What 2 broken arms taught me

I came back from my January holiday excited by the prospect of 2012.  It was my first real holiday for … I don’t know how long, and revived me.  I was convinced this was the year our business would take off.   On my break, I’d worked out my priorities for the year and compiled a huge list of things to do.  Action points for a year.  Armed with this, I hit the office on January 17 and set to it.

Three days later, I fell at the gym breaking both my arms!   I was racing my friend Lisa, and decided to run through some other exercisers, whereas Lisa went around them.  The manoeuvre was intended to get me ahead but instead I tripped on the concrete and used my arms to break the fall, snapping both elbows in the process.

For three weeks, I could barely use my arms.  It’s amazing, all the things you can’t do without arms – type, write, drive… Crossing things off items on a list was another, but doing that wasn’t necessary.  Panic!  How will I get through everything – anything – without arms?

I could still talk to people so I organised meetings.  First, I met with everyone in the company and asked them about the product and our plan.  How did they think we were going and how could we do things better?  When I ran out of staff (or they ran out on me), I set up meetings with people who used our site – retailers and their customers.  I asked what they liked about what we were doing, what problems they had that we were solving, what they thought of other similar competing sites, and what more they’d like from our site.  I also visited retail stores and watched as retailers used our service and tried to convince customers to sign up.

What I found was astounding.  My three armless weeks will have a great long-term impact on the success of Posse.  I discovered we’re solving a whole range of problems for retailers, not just the ones we knew about.  By watching the platform in action, I saw ways we could make things easier for stores and learned how much they valued aspects of our service other than attracting new customers.

My biggest discovery was that although we were solving a problem for stores, we weren’t solving a problem for customers.  They already referred friends to their favourite restaurants and gyms.  We could make this process more rewarding but we weren’t solving a customer problem.  Watching stores try to get customers to sign up, I noticed that people’s reactions are very different to what they say in focus groups, where everyone is polite and says ‘oh yes, I would use that.’  But in the real world, they’re busy folk, constantly bombarded with new apps, loyalty programs or websites to use.  If Posse was to work, we had to be so awesome that everyone would use it and talk about it with their friends.  And we had to solve real customer problems.

In the following six weeks, I ran fourteen focus groups, visited more than twenty stores, and interviewed over thirty potential users.  I didn’t expect them to tell me what they wanted but asked questions about which retailers they love and why.  How did they share this information with friends?  Why and how did friends offer recommendations?  What was the last time they’d received prizes and how had that felt?

And I started to see what we needed to do.  Customers have two big problems that we can solve and if they’re going to start using a new app or site, it has to be delightful in every way.

Armed (oops!) with this information I worked with our team and an agency and we formulated a strategy together.  We’ll roll this out over the next couple of months and you’ll hear more about the ideas later.

My point here is, you don’t need to break both your arms before you start to invest serious time in speaking with customers.  It’s much more valuable than the list of other things you plan to get done in any given week.  It’ll be the reason why your company succeeds or fails.