Interview with Raphael Allstadt, Co-founder and CEO of tl;dv and Tom Bangay, Senior Director of Content & Community at Juro, hosted by Natasha Lytton, Head of Brand and Network at Seedcamp
Learn all things content from the masterminds behind Juro and tl;dv’s content strategies – from why content was first determined to be an essential part of the business and shaping the early strategy to execution measurement and key learnings for early-stage founders.
For Juro and tl;dv, content has been an integral part of their strategies from the early days. Here is why and how they set the ground for successful content strategies:
Targeting in-house lawyers, for whom the trust bar is very high, Juro, an all-in-one contract automation platform, started building its content function early on to showcase its expertise. At a time when the legal technology sector was overexposed to hype, Juro chose to be careful, honest, and transparent with its messaging.
tl;dv, a meeting productivity tool for remote-first teams, embraced a challenger brand mentality for their content strategy. The team knew that they were not solving a groundbreaking previously-unheard problem. Many of their future users were already struggling with too many meetings in a given week and searching for transcription and recording solutions. tl;dv knew it had to stand out from the swarm of other competitors tackling this well-trodden problem. They used content as a way to differentiate themselves in the broader landscape.
Tune in and/or read on to learn:
Watch it on YouTube or listen to it on your favourite podcast platform.
Q & A with Raphael Allstadt, Co-founder and CEO of tl;dv and Tom Bangay, Senior Director of Content & Community at Juro, and Natasha Lytton, Head of Brand and Network at Seedcamp
Natasha Lytton: What does content mean for you?
Raphael Allstadt: When we started tl;dv, we were looking at the market and the general state of ripeness of the market. And we found that, generally, the problem is well-defined. Many people feel the problem of having way too many meetings with an average of 16 hours a week. People were already looking for solutions like the first entry point to record a meeting, to transcribe it in order to share it with someone. Also, we had a lot of well-established players in the space already that we knew we had to pick up the fight with.
So, early on, we looked at content as a way to differentiate ourselves as a challenger brand in that space. We said we are okay if some people don’t like our approach, but others really love us for doing what we do.
Tom Bangay: The main persona that we sell to are in-house lawyers, and lawyers have a very strong sniff test for bullshit. The trust bar is very high, so you are already at a disadvantage in terms of authority as a startup, and then you’re selling to a persona that doesn’t believe anything you say. So, I think the founders really invested in the idea that the content is going to pay off both short and long-term. Because no one is going to trust us until we showcase our expertise.
Natasha Lytton: What were some of those early experiments when you first started deploying content as your marketing and brand armor?
Tom Bangay: At first, we worked on one of the founders’ personal profiles and thought leadership. He was the only internal thought leader we had. After a while, we thought, let’s just do something really big, really quickly.
So early on, we took an approach of trying to leverage reputable brands and crowdsource thought leadership amongst the legal community. We did a lot of interview-led content where I would get GCs (general counsels) to talk to me. They always signed off, and they were always flattered and also glad not to have to do it themselves. Then we published a book about legal operations that got us, I think, a thousand new contacts in HubSpot, which was really good.
So we did that for a bit, but that’s classic lead gen, not really demand gen. So it really helps with the brand in the early days because people just associate your company with these more mature ones and assume that they are customers and that kind of thing. But as time went on, we needed to be a bit more high intent in terms of the leads we were capturing.
So probably, two and a half years ago, we started focusing really intently on SEO, which is where I spend probably half my time now, strategically these days.
Raphael Allstadt: When we started out, we said, great, let’s start with thought leadership content about how to work asynchronously, how to be fewer times in meetings. And we thought this was a way to really generate leads as well. It was a great exercise; it resulted in a manifesto that we still have on tl;dv today, but it was really like the wasteland because the challenge always is with SEO.
It takes months to see if it’s successful or not. So if you like, it’s a lot of opportunity cost as well because you take a long time to realize that it was the wrong strategy. And to add on that, you don’t have the authority and trust on Google to rank actually for the content you’re doing.
So this was actually one of the first learnings. The conclusion we drew from that was let’s focus on more transactional content, as the first strategy that is clearly assigned to an action that the user wants to complete, that we can serve and start from there. That’s the first learning we had with written content and SEO as a whole.
