My wife Sharon and I recently experienced a day of customer service hell. This arose from our interactions with six different businesses. While none of them is a startup, our experiences provide some great customer service lessons for entrepreneurs. Here’s our tale of woe: The management company for our daughter’s college apartment told us they […]
I’m on the board of a venture-backed startup that sells software-as-a-service. At a board meeting a while ago, the CFO enthusiastically announced that the company’s customer retention rate was 96 percent. I didn’t want to be a killjoy, but commented that, in my opinion, this was actually a bad sign. If customer churn was really […]
Successfully founding a startup is hard. One of many challenges is the necessary shifting between your long-term vision for the business, on one hand, and rigorous short-term testing of critical hypotheses about it on the other. I call these different perspectives the telescope and microscope. The telescope represents the big-picture vision for a startup. It’s […]
