The Path To Scale
In our New Year’s message, Henry and I spoke about the need to enhance quality and the ability to scale the platforms we have launched. We shared the irony that after launch, we need unscalable, high-touch customer service. This may seem counter-intuitive: how does unscalable service align with a need to scale? At first, this may seem paradoxical. I wanted to expand on this idea and share more thoughts and resources on this.
We need to leverage unscalable high-touch customer support and service when we launch new products and platforms for a couple of reasons:
Systems will always fail.
This is a fact of life. We can count on it and need to plan for it proactively. In the old days, we would call this operational risk assessment and build mitigating controls to manage the risks of something not working. Big terms for what really amounts to having a backup plan or compensating process for when something does not work or goes wrong. Here’s the thing: when we launch a new product or platform, plan as we might, we cannot possibly anticipate everything that will go wrong. We have no choice sometimes but to learn as we go. In these cases, we minimize the impact to our customers by over-compensating with hands-on customer service.
This will pay off for a couple of reasons: (1) customers will give us the benefit of the doubt in the event of system failures when we provide great service recovery. We make evangelists of our earliest customers. It is not difficult to imagine the positive word of mouth and posts on social. I would argue that the best stories people share about service is usually about what companies did when something did not work! (2) The learnings from these recoveries uncover what we did not anticipate and generate the user stories/requirements for system enhancements that will lead to a truly scalable solution.
One Time Opportunity.
When we first launch platforms, it may be the only time we can literally afford to talk to every user or potential customer! Paul Graham of Y Combinator has said, contrary to conventional tech platform growth-at-all-costs wisdom, that it’s much much better to have one hundred users who love you than one million users who “sort of like you”. When we launch our platforms, this is our chance to make sure our initial users love us. When more customers join, we won’t be able to afford this level of direct engagement, and we risk developing a platform that people “sort of like” – if we are lucky. We provide unscalable high-touch customer support and service when we launch new platforms because we can. We will not have this chance again.
The book The Airbnb Story tells of the very early days of Airbnb when Paul Graham extolled the Airbnb founders to “go to your users”. They literally did this by going door-to-door, visiting as many “hosts” as they could. They parked themselves in their hosts living rooms and observed all the pain points first-hand. Brian Chesky, Airbnb CEO, would take a checkbook out of his backpack and write paper checks to pay hosts on the spot and his co-founder would take customer service calls directly on his personal mobile phone. That’s how important the initial Airbnb hosts were - they needed them to love Airbnb despite the kinks and early issues. What they learned by providing this kind of unscalable support ultimately paid off, and the Airbnb rocket ship took off not too long afterwards.
If we want our platforms to truly scale, we first have to be prepared to do things that don’t scale. We need to get our hands dirty. We need to be prepared to serve our customers one-by-one. Brian Chesky calls it handcrafting the core experience.