Natasha Lytton: Can you talk more as well about your content creation when it comes to video? What led you to develop the content and the very awesome video collateral that you’ve ended up experimenting with?
Raphael Allstadt: What we always had in our DNA and what we always believed in – because we started out writing content – we were challenging ourselves to have fun with it and be witty as a brand. So we said, Hey, there is something it generally resonates with the market, but we didn’t see results coming in. So essentially, when we refocused ourselves, we looked at the market and said, ‘what defines us compared to the competition?’. And, you know, it’s video clearly. We are a video product.
We really believe in remote, unique video to convey information. So that’s very aligned with the brand that was kind of the first thing sort of funny, very bold, and video first. And then we said, ‘okay, how can we align this with viral content?’ And so we did really like a stroll through TikTok and found a great creator.
And that was really the aha moment of doing that. And when we did launch on Product Hunt and for the first time, it pinnacled all to this moment that we said, okay, let’s produce a really great video, invest some money with this creator that was an influencer himself. And the reaction was really mind-blowing because it was actually like sort of untapped territory in product launches.
Like they’re all very similar. So yeah, in the end, we won the product video of the year on Product Hunt with that, which was great. I have the Golden Kitty here, which we were super happy about. That really was the final push for us to say, okay, where can we take this next?
We actually hired the influencer, and he’s now really running content on social media for us. We have really doubled down on that and seen great results from that so far.
Natasha Lytton: How has your content strategy evolved?
Tom Bangay: The trend line has been, we’ve just moved further and further down the funnel. And I think that the more stuff you do, the longer the timelines and also the more data points you have. Almost everything is vanity metrics, and it’s really easy to get distracted by them. So let’s say you get a page one ranking for a key high-intent term – vanity metric. You get a really strong click-through from that search engine results page – vanity metric; you get loads of traffic – vanity… Loads of revenue – metric! That’s a real metric! So at the moment, we focus super heavily on pipeline, because, obviously, there are sales performance aspects to what gets closed and product coverage as well, but everything is about pipeline.
For a company like us, it’s just too easy to game it [otherwise]. And as soon as you become a function that’s in any way mature and you have like specialists and some budget, and you’re doing lots of stuff. If your target was, let’s say, MQL (marketing-qualified lead), and people can get a bonus by hitting a certain number, it just drives the wrong behaviors.
We’re very focused on pipeline at the moment, and the only way that works all across the team – we have demand gen and a content team – is because our attribution is incredible.
We pretty much know everything that happens with our traffic. Without that info, I just don’t think we could have been able to scale at all. But as soon as you have it, you can really put your foot down in certain things.
And that’s been super helpful to us. On the team question, the team structure pretty much maps to the things we focus on in content. So the only things we do in content are acquisition through nurture through community and then branded sales enablement.
Raphael Allstadt: We are thinking very similarly, but for example, for our social media profiles, which we post and invest heavily on, we count a lot on impressions overall because, again, we are in a competitive market and brand considerations are important in getting our name out there. From a second aspect, because tl;dv is very easy to be adopted and learned, it’s usually one person in the organization that starts using the tool. And then, you need to think from that person’s perspective as well. How good do they feel to introduce tl;dv, to their peers and the team as a tool, as a solution, but also as a brand and company, given that there is competition in the space.
We actually see really, really, high brand love that helps people actually feel good about suggesting to use tl;dv as opposed to a competitor. So in that sense, for us, it’s a little bit harder sometimes to attribute, and that’s why impressions for us are important – and also a great social presence and a lot of character in the content we produce and brand.
But on the other side, obviously, when it comes to SEO, now we are very transactionally focused, and that has clear goals of essentially generating signups as the first means. And from there, the product sort of takes over, and that’s then obviously what we track across the funnel is, are we attracting the right people? Are they converting correctly? But, ultimately, for now, it’s signups on what we produce on Google and the blog.
Natasha Lytton: How much do you think the founder needs to be bought into content for it to be an important part of the business and the strategy?
