Should You Always Listen to Customers?
Most smart entrepreneurs are customer focused. They want to make the customer happy and get more of them. But are there times when you shouldn’t listen to customers?
This question was the topic at one of our portfolio companies, PBwiki , last week. One of the senior developers had put together a list of articles that he had read about development philosophies. The one article that caused the most interaction by the team was an excerpt from The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper. Most people came down on the side that you have to listen to customers to make sure you are building things that the marketplace wants. But I actually took a different twist when I sent this email:
I think there are times that you should not listen to customers. The reason is that the not all customers are equally valuable to a business. Often customers that you have at one point in your business are not the customers that get you to the next level. The key is to have the business vision to understand who the “real customers” are. Listening to early adopters or trendsetting individuals is not always good for appealing to the mass audience. In our case, our job as entrepreneurs is to understand who the customers are that we want in the future. Do we have any of them now and if so, how do we make them happier and how do we attract more of them?The key message here is that you have to know who your target is and listen to those customers. Don’t think that every customer fits your target audience.
August 14th, 2008 at 3:14 am
You might also point out that while PBWiki’s market position is as an easy-to-use wiki tool, the tool actually sucks pretty badly. Whether or not you listen to your customers is moot if you can’t design a good product. PBWiki has a big target painted on its back right now and it’s only a matter of time before someone who knows how to extract useful information from users (not customers) and design decent interaction with that knowledge will create a decent Wiki tool and crush the peanut butter guys. As Uncle Bob Martin says, “Craftsmanship is better than crap.”