October 2010
Beginner
352 pages
6h 11m
English
Content preview from Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup
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Chapter 49. Know Your Customer
Bill Flagg
Bill is the former co-owner and president of RegOnline, a company that provides online registration software, and is currently an investor through his fund, The Felix Fund. He has been a TechStars mentor since 2007.
A real business boils down to one thing—serving peoples' needs and getting paid for it in a way that you can operate profitably. The best way to do that is to know your customers.
At RegOnline we constantly listened to what our customers needed and wanted. This process started with my business partner Attila who built the first version of our software on the basis of what one of our early customers requested. Attila then turned to the next customer, and the next customer, and the next customer until we had 5,000 happy ones.
Over time we began to expand our sales and marketing activities to be self-serve, through which our customer didn't have to talk to a salesperson to sign up for our service. We constantly looked for how we could make it easier for prospects to find what they wanted in our product by listening to what they asked the salespeople on the phones and then repeating that information in a simple way online.
Getting inside my prospects' and customers' minds was one of the most valuable activities I did at RegOnline. Getting face to face at trade shows helped me learn and play back what customers wanted. Sitting in on our ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.