Raphael Allstadt: I think it’s important because if a strategy fails and the founders have a lot of buy-in, in the way we’ve done it, it’s helping you maintain some sort of boldness to keep (doing) one thing. For example, when SEO failed for us in the early stages, it could have been like, ‘Hey, maybe the content is too funny and not serious enough.’ Like all your competitors are focusing more on the transaction itself. You’re adding humorous elements. But if the founders really stand in for that and say, ‘Hey, I think we should push in that direction,’ then I think it helps keep this consistency and transform it just to some other channel – and then find success there, that you otherwise would’ve not found because maybe you would’ve iterated faster on the brand. So founder gut, I think, is important in that sense.
Even I do TikTok videos sometimes. I think it’s important that the founders are involved at our stage, and we are earlier than Juro, obviously.
Tom Bangay: I never worked at a startup before I worked for Juro. And I think if I’d known anything about startups, there’s like a couple of things I would’ve done: 1) I would’ve realized it was quite risky to take the job as employee number 12, and in hindsight, it all worked out; and 2) if I’d known quite how long the shadow is that founders cast, I would’ve interrogated them a bit more in the interview process. And again, I got really lucky there because they’re both great and I didn’t really have any problems. But if you had a difficult founder or a founder who perhaps was hiring you because they need some headcount, but they’re not totally bought in, that would be quite bad.
So, I can only speak for my particular founder, but if you can show that guy a number on a piece of paper that is important to the business, and then you can show that you can influence that number, and you do it predictably, and it helps the company grow, you can do anything you want within reason. You’ll get all the backing that you need, support, buy-in and investment with team members.
Natasha Lytton: What should companies first thinking of investing in content bear in mind?
Tom Bangay: You need a really clear vision. If I look back and think about things that I wish I’d known at the beginning, strategically rather than doing specific tactical things – I think, if you bring in a content person and you’ve not sorted out your fundamentals, like what’s the value proposition, what’s your ideal customer profile? what’s your messaging framework look like? have you written all this stuff down? then you’re sort of asking people to drive a car without a steering wheel.
You really need to have all that defined before you try and position your company around it with content. Because if you start writing loads and loads of stuff, and then it’s unfocused, and you misunderstood who you’re aiming at, it’s just gonna miss immediately.
The other thing I thought of was, having a really clear understanding of what is high intent, which Rapha mentioned around transactional SEO content. At some point, things are not gonna work.
Or like in our case, we sell to lawyers, so every year, we have to remember not to panic when they’ll go on holiday for two months in summer, and there’s no demand. It’s really interesting that lawyers’ buying patterns, particularly in the UK, track exactly to private school holidays. So if the kids are off, no one’s buying anything. I think that kind of thing, like really understanding if you need to panic and just make sure you’re only focused on high intent, and you stop doing things like thought leadership. Do you actually know what high intent is? If you can’t answer that question quickly, you’re just gonna make bad content decisions.
Also, we’re very, very aggressive with our input metrics. You gotta be extra confident your strategy is correct, but if you are really confident in it and you know you found the right thing, go really big, really fast, really hard, just like, press your foot to the floor. And that’s how you’re gonna move the needle.
Raphael Allstadt: I totally agree. I think the only thing I just want to reiterate is the general journey: how is your product discovered, or how should it be discovered?
Is it the founder knocking on your door for the first year and trying to really guide you through that journey, which is also what we did, as you’re still building version one, essentially? And then maybe your POC is just showing it to the team. Maybe some thought leadership. Writing can really help you just to reiterate the values and add some love to the brand, but they’re never designed to convert. In our case, we know it’s important that people like our funnels; PLG (product-led growth) is where most of the growth is coming from.
So we want to create content to help people feel proud and excited to introduce tl;dv into the wider company. To really understand, what is the main goal of your content along the journey of the buyer – super, super important. The other tip that I would give is to be realistic along the time. If you start content strategy for your blog, it will take months to show results, and don’t expect it to yield short-term outcomes. I think there should be always other channels in the mix when you look at content as a tool to generate leads and, ultimately, buyers.
Tom Bangay: I think just to add to that last point, which I a hundred percent agree with, it’s a really difficult one with SEO because it takes ages. So it’s really hard to convince people often, especially in their early stages when everyone’s panicking, that it’s the right thing to do.
I was having this conversation with someone the other day about why would you stick with it when you can get more certainty that you’re gonna get some leads by outbound or PPC (pay per click) or whatever. And my answer was, would you like a customer acquisition cost of zero?
