For the Love of Money or the Game?
Have you seen the recent New Balance commercial on TV? I love it. It asks the simple question, do you play sports for the love of money or the game? I think it resonnates beyond sports and into the business world if you think about it. For the love money or the game…or rather are you in business for the love of making a lots of money your providing the customer the best experience or product possible? I think if you can answer that fundamental question you can set the proper tone and strategy for your business…and you’ll be profitable too.
Don’t believe me, here are some examples of companies who are customer focused, not out to make a quick buck.
– Located in Chicago, Feedburner is the defacto tracking solution for RSS feeds. They aren’t just crazy about syndication and all of its possibilities, they are passionate about it. They are passionate about providing key statistics to their customers. Each year Feedburner takes a day and lets their developers loose to each build one cool new enhancement that can be implemented tomorrow on their service. They are committed to keeping a free version for smaller businesses and individuals to use. They create evangelists one customer at a time every day with the information and service they provide. It is that focus on providing tools for their customers to analyze and monetize their data through syndication that is what landed Feedburner some of the largest publishers in the U.S. including Reuters and the Associated Press.
– Originally a small Web site design shop in Chicago, 37Signals changed their business model in 2003 when they showed their internal, home-grown, project management (or collaboration as they call it) tool. Now called Basecamp, 37Signals launched a revolution of design companies expanding into the software developement world to solve solutions they and their clients have been struggling over for years. 37Signals is passionate about creating small business tools at a reasonable cost. They know that there will be better, more expensive tools created by other companies, but 37Signals is focusing on the lower end of the market. Command the lower end of the market at prices almost anyone can afford and you will profit. 37Signals runs a scaled down version of their products for free with the ability at anytime to upgrade or downgrade levels. They take the mentality that less is more and that enables them to respond to the real needs of their customers.
37Singals then took that mentality and expanded it out to three more products (TaDa, BackPack, and Campfire) and has helped revolutionize a programming language (Ruby) and framework (Rails) into mainstream use.
– A company co-founded by Adam Curry (ex-MTV VJ and affectionately known as the "podfather") Podshow has started to position itself as the "un-label" for artists to distribute their music to a wider audience than possibly the very trend and profit heavy record labels would. Podshow created the podsafe music network and is soon going to launch a music store that allows any musician to publish and distribute tracks and records at iTunes competitive prices.
What sets these companies apart?
Passion for their products and services. Created solutions that has mass appeal, whether intentionally or by accident. Continue to enhance their products not for pure $$$, but so their customers remain loyal and evangelize their products and services.
Another common element that sets these companies apart is that they are small. Does that mean small businesses are the only businesses that can follow this model? Certainly not. How big do you think your local Subway employs? Or your local drug store? This model can be applied to almost any company and work. Customer focus wins in the end. Think about it. IS your company customer focused or profit driven?
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