Ebay started as a site for selling Beanie Babies.
Yelp started as a place where you could email recommendation requests to your friends.
Neither grew into who they projected they would be. If they kept moving forward based on their first business plan, most likely neither would be with us today.
Instead…
Ebay’s execs watched what their customers were doing, and soon determined there was more going on that just buying and selling Beanie Babies.
Yelp’s founders paid attention to how their users were engaging with the site and discovered their customers were using it in a different way than they projected. They weren’t answering requests for recommendations; they were using the “Real Reviews” feature to write unsolicited reviews.
Nothing really goes as we project.
We’ve all got blind spots and things that just cannot be seen at this moment.
Ebay and Yelp offer critical insights for each of us in our business to work through our blind spots and prejudices:
• Put your product or service out there. It cannot be perfect until customers get their hands on it and provide you with feedback…both the intended and accidental kind.
• Replace perfection with excellence. You can be excellent from Day One. You’ll probably never be perfect.
• Watch and learn. It’s never going to go EXACTLY as you projected. Adjust based on what you see. Your customers’ behaviors will clue you in.
• Your customers are not you. When you build your product or service from your perspective, it will be a great product or service…for you. Maybe not so much for your customers. Think like your customer, not like you.
Embrace the truth. We’re all blind to some things about our company, our products and services and how customers will react.
Your business will accelerate faster when you spend at least as much time examining your customers’ behaviors as you do producing your products.