Once you build that beachhead of search traffic that converts, it’s just there now forever. And you spend almost no money or time on it. Nowadays, it’s really important to have good unit economics. So, you really gotta hold your nerves with search, but if you get through the eye of the needle, it’s great.
Natasha Lytton: Any last words of wisdom were things you know now that you wish you had known when first starting out with your content?
Raphael Allstadt: I think the first one is be realistic. What is achievable? I mentioned this point earlier: your thought leadership piece will not rank on page one of Google because your authority will not be great and you not have enough backlinks. So be realistic there and look at your market, the power you have, and your skills to really double down on this. The other thing is, really have fun with it.
I think that you need to enjoy the writing, even if you write very transactionally-focused articles on how to record a Google Meet. You can still have fun and you can still write great articles. And I think that’s some red line that you should have throughout your entire content journey at your company. And then, success will follow.
Tom Bangay: Very nice. I agree with all of those. So I thought about this in terms of strategic stuff, and then just really like practical mistakes that we made. So I think, on the strategy side, I already alluded to it. But if your strategy is not revenue-focused, it’s gotta be top-down rather than bottom-up – it will fail.
If I were to start again, it’s never too early to start building your search iceberg, even if domain authority is gonna be quite low at the beginning, so nothing is going to rank. But when there comes a magic moment, when suddenly your website looks quite good to Google, you just get loads of traffic.
So the sooner you can build that, the better. Proper attribution is a superpower, so the sooner you can find someone who can properly attribute your traffic, the better.
One thing we didn’t talk about at all but has been great for us is we have a private community of house lawyers, like a buyer community, and I would’ve started that day one because it’s just an absolute pot of gold. It’s really great.
To learn more, visit tldv.io and juro.com. Also, follow Tom and Raphael on Twitter.
An interview with Jonathan Widawski, Co-founder and CEO of Maze, and Devin Hunt, Venture Partner at Seedcamp.
We’re excited to introduce Seedcamp Firsts, the definitive guide to the all-important first steps in company building brought to you through first-hand experiences and lessons learned from the brightest minds across the Seedcamp Nation.
The power of the Seedcamp Nation comes from the incredible breadth of experience that’s been lived across it. We want to open up this hard-won knowledge and insights from the exceptional founders we’ve backed to our mentors, Experts in Residence, Venture partners, and our core team. Our ultimate goal with Seedcamp Firsts is to help support the next generation of exceptional entrepreneurs navigate those critical first steps in building a business.
We’re thrilled to kick off our Seedcamp Firsts series with Jonathan Widawski, co-founder and CEO of Maze, a Seedcamp-backed growth-stage company on a mission to democratize product research. In this piece, we will explore everything from prioritising what to build, and when, to how to evaluate customer input in product development decisions.
The founding story of Maze
While building their previous startup, a messaging app for gamers called Ping, Jonathan, and his co-founder Thomas Mary, stumbled upon a ground-breaking idea. In Jonathan’s own words:
“The reality was we didn’t have a product yet. What we had at the time was this very in-depth InVision prototype of what we wanted to create. And so we thought, how do we get insights in our value proposition, which flows are working, which design is performing better, before actually having to build a thing and not having to interview 12,000 people.” – Jonathan Widawski
They hacked together a solution by adding an analytics layer to an InVision prototype. This would become the prototype for Maze.
Their instant revelation: “We could collect quantitative data that we would be able to collect post-development at a pre-development stage.” Discovering a treasure flow of available data made them realize that using this method would enable them to iterate without having to spend money on building.
“What we did at the time was we built the first version in a couple of months. It was really basic. It was bare bone. We were manually creating the heat maps, like all of these things that it had no bells and whistles.” – Jonathan Widawski
Jonathan returned to his job as a lead UX designer and convinced his clients to test their prototypes with the Maze tool. Even though they were generally reluctant to do customer research, they accepted, giving the Maze team access to some of their customers. Finding great value in the results of the prototype tests, the clients provided Jonathan and Thomas with proof that they were on the right track with what they were building.
