Scrappy Startup Forum

If you have already launched your scrappy startup, you are probably already familiar with doing your own customer service. If you haven’t launched yet, you will be familiar with it. Either way, you may already be considering outsourcing your CS or at least hiring someone “cheap” to do it for you.

And that is possibly one of the worst things you can do as a scrappy startup.

Staying in touch

One of the biggest advantages to doing your own customer service is staying in touch with your users. By tending your own complaint queue, you will be immediately aware of any problems that are bubbling to the surface (or skyrocketing into a catastrophe). It will give you a chance to head off problems before they become devastating, and also give you a chance to possibly fix the problem.

Fixing problems

Have you ever tried calling your cable company to get some complex problem fixed? Was the first level agent able to fix it? Probably not, and this frustrated you. Customers don’t like it when the first person they talk to can’t fix their problem. By being the first person to talk to the customer, and also being the person who can get things done, you can provide a much better experience, one that your customer is sure to gush about. A “cheap” or outsourced person would not have the authority to get things done, otherwise they wouldn’t be cheap!

Getting talked about

One of the most important goals of a scrappy startup is getting talked about. Free press is worth its price in gold, and one of the best ways to get free press is to impress a customer. The best way to do that is doing something for your customer that they think is amazing, but is easy for you.

A quick story — my day job is running the operations for reddit.com, a social link sharing site. Although we aren’t a scrappy startup anymore, we operate like one. We only have 4 engineers, and all of us do customer service for our main product, which is self-serve ad space. When there is a problem, we can fix it quickly. When there is a bug in the code, we can still fix it rapidly, because the same person who wrote the code also does the CS for it. Recently we had an advertiser who had purchased a day’s worth of advertising. A few hours into their run, their service provider went offline for a few hours, effectively reducing their ad time by 30% and giving our users a horrible experience in relation to their brand. They contacted us after the outage and asked if we could give them a credit or extend their ad by seven hours.

Of course, we had no obligation to do anything at all, since the problem was with their service provider. But we believe in awesome customer service, so we immediately comped him for another full day of ads at the same rate, and then gently suggested that he told people how awesome we are. Truth be told, it is harder for us to comp seven hours than a full day, but the customer doesn’t know that. As far as they know, we just want way above and beyond to service this one customer.

He immediately mailed back thanking us profusely, and then tweeted about how happy he was. Then his customers retweeted what he said, essentially turning his customers into our PR department. Total cost to us? A few dollars in lost revenue.

Show me the money

So how does all this equal profit? For starters, that customer from above was so happy with with his experience that he came back and ordered more ads for more money than we had comped him. So in that sense the whole process netted us real money.

More importantly though, the profits comes from the extra goodwill you will get. Happy customers will be your advocate — they will tell everyone how great you are and maybe even convince a few people to spend some money with you, or spend more of their own money with you.

Even if they don’t spend any more money, or least you will feel good knowing that you made someone happy.

There has been a lot of buzz around the Valley lately about the term “scrappy” and how startups are staying lean / scrappy to optimize growth and profitability.

Here are four simple ideas a founder/team  should consider to increase scrappiness:
 
Philosophy — Everything starts with the way you view the world. Reading and understanding various philosophical systems from Stoicism to Zen Buddhism to Dale Carnegie are all important for a founder to understand how he/she views the world. Once you can adopt and commit to a scrappy philosophy then you can focus on scrappy execution. A founder must live scrappy and really “be” scrappy.

People – A founder must hire scrappy people. Look for folks who have started clubs on campus; have led church groups or worked at a non-profit. Any life experiences where they have had to deal with incredibly constrained resources and have had to hustle. You also have to look for folks who are excited with the possibility of finding creative solutions to problems by leveraging minimal resources. Also finding people with large personal and professional networks is always a plus since they can tap their network for solutions to problems.
 
Reward and acknowledge people who stay scrappy.

Products — With the recent surge of amazing web based solutions for common business processes, being scrappy has never been easier. I have listed a few such solutions below:
·         www.pipelinedeals.com – CRM system
·         www.lessaccounting.com – Accounting
·         www.ReTargeter.com – branding and driving sales
·         www.FlowTown.com – email marketing / social media demographics
·         www.KISSMetrics.com – metrics
·         www.Recurly.com – managing online payments
·         www.Yammer.com – rapid cross platform internal communication
·         www.google.com/apps — web based email and calendars
 
Place – Given the current economic conditions there are ample opportunities to find cheap office space. There are also a host of larger companies or other startups that have additional space and are willing to sublease that space to you. Also location is key, if you are surrounded by other startups, great resources and free events that may be more beneficial in the long term than going with a cheaper space.

Being scrappy is a life-long philosophy but when/if you do have the resources then make sure to give back to other scrappy folks!

-Arjun Dev Arora, ReTargeter

Note from admin: **Want more of Arjun? Come to the launch of Scrappy Startup Forum on April 30th! http://scrappyceo.eventbrite.com **

In the spirit of lean startups and the current economic situation, it was refreshing for Jon and Dan to tell us stories about scrappy startups and the mentality behind scrappy.

What stuck the most to me was the differentiation betweetn lean startup and scrappy startup. 

Lean Startup is a methodology, Scrappy Startup is a mentality.

(Thank you, Dan and Jon for enlightening us on this distinction.)

More scrappy stories were shared on how SlideShare scrappified their way to success, how Dan Martell trained his employees in the back of a car while driving to and from meetings, and suggestions on how to be scrappy in your own startup.

Learn how they found success in startups in this #scrappystartup video.

(feel free to comment afterwards and get the conversation started)