Your first 100 customers

Why your startup business is different to big businesses, what it is you should be focused on.

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

If you look at most big businesses, you see that they are focused on the end to end customer experiences. It's true in places like video, of Uber, and it's true of people like Airbnb.

In the beginning of your business, you cannot focus entirely upon that. Even in the days of, early days of Uber and Airbnb, they didn't have the end to end customer experience. They didn't have the technology to support it.

In the early days of Uber, you phoned, and you booked a cab, and then, people got on the telephone, and started trying to find a taxi company that would take you where you wanted to go.

In Airbnb's case, they showed a selection of places you could book, and then they went out, and when they got a booking, phoned around and tried to find somewhere that could accommodate that booking, with the sort of requirements that was had sent in.

Then they sent to you, by e-mail, a selection of places that you might choose from, that didn't quite match your requirem…