“Especially when you are successful in selling a process that you’ve been unsuccessful selling for this type of customers for years, and especially when they automatically attach it to a return on investment, when they can attach a budget value to it, to me it was a great sign that yes, the stars are aligning. There is a product that we built that is bringing value that we can then attach to a budget within the organization. And all of this means that if we can replicate this a hundred thousand times, we have an actual business. This is the type of signal that you’re looking for.” – Jonathan Widawski
Jonathan and Thomas started building Maze in 2018 to democratize product research everywhere. Their initial goal was to make research – traditionally limited to the largest enterprises – happen everywhere, in companies of all sizes, including startups, and in all industries.
Their vision evolved into enabling research to transcend the researchers’ role, becoming a tool that the whole organization would use. The founders applied this principle in building Maze, ensuring everyone was involved in the research journey.
Tune in and/or read on to learn more about the founding story of Maze and discover Jonathan’s top insights on how to test, explore and validate your first product ideas as an early-stage startup:
[Listen on your favourite podcast platform here.]
Q & A with Devin and Jonathan:
Devin: How did you choose what to build?
Jonathan: The fun part of the story is that while (…) we experienced the pain firsthand, Maze actually got started in the previous startup that we launched with my co-founder Thomas. It has nothing to do with what we’re doing today. We were building a messaging app for gamers, Ping, as it was called at the time.
And the reality was we didn’t have a product yet. What we had at the time was this very in-depth InVision prototype of what we wanted to create. And so we thought, how do we get insights in our value proposition, in which flows are working, in which design is performing better, before actually having to build a thing, and not having to actually interview 12,000 people. So, what we did at the time is we hacked our way into building what would become Maze, later on, which is, we downloaded our InVision prototype. And we started putting analytics on top of everything with the idea that if we’re able to aggregate the data on the prototype and make sense of that data, we wouldn’t have to run all of these interviews.
We could collect quantitative data that we would be able to collect post-development at a pre-development stage. We pushed this Maze “V0” to 2000 people. And one hour later, we got thousands of responses. I come from a world where five responses in five weeks was basically opening champagne, and all of a sudden, we had this treasure flow of data available to us.
It was completely mind-blowing, seeing a) the data was available, but b) also that all of a sudden, the cost of iteration, didn’t include the cost of development. That all of a sudden, we had the means to iterate at a stage where we didn’t have to spend money on building something. And so that’s the long story short on the previous startup that obviously didn’t work, but it felt obvious at the time that we found something at least that we found extremely valuable and that we started Maze.
Devin: As you started to build, obviously, there were lots of micro decisions to make around the right way to prioritize and what to do next. And I know, at least when we were working together closely, InVision is where you started.
Jonathan: Especially in the early days, it feels like you want to build everything, but you really have the resources to build one thing. So, you have to basically nail down all of this discussion. And I think that it all boils down to a very simple question, which is almost what is the real thing that’s going to 10x the business in the next year to come. And so it might sound silly in the end, but the reality for us was always what is the marginal incremental change that we can make and what is the thing that’s really going to unlock for us the next stage of the mission and the vision that we’re trying to build?
Devin: One of those challenges young companies face is they have a customer in mind or maybe one or two references, but that’s a very small data set when trying to validate some big decisions. Are there any specific formulations you’ve baked into Maze since then to build that confidence or make it more objective than subjective?
Jonathan: At the 10-people team (stage), what I felt was the most useful at the time – there’s an analogy that I like to use, which is you shoot the arrow, and then you draw the target around it, which means that at the time you’re going to launch a bunch of experiments, you’re going to test a lot of things, and your vision’s really going to be redefined by what we learn to be successful.
Originally when we started Maze, we started by saying we need a better research tool for researchers, right? That was the vision. We just wanted to build something that was more efficient at the pre-development stage. And all of a sudden, we started seeing designers using the platform, and we started seeing product managers, and we started seeing product markets, and we were like, ‘there’s something there.’
So a lot of it for us was about adapting our strategy to what we were learning on the go, I think very early on, that’s more critical than anything else. It’s just, you’re going to launch things, you’re going to see pockets of things that are successful. So for us, that was things like the new customers that we were starting onboarding on the platform.
We launched a small report, which was just another way to repackage the data that we were doing, that all of a sudden was shared everywhere. So all of these things, you need to take those as signals of almost micro product market fit for some of the features that you have and try to compile all of this into your vision. It’s a very iterative process at this stage of the company.
