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It’s the founding CEO’s job to personally email the first 1000 users

blog.thestartuptoolkit.com

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Re: It’s the founding CEO’s job to personally email the first 1000 users

#51

Post by lurker14 »

singer wrote: post #21
fabiandesimone wrote: post #15

I've done this since day one in my startup (I'm in day 112). Not being a hacker I have to be really careful where to put my dev money, so any automation I might want to do I have to figure out ways to do it without involving the devs (that money goes to the service I'm building) I have a combination of processes: 1. User must fill out a form with their name and email in order to get the download link. For this I use…

Do you have any trouble with people reporting your drip emails as spam? I found that some people are reporting emails instead of clicking the unsubscribe link. Unfortunately, many email clients make that button more convenient than tracking down an uninstall link within the email.

The customer is always right.

Maybe your emails aren't appreciated in the spirit they are sent. Just because you cajoled someone to check a box to use your site, doesn't mean they appreciate your email campaign.

Re: It’s the founding CEO’s job to personally email the first 1000 users

#52

Post by fabiandesimone »

singer wrote: post #50
fabiandesimone wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. My audience is very engaged :)

Can you post a link? I'd like to check out your product.

Sure: http://www.bbguard.com.ve (Site is in Spanish)

Re: It’s the founding CEO’s job to personally email the first 1000 users

#53

Post by gpjt »

chadgeidel wrote: post #35
singer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any trouble with people reporting your drip emails as spam? I found that some people are reporting emails instead of clicking the unsubscribe link. Unfortunately, many email clients make that button more convenient than tracking down an uninstall link within the email.

You know what would be neat? When you click the "spam" button in Gmail (or other clients with similar functionality) and there's an "unsubscribe" link in the email then Gmail could suggest visiting the link with some kind of a notification and buttons labeled "unsubscribe" or "no, this is spam". I suppose that could be abused however.

Gmail does something like that if emails include a List-Unsubscribe header: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=81126#un...

Re: It’s the founding CEO’s job to personally email the first 1000 users

#54

Post by weaponofchoice »

freejack wrote: post #48
weaponofchoice wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree that it feels like a waste of executive time. Although, there's probably a bit that the exec could learn from early users, perhaps initiate conversations over features, gather pain points and so on. But there's no reason why this can't be handled by someone else on the team. And '1000' is just a ridiculous arbitrary number. How quickly did the company get to 1000 users? Imagine replying to a 1000 early adopters…

Whether or not it's a waste of time depends on the commitment you've made to your customers. Jobs obsessed over design for a reason. Our promise is to provide exceptional customer service, so that's how we prioritize our time.

Well said.

Though, habits like these (suggested by the article) early-on could shape the startup's perception of their commitment to their customers. It could end up being a costly 'culture' thing.

It's still debatable whether dealing with customers daily, makes for productive use of an executive's precious time, even if the startup's value proposition revolves around exceptional customer service.

I've witnessed a few small companies getting infinitely better, once they started hiring the right people to fill sales and customer relations positions, that were usually handled by the founders themselves.

Re: It’s the founding CEO’s job to personally email the first 1000 users

#55

Post by freejack »

singer wrote: post #29
cbr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"more convenient than tracking down an uninstall link within the email" Perhaps you should make your unsubscribe links easier to find?

The link is extremely easy to find. It's the only link that appears at the bottom of my emails. Checking the box in my Gmail inbox and clicking the "Spam" button is much easier than opening the email and hunting down the unsubscribe link.

OT: we moved our unsub link to the top of our mailers and complaints have dropped to almost zero.

Re: It’s the founding CEO’s job to personally email the first 1000 users

#56

Post by garyhalverson »

How can you go wrong trying to connect with your customers as a business owner. I think this is a great strategy to follow and even beyond the 1000 users, you can still grab x number of new customers to email personally. People want to feel important and personally communicating with the founder is one way they can do that.

