Each new customer brings their unique set of challenges in a start up.

Each new customer brings their unique set of challenges in a start up. As much as you try to define an ideal customer and stick to it, sales are sales, dollars-in offset dollars-out and extend runway. So where do you draw the line and say no? How far do you set your boundaries from your ideal customer? We have come up against this tough question more than once, and recently an increasing number of enquiries and leads is only making the answer more important. Each customer that we onboard whose problem is nearly solved by the solution we have is an unwritten contract to provide features in the future. Somewhat more worryingly, sales guys being what they are, the buggers go and hack together all sorts of unsavoury ways of using our software. A Story By way of example let’s tell a story about human conversations. Before we had people involved who knew anything about building a brand we were called Talk Like Humans. We built Cradle so that businesses maintained a human feel as they grew, with teams that still interacted with their customers like humans do best, by Talking Like Humans. And then customers happened. Some want voicemail, and worse, some want voice menus that lead to voicemail without even the possibility of a person picking up. This obviously puts us at odds with our customers. Our raison d’être was around finding that important customer someone to speak to, not leading them down a maze that ended in our ultimate enemy! Voicemail oblivion. We haven’t built this functionality. It’s at odds with what we’re trying to create so we’ve deliberately retarded it down the backlog. The problem here is that it turns out there is a way to nearly make it happen. And now the system is magically set up to do this for a decent percentage of our customers. So resulting from moments of founders descending into heated arguments about product priority or sales priority, we slowly negotiate some kind of middle ground, a compromise between accommodating these customers whose use case really doesn’t fit out product and saying no to hackiness. We try to justify this by saying that ultimately we’re going to build out these features because our target customers are really going to need them, but this is probably intellectually self-deceiving. I wish there were some moment of great enlightenment at the end of this semi-rant. Alas there isn’t. We grapple with this seesaw act on a weekly basis and using our collective wisdom aim to balance our resistance to product debt against our need for sales. We always look at it through a lens of our ideal customer, making sure we’re not creating too much unnecessary work for our future workmates to deal with. I’m sure we’ll fail much of the time on this last point, but provided the decisions are considered and done with understanding of the risk, we go for it.