Alex Kaminski's Blog

The relationship a company has with their customers is critical to any business. But this relationship is so much more important for a startup. As a startup, we don’t have the luxury of millions of users (so that we can ignore a couple users) and hundreds (or thousands) of employees (to have customer service departments). Each user is very important for us. Not only does each user help build our product, but each user represents an individual person that (hopefully) believes in your product/vision.

Seeing new users sign up should motivate and excite you. These users prove that your product is useful (or revolutionary in some cases) and should make you excited to work on this product. Often, users will also send you excellent feedback highlighting things that need fixing or new features you should add. It is vital to respond to this feedback. By responding to each suggestion and customer service request you are building user loyalty.

Users love knowing that their suggestions were implemented or that their feedback was important to you. By having conversations and interacting with your users you can, in a sense, get the user to care about your product in a pseudo-founder sense. They’ve invested time in both using your product and helping you improve it, this naturally makes them more attached to your product (and brand!).

By simply talking to your users and showing that you care about them and their opinions, you are building brand loyalty for life.

Most startups don’t know the full value of feedback. They love getting feedback from users, so that they can improve. But most do not engage the user further by continuing the conversation (or even replying to feedback). This is a mistake. You should always reply to every single feedback email (and, obviously, help request) with a thoughtful and personal response. This seems like a small thing, but can go a long way in developing customer loyalty.