I can recall a time when I received a personal phone call from the CEO of a marketing blog I followed. When he introduced himself, I recognized the name, but was sort of shocked he was calling me. The guy ran a very successful business with tens of thousands of subscribers, why was he calling me? That was my initial thought. He wanted my opinion on a few things, that was all. Wasn't trying to sell me anything. My answers were lame at best cause I was caught off guard (literally shocked), but after the call was over, I had to sit down and take in what just happened. I never forgot how that call impacted me. It did make a difference. I ended up buying several of his products after that, not because he called me, but I believed his products were good and felt comfortable buying them from him.

It's simple, really, after looking back, he was just building relationship and rapport which translates into trust which translates into relationship which turned into sales. When your product has a lot of competitors, who does your customer turn to first? If you have established some sort of rapport, it will be your business. It works...

Re: It’s the founding CEO’s job to personally email the first 1000 users

#57

Post by freejack »

weaponofchoice wrote: post #54
freejack wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether or not it's a waste of time depends on the commitment you've made to your customers. Jobs obsessed over design for a reason. Our promise is to provide exceptional customer service, so that's how we prioritize our time.

Well said. Though, habits like these (suggested by the article) early-on could shape the startup's perception of their commitment to their customers. It could end up being a costly 'culture' thing. It's still debatable whether dealing with customers daily, makes for productive use of an executive's precious time, even if the startup's value proposition revolves around exceptional customer service. I've witnessed a fe…

Well, I can say that it has been a great use of my time :-) The increased focus has demonstrably paid off in terms of real revenue and customer activity that I don't think we could have tapped into with a lesser focus. Everyday I'm seeing new things that help us improve, that help me set a strategic direction that would be muted if the feedback were filtered through intermediaries.

There are other ways of organizing of course. Someone once told me that its way better to organize around the strengths and weaknesses of the people that you have and the people that become available than it is to organize within the constraints of an org. chart "because that's the way its done". I'm sure that if we had a different mix of skills, we might choose to delegate differently, but this is what works for us. For example, I spend very little time worrying about engineering matters compared to the amount of time I spend managing customer service workflows. What matters is whether we're putting points on the board, not so much which plays we're running.

Re: It’s the founding CEO’s job to personally email the first 1000 users

#58

Post by redguava »

damoncali wrote: post #17
redguava wrote: post #2

As long as you have their first name, I don't see why this can't be automated. It doesn't seem time well spent and there is more chance for error doing it manually. I agree with getting in touch, I just don't agree with spending your time each day doing it.

You shouldn't fully automate it. I have a semi automatic process where I click a mail_to link and get a pre-filled email ready to send with the customer's name in it. Occasionally, there is reason to do a little research into the customer's operations (e.g. visiting their website) from which I can add a personal twist. If you do it that way, it's not a huge time suck. Here's what wrecks the experience: 1) The email c…

All of this can be handled in an automated email. I do this already in my startup and I get responses from my users just like I did it manually.

When bootstrapping a startup that you want to be able to scale, automating everything that can be automated is very important.

Re: It’s the founding CEO’s job to personally email the first 1000 users

#59

Post by qeorge »

freejack wrote: post #7

This is a great recommendation for a startup looking to differentiate based on customer service. I don't buy the implication that this isn't a great use of "executive time". I'm not the CEO, but I run a business unit and the buck definitely stops here. I still make time to: - respond to random emails I pick out of our customer service email queue - read all customer feedback submitted from the "feedback" tab on our w…

Counterpoint:

If you have You've got time.

Re: It’s the founding CEO’s job to personally email the first 1000 users

#60

Post by rumblestrut »

rumblestrut wrote: post #11

I've mentioned this in another thread before, but Wufoo sent me a handwritten thank you note for being a (paid) customer one year around Christmas. Now THAT made an impression.

Ha! I found that postcard today. Here's the front and back.

http://ericjgruber.com/images/wufoo-thanks-front.jpg

http://ericjgruber.com/images/wufoo-thanks-rear.jpg

(Note: Frank, who the card was addressed to, was the cardholder on the account but I used it all over our site, to clarify.)

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