Why Turning Away Customers Can Be A Great Product Strategy

One of the hardest things about starting new things is not having a big vision. And once you can do great customer development it’s rarely about lack of customer driven inspiration for the pains you want to solve, or the joy you want to create.

The biggest challenge I see time and time again with startups and corporate innovation teams alike is knowing when to stop. Holding themselves to focus ruthlessly- often at the cost of their product roadmap.

There’s so much to explore in an early stage venture, and especially at the beginning so much of our data is still directional. Yes, we’re testing and learning frequently and fast to ensure we’re still on the right path, but it makes it insanely hard to shut off the incessant voice in the back of our heads asking “but what about feature X… why haven’t you built that yet” or lamenting “we’re only focussing on a small customer segment, but our idea could be huge!!!”

We want to fulfil our full vision, for as many customers as we can, as fast as we can. Holding back on building the features we’ve already thought of, or worse, those our competitor has already built can make it feel like you’re stuck in the mud.

But one of the biggest strength startups have is speed. The ability to move fast, validating and invalidating ideas at a pace corporates have historically struggled to match. Now today, corporates know they need to learn the executional agility and speed of a startup. But they have even more of a battle to shed the traditional waterfall development: scope your full feature set, handover the tech spec (often to a design and development agency) and then launch.

When you follow Lean Startup Methodology you prioritise speed of learning over everything else- including building.

This requires the incredibly hard discipline of keeping your focus fixed on your next learning goal rather than focussing on feature parity with competitors or launching every shiny thing your genius entreprenuerial brain can conceptualise.

This week I saw an amazing example of this in practice.

I got rejected as a customer by a startup.

This is a SaaS based startup offering great user experience on email. It will help you be more efficient, enjoy email more and close more leads- *apparently. It’s called Superhuman: https://superhuman.com/

I’d managed to jump the waitlist (that’s right- an email interface startup managed to engineer scarcity with a waitlist) by begging a colleague (the one whose email experience I’d been coveting) to recommend me.

I thought I was through. I felt special. I actually went into work that day excited to have my email experience overturned (yes, I’m sad, yes I’m ok with that).

They asked me to complete a short workflow questionnaire. Now I hate surveys- but even this had me- I presumed they’d use it to onboard me even more swiftly based on the questions, and to feed into their product roadmap.

That is until I received the below.

They weren’t ready for me and my Google Pixel. When I told them I did emails on my phone as much as my laptop I was unwittingly disqualifying myself as one of their first target customer segment.

Now typically, as a founder we would be terrified of having to give this as a response. To tell a customer we can’t serve them. It feels so counter-intuitive. Surely I could still offer them the laptop experience while they wait for my Android functionality to be ready?

But this decision is brilliant. For a proposition that revolves around the experience, they chose to focus on just a customer segment they could deliver that full experience to- before scaling out to other customers. It’s bold. It’s brave. I think it will pay off. They’re going to build an incredibly loyal fan base of early evangelists, who will give them incredibly ripe data to expand their offering, at the right pace to continue learning.

I asked when they would be ready for me. No sooner than next year.

They’ve walked away with a fan. Who never even used their product, but who now already associates their brand with excellence, with wanting to get it really right for the customer, and who doesn’t want to deliver something that doesn’t meet my real needs, because they took the time to try to understand me before they accepted my sale.

Next year. I can’t wait.