The one question every startup needs to answer

I've worked with a ton of startups. And we talk. A lot.

We talk about founder stories. We talk about product features. We talk about competitors, pricing, and really important things like SOX compliance.

But no matter the stage or industry, we all struggle to talk about one, company-altering thing:

How exactly to best use our products to achieve meaningful change.

It's called defining the optimal customer experience and it can impact a startup's success (and our customers' success) unlike anything else.

Skip the founder and fundraising stories and dive right into what a customer needs to do to extract the most value from working with the company.

Want a cheat code? Study the best customers. By best customers, I mean accounts with a blend of high revenue, high usage, and high feature adoption. Think of these customers as All-Stars. We want to find more of them. More specifically, we share what they're doing and see who's able (and willing) to do the same. We dissect their behavior then present it to prospects to gauge their ability to model that behavior. It becomes less a sales conversation and more an honest conversation about challenges, opportunities, and a proven plan to address both.

But we don't have any All-Star customers. This exercise becomes that much more imperative. If we can't share precisely how to best utilize our service, who can? More importantly, how do customers know if they're even up to the task?

Start small. Identify a few micro-behaviors needed to produce impactful change. The more specific we get, the more clearly we communicate them to customers. They'll quickly let us know if they can perform those behaviors or not.

We onboard more All-Stars so they grow faster, stick around longer, and refer us to other All-Stars.

So, here's the one question every startup needs to answer:

What does our optimal customer experience look like?

Answer. Share. Grow.