#163: Create possibility with your customers

“Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases, we don’t even know that the wounds and the cramping, are there, but both limit us. They keep us moving and writing in tight, worried ways. They keep us standing back or backing away from life, keep us from experiencing life in a naked and immediate way.” 
– Anne Lamott

Dear friends

My tapas birthday strategy has continued to unfold, We spent last weekend at Natural Selection’s Lekkerwater Beach Lodge. I will tell you more next week, for now, know if you want silence and ocean, and to be connected to thousands of years of human history, this is the place for you.

If you tried to access my site last week, I apologise. It was undergoing maintenance, but it is now up and running. If you want to know more about how I work with clients, you can find out more here.

/ strategy – ‘listen for the note behind the note’

Our last two strategy pieces shed some light on what one of you called ‘the dark art of sales’.

Today, we draw inspiration from a 2019 Masters of Scale interview with Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz, entitled Let Your Customers Be Scouts.

Eventbrite is a ticketing platform that enables users to create, promote and sell tickets to their events.

Masters of Scale host, Reid Hoffman, says he interviewed Hartz because she “made rapid response to customer feedback the driving force behind Eventbrite’s strategy”.

As the podcast starts Hartz tells him that, as a child, she danced for hours, ‘five, six, sometimes seven days a week’. And reflects that all that training gave her ‘an ability to absorb feedback quickly’.

Her observation is something I often do when working with my clients. We explore the past to uncover possibilities for the future.

Hartz peeled back a layer, she listened for the note behind the note.

She understood that dance and its regimen of constant feedback gave her the capacity to listen intently and adapt her actions in pursuit of excellence. It’s a capability that translates in multiple domains, not only the dance studio. It is something that she integrated into the heart of Eventbrite’s operations.

Eventbrite’s early adopters were largely tech bloggers, who used it to create meetups for their communities.

Hartz comments “Let me tell you, like there’s no better way to get great feedback than to build a product for people who build them themselves, and/or write about them all the time”.

Who are your business’s passionate users? When last did you have a conversation with them?

As the platform’s popularity grew, it attracted other types of users, including those wanting to host speed dating events. Their requirements were different.

Rather than forcing them to fit into the existing framework, the Eventbrite team listened and then expanded their functionality to meet those customers’ needs.

It might not always be appropriate for your business, but pausing and listening to all potential customers, and being open to ‘what would we need to do to meet this need’, might give you a whole new revenue stream.

We often fixate on our existing policies and processes, blinding ourselves to what might be out there. Listening to our customers and, at minimum, being curious about what we could do, opens new possibilities.

A moment’s musing costs very little, and it might secure your future.

Hoffman comments Eventbrite “were on the lookout for the challenges event organizers faced. They wanted to get the jump on helping to solve these challenges. They could then offer these solutions to other event organizers before the organizers knew they needed them. This resulted in a number of innovations that helped organizers as their events scaled from a few dozen people to thousands”.

Hartz and Hoffman’s conversation took me back to another Masters of Scale episode, How to Build Your Company to Last. Here Hoffman speaks with Robert Pasin – Radio Flyer’s Chief Wagon Officer – about how he reinvented that business.

Pasin did what Hartz did. He listened.

He reflects, “When we asked people to describe, what Radio Flyer mean to them, all these wonderful images would come up, like, ‘I was playing outside, the sun was in my face, the wind was in my hair, I was playing with friends and family that I loved, I was imagining that I could go anywhere, that my wagon was a race car, or a spaceship,’ and so we focused in on the fact that Radio Flyer is a vehicle of the imagination, that it can be anything you imagine it to be, and it can take you anywhere you want to go”

And then something fascinating happened, “we found, when we started asking people to describe the Radio Flyer they had as a kid, they would often describe a wagon, of course, but they’d, many times, say, ‘I had a Radio Flyer tricycle, when I was a kid.’ And we’d ask them to describe the tricycle, and they’d say, ‘Well, the tricycle was shiny, and red, and it had chrome handlebars, and it had a big bell on it, and it was Radio Flyer.’ And we said, ‘Wow, that’s crazy, ’cause we never made a tricycle.’”

The fact that Radio Flyer hadn’t made it, didn’t mean that they couldn’t or shouldn’t. Pasin listened to his customers. They launched their tricycle, and it went on to become the number one brand in the category.

Columbia Business School strategy guru, Rita McGrath, reminds us that ‘ensuring direct connection between the people at the edges of your company and the people making strategy’ is also powerful.

Often you have people in your business who are closely connected to your customers or are adventurous types who like to visit the future. Listening to them will help you to refine your offerings.

Hartz does this regularly, with her ‘Hearts to Hartz’ sessions.

She gets together with 8 to 10 people, from different disciplines and perspectives, to “talk about how to build great products for our creators: going kind of back to the basics”.

Again, she listens for the note behind the note.

/ self – ‘perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor’

In her celebrated book, Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, says “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something— anything—down on paper”.

She calls them ‘shitty first drafts’.

The same is true for any new product offering. Your first thought is likely to be quite rough. That’s fine. Get it down. It’s a start.

She reflects that to move forward we need to let go of perfectionism, “Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here—and, by extension, what we’re supposed to be writing.”

The same spirit energises any creative endeavour, whether for an organisation or for your life. In labs we call them experiments, in technology, we talk about minimum viable products, you get the idea, the beginning of anything new is almost always messy.

In her blunt style, she says “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.”

/ soul – ‘stitch together what beauty there is…’

In his poem, Holding the Light, Stuart Kestenbaum tells us to “Gather up whatever is glittering in the gutter, whatever has tumbled in the waves or fallen in flames out of the sky, for it’s not only our hearts that are broken, but the heart of the world as well” and advises us to “Make a place where the day speaks to the night and the earth speaks to the sky” because “Whether we created God or God created us it all comes down to this: In our imperfect world we are meant to repair and stitch together what beauty there is…”

I hope that your day and your week are filled with beauty.

As always, much love

Karl

PS: In the spirit of this week’s letter, I have been experimenting by posting ‘snacks’ on my LinkedIn Page. I know that you’re busy and it is easy to lose sight of principles that help you be more effective and joyful. My hope is that these distillations will help provoke and inspire you. I am ready to listen, please let me know what you think.