Today, my advice to startups is to tattoo the following acronym somewhere where you will see it every single day: J-M-I-E, which means Just Make It Easy.
I came up with this several years ago when I was traveling relentlessly and found myself flying Southwest a lot—not because they were always the cheapest carrier, but because they Just Made It Easy. I could book last minute. I could cancel last minute. I could change a flight last minute without fees, without calling. And so I found myself a very loyal customer because of that.
I started adopting that mindset into our companies—just make it easy for someone to do business with you.
Just this last week, I've reached out to a number of startups that I thought could help us, particularly with emerging AI capabilities that are interesting.
Only two of them actually made it easy to get on the phone, walk through a demo, walk through the product, and then actually made the buying process easy—very clear with their expectations and what they did and didn’t do. And, you know, they fumbled through the PowerPoints or whatever, which is fine. I still do that.
The rest of them made it almost impossible to do business with. I had one dude from a pretty well-funded startup where the soonest appointment they had was five days out. Then he was five minutes late for the demo, so I had already bounced, and he emailed me wondering why.
Just yesterday, I had a sales meeting booked, and it was declined by the founder because he made some assumptions about us as a portfolio instead of actually just taking a 15-minute call and realizing that I probably would have done two sales with him.
And those are just very recent examples. The list is long with folks who, for whatever reasons, are just making it difficult and introduce unnecessary friction just to do business with them.
The point here is to step back and look at all of your processes—whether it’s sales, onboarding, post-sales support—just make it easy to do business with, just make it easy to transact.
And man, you're going to accelerate a lot faster than being a pain in people's ass.
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