Devin: How do you decide product market fit or feature customer fit and how do you enable your team to make those decisions independently?
Jonathan: When I talk about product, I like to start with the vision of the company first because I think it’s critical. I think product strategy is not listening to your users. Product strategy is not being a genius product strategy, just turning your company’s vision into something that’s coherent to get you to a vision.
At Maze, we want to live in a world where experiences are shaped by the people who engage with them. So what that really means is that we believe that the future is entirely user-centric and that the companies that will win will be the user-centric companies. Then the mission that we have is how do we get there. We get there by saying we empower anyone to test and learn rapidly.
That’s our mission. We want to empower anyone to test and learn rapidly. What that really means for us is that we give the tools to anyone within the product organization. To be able to run a test and to consume the results of the test to learn and then iterate.
So everything we do at Maze is just getting closer to this mission. So every year at the beginning of the year, we’ll look at the state of where we are. I like to think of the mission as kind of stairs. It’s like, you’re getting closer. You’re climbing those stairs.
Devin: If you were gonna start it all again, how would you start afresh, given all this knowledge?
Jonathan: I think the only thing that I would really do differently is to start from the vision to then build everything else. Because for us at the time, we stumbled upon success, but we didn’t really process success through a vision lens. We built the vision as a successor. The goal is to reach this mission and we can do this by validating things as we grow. Each piece is going to be validated. That changes everything because all of sudden, you sell a coherent story to people that you hire, you sell a coherent story to your investors, you sell a coherent story to people internal to your company. The goal is to reach this mission, and we can do this by validating things as we grow.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Notes:
Jonathan Widawski – twitter.com/WidawskiJ
Devin Hunt – twitter.com/@hailpixel
Maze – maze.com
Seedcamp – seedcamp.com
Further reading:
A New Way to Think About Product-Market Fit
In our latest edition of Seedcamp Firsts, our Head of Brand and Network, Natasha Lytton, speaks with one of our fantastic mentors, Rona Ruthen, about setting up customer support and operations in early-stage startups.
Rona is one of the best people to learn from on this topic following her experience scaling Fintech unicorn Monzo among other well-known startups, including Curve, a Seedcamp portfolio company.
“Exceptional customer service or customer experience in an early-stage startup should provide the customer with a feeling that whatever they need is either embedded in the product itself or is easily accessible to them.”
Rona Ruthen
If you’re short on time, we’ve pulled some key learnings for you below, but we strongly recommend you to listen to the full conversation to learn how to first set up customer operations in your company.
5 Key Takeaways:
Key Questions to ask before you set up Customer Operations
Watch it on YouTube or listen to it on your favourite podcast platform.
Deep Dive Q & A with Rona & Natasha
Natasha Lytton: Why are seamless customer operations a prerequisite for the success of early-stage companies?
Rona Ruthen: I get asked this quite a lot, and I think it’s quite important to acknowledge that the answer isn’t necessary “it is critical at the early stage.” It’s a strategic decision that every company needs to make. And actually, something to revisit at a different point in time because you can start a company and not optimise for customer operations or customer support, or customer experience. Sometimes, whether it’s based on your own values whether it’s the type of product that you’re launching, it is critical for the success of the company.
Sometimes you can do without, and you can sort of scrape through it for a while until it’s the right time to create an exceptional experience. The first stage is deciding if it’s critical for you and not just letting it sort of hang around what you’re doing and making a conscious decision. We also live in a world where we know that customer experience is quite critical for every product that we use and that we care about. So the full customer experience is critical for most products these days, and there are multiple ways of doing it, especially when you’re a small startup.
It could be fully manual, no one has to know, and sometimes it’s even better because you can be very personalized about it when you only have a small number of customers, and sometimes it’s just easy to build the thing and automate it from day one.
So it really is about understanding, is this a USP for your company at this point? Is it easier to do it manually or not? What do you want the experience to be?
Natasha Lytton: On that point of manual versus automation, when do you suggest companies start to switch from manual to automated?
Rona Ruthen: There are two elements to this, and I have my own guiding principles for how I think about it. In terms of elements, there’s what you need, what works better for you as a company, whether you’re optimizing for efficiency, and what’s the right thing to do from a customer experience perspective.
