Why Will Your Customer Share?
We’ve gotten a bunch of gifts for our new son, Alfie. Onesies people clearly agonized over - beautiful forest scenes and animals and basketball players. All one-offs. And I can’t help wincing when I think of the poor people trying to make a business work out of selling those. Brutal.
Then, there are the repeat gifts. The great businesses. Those are the ones to dig in on.
We’ve been gifted four Shushers, three people bought us the newborn package from Taking Cara Babies, and we have three Ollies.
The reason?
Great feedback loops.
Let's talk about why and the questions you’ve got to be able to answer for your business.
Acquiring customers is a disaster and getting worse. Social (non-Tiktok) ads are 10x less effective and 10x more expensive since the new privacy rules. As a result, companies have funneled money into Adwords, which are now prohibitively expensive for startups.
You need niche channels for growth (podcasts, newsletters, communities, maybe Tiktok). But more importantly, you need the vast majority of your growth to come through recommendations.
That means you need to stack the deck to make sure you build something worth recommending and something easy to recommend. This requires a few things:
Your product to solve an urgent problem people talk about - a level that needs jumping. Your customer was at point A, they use your product, now they’re at point B and they have to tell someone because that jump mattered.
Your customers to talk to other customers at specific moments you can predict and intercept, and for the value to be easy to convey. A natural, consistent soundbite.
The features of the product to be designed to meet the moment it lives in.
The products we’ve been given by parents all nail these. First, the problem they all solve is THE problem for new parents → get your kid to freaking sleep. Humans love helping each other solve hard problems. You want your customers to be able to say “I helped ABC solve X,” when X is a hairy, important problem. No one suggests solutions to the fourth biggest problem someone faces. Next, each product lives in a specific moment of the bigger problem - sleep - and solves it. You jump levels with each one.
Taking Cara Babies teaches you a system. Two people who gifted us this said the same thing - “you’ll have a system, no more flying blind.” About six days in of winging it, we realized we needed a system. And once we had one, we told all our new parent friends.
The Shusher helps you deal with panic in the moment. The people who gifted us them said variations of “no more putting your baby down to sleep and them waking up 10 minutes later crying.” And the product meets the moment perfectly - the device is utilitarian. It’s silly. It’s counterintuitive. It was built to share. Everyone who gave it to us said “and did you know it's a recording of a real person's voice shushing??!”
The Ollie lives in the moment you realize you can't swaddle a baby like the nurses did. It's velcro and stretchy and impossibly easy to get a snug swaddle. The people who gave it to us said some variation of ”for the moment you realize nurses are superhuman swaddlers and you aren't.”
So, the hard questions for you.
Why will people share?
What’s the level jump you create and how will your customers describe it?
What, exactly, will they say?
When would they share?
Why will it make them feel good to share?