be real. I still pay for it.

Yes, they figured out that their customer was the government that gave them a monopoly. That's one example. Are there others you think about?

There's other stuff like that — phone companies — but let's talk about another one we've used more often. Social media companies. Let's talk about Facebook. Facebook is known to do some user-hostile stuff. There's even — what's the term for it? — dark patterns. There's a whole field of research.

Yes.

Maybe someone would say, watching this, oh, well, they like their customers. How would you articulate?

I think what's funny is, one, it's not obvious who the customer is of Facebook. On one hand, you could argue their users are customers. On the other hand, the users aren't paying. Then you think, oh, well, maybe they're really serving their advertisers, but then you see all these stories about how all the numbers aren't real. Fake clicks, all kinds of stuff. Needless to say, when you're big, you cannot like your customers. What's the takeaway for founders?

The takeaway is you look at these big companies, and you can easily decide to emulate this stuff. Again, if all I'm doing is from first principles is trying to look, how does the world work? Why does the world work the way it does? It's easy to look at these very successful, very valuable companies, know the story of Facebook, and actually attempt to emulate the end state of these companies, which are so big. The people that work there are very isolated from their customers. Only a small percentage of those companies employ people whose job it is to talk to their customers. Most people, if you work at those companies, you would never talk to the customers.

Most people who work at these companies now weren't around in the beginning when those companies did like their users and did serve their users. They're not even getting a good pattern. I think what's funny about this is that this opens up the opportunity for startups. This is your secret sauce. Even if you didn't believe us that it was just being a nice person, being good-hearted would be to serve your customers. It's a competitive advantage to care about your customers.

Let's set this up. Check this out. A lot of folks, especially if they worked at one of these big companies, their first instinct right when they start out is to pretend that their startup is a big company, pretend that it looks like it has a bunch of employees, pretend that there's a customer support rep that's not them, and recreate the whole weird Rube Goldberg machine of talking to customers that they saw elsewhere. It makes intuitive sense. But what if the opposite were the case? Something incredibly powerful is that people like to talk to the founder of companies.

Who knew?

And they like to talk to the people that make software that they use. And they like to feel listened to and they like to feel heard.

And that's unique.

The big companies can't do that. Again, imagine you had some problem with Facebook and then one day, literally, Mark Zuckerberg showed up at your house and said, let me fix it. Okay, you wouldn't like that, but okay.

No, I'd like that. I'm about to say, I'd be Facebook's biggest fan. I'd say, I don't know what you think about Facebook.

You would want to tell people, hey, I actually met Mark Zuckerberg and he came to my house and I guess they really, it'd be a story.

It'd be a story.

I was an early customer of Stripe at my startup. It was invite-only and very few people were using it. My customer experience was Patrick, the founder of Stripe. I had a chat with him in Google Talk. It was a long time ago. He would message me all the time. They had a big mistake where they overcharged a bunch of my customers. It was a problem on their end. What happened is Patrick DM'd me, told me that it happened, said that they fixed it and apologized. Do you think that I like Stripe more or less after that experience? Even when they messed up?

Exactly.

Isn't that wild?

It's wild. What's funny is that sometimes big companies can pull this off too. I remember early days at AWS, we were blowing up. There wasn't enough time to buy and rack servers. We literally needed to use EC2, and it was in beta. You just couldn't sign up for it. We randomly tweeted, can anyone help us get on EC2 right into the world? This guy, Jeff Barr, tweeted us back. I said, yes. Amazon had a face and a human and a hero and he hooked us up and saved our company. That's Amazon. They did it.

And you remember that. You're telling the story now. It planted in your head.

I'm still telling the story. If you can create that experience for customers — woof.

Yeah. If you can blow people away by how much you go the extra mile to care and solve their problems and not emulate the big company stuff. You're giving away your power if you don't do that. You've got to use that power.

Caring about your customer is a superpower. I think what's funny, and you made this point, is that it's really, really hard to beat a competitor who cares about the customer more than you do. It's really hard. The customer knows in their bones that you don't give a shit.

I think that if we bring this back down to startups, one of the things that's tricky is that you get into a startup for a lot of different reasons. "Hey, Dalton, I'm building a B2B SaaS company for accountants. I think it's really good. I have some experience doing accounting stuff at my previous company, but I don't love the accountants."

"I'm just going through the motions, I don't know. Let me tell you about my next startup idea after this." It's not great when they want to pitch you their next startup.

Not good. But that's not a horrible starting point. What's the advice you give to that person who thinks they have an insight but wouldn't say at this moment, oh yes, I really care about my customers.

If I've learned from the folks that I think are best at sales, it's that they learn to break down the barrier between salesperson and customer relationship and actually genuinely care about the other person and their life and what they're doing.

Say you're selling to small businesses, you're selling to coffee shops or something. If you actually care about the owner and you know their life story and you can see how the software that you're selling them might help them stay in business longer or help pay their employees or what have you and take it on a personal level, such that even if you left that job, even if you sold your company or left the company, you would still remember fondly the people that were your customers and how you were able to help them. That's real. You can't fake that.

I think a lot of founders, when they have competition, they think that whoever raises the most will win, or they think whoever is the most famous will win.

Most employees.

Sure, right? I can't really quantify this, but if I think about the people you and I know that have done startups, the people that care about their customers the most, that seems to be who wins. You'll have companies that raise less, that are less famous, all those things versus other folks. But man, they just gave a shit.

It's so funny, because I love your point around maybe you don't like coffee shops. But everyone can like people. Everyone can like helping another person. That's just the quality of humans. Do you like helping someone else?

It feels good to provide service and it feels good to give someone something that sure you're making money from it because you're charging for it but you know that the value that the thing is delivering is big. You're getting a great deal and you know in your heart they're getting a great deal. Not just "hey, they bought the software, we know it doesn't work, we know they don't use it, but I hope they keep paying. They signed the LOI so I was able to fundraise, but we know the software sucks." Yeah, that makes you feel bad.

That makes you feel bad. Yes. If we're going to wrap this up, we've given a lot of advice on how to do all kinds of things around early stage startups, but one of the things that we probably should have emphasized more is it really helps to care about your customers and if you can use that as a tool, you'll learn more. You'll make more sales. You'll have more fun.

People can tell if you care. They'll want to tell you more about their problems. They'll give you the benefit of the doubt. They'll cut you slack. If they can tell that you care, you want to actually solve the problems and not just get money.