And again, those change over time, the way I think about them, my guiding principles are around first: Is the process structured and mature enough? If you’re building a new product or a new feature, sometimes you just don’t know exactly what it looks like or how it works, or what it would look like six months from now because you’re still in that discovery phase. So that’s the first question. The second thing is, What is the current scale of the process or the manual work? And what would it be in six or 12 months? If it’s one or two people, then maybe it’s not even worth considering automating it. Then, ultimately Is the customer experience negatively impacted by the fact that it’s manual? Sometimes it’s not, and sometimes it is.
If it’s only one person doing the work and growing to three people, it’s a great customer experience for now, and it’s not a fully mature process. Keep it manual. Don’t even worry about it. But, if you’ve already got 10 people doing it, it’s going to grow to 20 people doing it – the customer experience could be negatively impacted by backlogs and longer wait times. Then you should be at least thinking about automating it, if not further ahead in the journey.
But it’s also a game of trade-offs, right? It’s not usually one process against the other. You have 10 of them, or 20, or sometimes a hundred, and the trade-offs are not just between the internal processes, it’s also against other product priorities and other resources across the company. Prioritize within customer support, customer operations, and customer experience. Then, you also need to figure out how to prioritize against what else is happening across the company.
If you think about the companies where focusing on that early is essential, What does exceptional customer experience look like?
Natasha Lytton: You have been at organizations where it is world-class. How did you go about defining that and what could other founders take away when they want to first start think about setting up customer service and operations and their businesses too?
That’s a really great question. Like most things, you start with the customer: What do they need, what do they want? What would make the feature or product work better for them? I think there’s a layer of experimentation. You never know until you try whether it’s the SLAs (service-level agreements) for customer support.
Intuitively, we all want quicker, better now. But actually, do you need that for all things? Probably not. And so that’s where you can sometimes push the boundaries and just figure out what is a great experience.
So I think exceptional customer service or customer experience in an early-stage startup should provide the customer with a feeling that whatever they need is either embedded in the product itself or is easily accessible to them. My ideal would be that every feature has intuitive and embedded contextual support or information within the feature itself. Then there’s a layer of easy self-service and then the right channels to contact support. Again, that is harder to build based on the product, and initially, in a small company, that could just be two-three channels that are very easy for customers to access with short SLAs and just providing the experience that it’s easy to use the product. The bottom line isn’t support. The bottom line is: customers are trying out your product. They want to engage with it as much as they need or as much as possible. You want them to engage with it. You want to make that whole experience easy, end to end. Support just needs to be a part of that, not something that you do on the side. If they’re contacting support, probably something didn’t work in the product, and you want to close the loop and make sure that the whole experience is great.
Natasha Lytton: How can companies think about what they should have in place for what they need for customer operations, be it in the alpha, the build stage, to launch, and then as you scale and grow much larger?
Rona Ruthen: Honestly, I think it starts by actually caring about the customer, which sounds basic, and every company would say that they do. It really makes a difference, especially when it comes from the top, and it’s embedded in every layer across the company.
I would make sure that that’s very clear within your values, your culture, and your org structure – everything that you need to make it really, really clear that the customer does come first. If you use that lens for most things, it’s easy to make a decision that is right for your customer.
Initially, in customer operations, we hired very independent thinkers, very hungry to do the right thing by customers and by the company. And that just meant they went beyond the call of duty in terms of doing the right thing for the company. And that was enabled by processes, by the right budget, by making sure that it is easy to go above and beyond for the customer. Over time, you want to build that into the right processes and to be able to scale that experience. And then obviously, it’s about talking to the customers and listening to the feedback, whether that’s directly doing user research, surveys, whatever helps you get feedback from the customer, but also, just reviewing what works from the data qualitative and quantitative that you get from what customers are using and what you’re seeing.
If they contact us on calls more than chats, then maybe that’s an indication that we should be mindful of. Or if calls take way too long, then maybe we’re not that good at solving things on the phone, and we can direct them to a better channel for them. So it really is about understanding what they’re telling us in multiple different ways and making sure that we do something about it.
Natasha Lytton: How do you recommend startups think about making sure everybody is interfacing with what’s actually going on?
