Henry Ward (no relation) explains his principles for hiring an excellent team:
- Hire for Strength vs Lack of Weakness
- Hire for Trajectory vs Experience
- Hire Doers vs Tellers
- Hire Learners vs Experts
- Hire Different vs Similar
- Always pass on ego
To find excellent employees, you have to take risks, he argues. “Do not be afraid of hiring False Positives. Give people chances. Be afraid of missing the 20x employee.”
His critique of Built to Last and corporate culture is also on point.
Maciej Cegłowski says websites have become too bloated:
The problem with picking any particular size as a threshold is that it encourages us to define deviancy down. Today’s egregiously bloated site becomes tomorrow’s typical page, and next year’s elegantly slim design.
I would like to anchor the discussion in something more timeless.
To repeat a suggestion I made on Twitter, I contend that text-based websites should not exceed in size the major works of Russian literature.
The whole thing is brilliant.
I was shopping around online recently for a finance app. Nearly every app’s website listed the same set of features: I can import transactions from my bank; I can set budgets; I can use a mobile app.
Almost none of the apps’ websites explained why their product was better than the other guy’s. They didn’t distinguish themselves on reliability, trustedness, ease of use, popularity, or much else.
This left me lost, and forced me into time-consuming demos and trials when some sharp marketing could have sealed the deal a lot sooner.
Peep Laja says it better than I could. He explains that lots of customers are like me: they shop around. Not only that,
sometimes they compare 10+ websites before deciding where to buy from. (The only exception seems to be users part of loyalty programs, such as Amazon Prime, hotel rewards memberships, etc.)
Yet, so many websites don’t list a single reason to buy from them.
Everyone’s got problems, and people are generally busy and superficial. They’re not reading everything on your website, instead they’re scanning. If it’s not explicit why they should buy from you, the competitor who makes it clear wins.
It’s not about listing your features or your benefits as such. It’s about explaining why what you’re selling is the best possible use of my money right now.
When Jason Fried ran out of contacts while traveling, he went to a Target eye clinic. Instead of being a stickler for policy—Fried’s contact lens prescription had technically expired—Ron from Target simply gave him a set of trial lenses at no charge.
Ron is a very reasonable man. He considered the situation, considered the risk, and did the reasonable thing. He helped someone out who was stuck in a bind. He imagined what it would be like if he was in my shoes, and I was behind the desk instead. He’d want from me what I asked of him. That’s the best service you can ever give.
It made me think about our business. We should be Ron. We all should be more like Ron.Snap out of corporate policy mode, and act under the good neighbor code.
Emphasis in the original.
Whether you run an eye clinic or a software startup or a nonprofit, the role of customer service is the same: to solve the customer’s problem. It doesn’t really matter if you caused the problem. What’s important is that you fix it. Your customers will remember you fondly if you do—and feel bitter towards you if you don’t.
“Marketers need to escape the ‘urgency trap,’” Flint McLaughlin writes:
They need to transcend the urgent with the important. And this cannot be achieved with yet another “how-to” series. We need to contemplate; indeed, we need to make contemplation part of our normal work cycle.
Marketing, he argues in his book, The Marketer as Philosopher, is as much philosophy as it is science. Scientific marketing experiments like A/B testing can give you data about your customer, but only reflection and thought can help you use that data to understand your customer. And understanding, not clever tactics, is the key to successful marketing.