Rona Ruthen: It’s super tricky. I think initially, in early-stage startups, it feels really easy because everyone can jump on tickets and everyone can engage with customers, but quite quickly – as everyone has a day job, so they’re quite busy doing what they’re supposed to be doing – pulling people in to engage with customers gets more complicated.
Also, your processes get more complicated. You don’t want everyone to jump on support unless they know what they’re saying to customers. Especially CEOs and founders can be very disruptive. Over time, you want to create and enable other people in the company to engage with customers. By the end of my time at Monzo, we had Friday sessions where we would jump on tickets. But we did that by shadowing one of our customer service operators and making sure that whoever wanted to do the same had the ability to shadow someone and look at any process or customer supports tickets as they wanted to.
But it was structured, and it was sort of handholding rather than, you can just jump on the system. You need to ensure it’s easy and that it’s accompanied by the right people who know what they’re doing. And also, again, reinforcing the importance of it.
It’s important to just be very clear and mindful of what you’re optimizing for. Initially, in an early-stage startup, you’re usually optimizing for flexibility. You don’t know exactly what you need, what the process is, and what the customer experience is going to be.
You need people who can just flow with that ambiguity and help you build it out as you go. So you usually need people who are a bit more experienced than your standard customer support profile. You need them to be willing to take a bit of risk to go a bit beyond the just, I’m going to respond to the question I’m being asked by the customer right now.
You want them to be able to engage with different types of people and roles across the company because, more often than not, in the early days, if you wanna solve a problem, you have to go to the engineer that built the thing because you don’t know what the problem is. You need people who can just work around these things quite flexibly.
As you start scaling customer support, you need more consistency and more standardization in how you respond to customers, and how you interact with them. Especially if we’re talking about FinTech or regulated industries, where working within the boundaries of what you’re allowed to do is critical. So that’s probably the point where you start writing down some of the processes, making sure it’s documented, making sure it’s clear what to do and what not to do. And at that point, you probably need and want a slightly different profile of customer support or customer operations agent, which is probably a bit more entry-level and willing to do quite repetitive work for a while, but with a bit of flexibility.
You also need to be mindful that this is positive but challenging when you’re managing customer support, a lot of people think of it as an entry job, but really, really quickly, they want to move on to the next thing, which I think is amazing, but you also need people to actually do the work for a while. Balancing that out is tricky but important when you’re building out a team.
As you start scaling, you have more people coming in at the entry-level, and not everyone is going to be able to move up or move sideways at the same rate. And so, setting expectations when people come in is critical.
Natasha Lytton: Any mistakes or things you wish you had perhaps done differently in the early stages?
Rona Ruthen: So many to choose from! I think if I was doing the very early stage again, I would probably have planned a few different scenarios, aligned with company growth scenarios, and figured out what I would need at different points along those journeys for, let’s say, six or 12 months, and then tried to optimize for something in the middle and from some level of flexibility. Sounds obvious, but I think more often than not, especially on the operations side, it’s a lot more reactive than proactive. I would try to be more proactive in terms of planning and understanding the potential scenarios that might happen and how I could ideally be one step ahead of most of them.
That’s the other thing that I know now that maybe I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. Hiring one extra person, or I call this sort of rounding up, at the very stages it’s definitely not going to be the downfall of your financial bottom line as a startup, but it can make all the difference in terms of providing a great customer experience and just having fewer burning fires and long, long nights and incidents.
Understanding a few potential scenarios and rounding up in terms of the size of the team would be one of my reflections. And just embracing change. We all joined startups thinking that we’re gonna love the fast pace, the ever-changing environment, not knowing what’s gonna happen day to day, but most people like at least the good balance of some consistency and structure with some change and bringing people along that journey. No day will look like what you had in mind that morning or the beginning of the week, and definitely not the beginning of the month. It’s quite hard. And so, how do you communicate around that? How do you create that transparency?
How do you create some level of consistency that allows you to actually embrace the change in a good way? It takes a lot of effort, but that’s critical.
Stay tuned for Part II, where Rona will join us to go much deeper into everything around scaling, where change is the only constant. We’ll be delving much more into how you can bring teams on the journey with you and how to embrace change as you scale.
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