The Single Biggest Reason for Amazon’s Success was Windscreen Wipers?!

Imagine it's the early 2000s. You are Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, but with a full head of hair and no fear of going bald. You are wondering how you can grow Amazon into one of the biggest companies the world has ever seen. You are currently selling only books, CDs, and DVDs.

What do you do? What's the plan? What's the strategy?

How do you decide to go from selling only those three items to selling everything, creating an audiobook platform and producing movies and TV series?

How do you do it? What's the first step?

Do you know?

Here's a clue… windscreen wipers.

Still not sure what to do next? Well, guess what? Neither did Jeff. During the early days of Amazon, he didn't quite know what the company would eventually go on to do. But back when Amazon was only selling books, CDs, and DVDs, he did one thing that changed the company's trajectory.

He simply sent an email to his customers and asked the following question. If you could buy anything other than books, CDs and DVDs from Amazon, what would you buy? He received 1000s of responses, with people wanting to buy anything and everything. One person even said windscreen wipers as, at the time, that's what they needed. Jeff realised people wanted to buy everything they needed, so why not sell everything someone might need and get it delivered in as little time as possible?

That's it. That's all he did. From that point on, Amazon became the Everything Store and forced every retailer to provide next-day delivery because we can't wait for s**t these days.

Now, I'm not saying go and sell anything and everything you can.

But Jeff did something so simple and so easy to do that businesses still overlook it: listening to and understanding what customers want. That's it. It's that simple.

Jeff was so focused on one thing at Amazon that people referred to him as being "customer-obsessed." He even admits himself to being "customer-obsessed." He understands that companies that grow and scale the most obsess over their customers. Companies that care so deeply about their customers to provide the best possible experience, no matter how much it costs.

He is famed for bringing an empty chair to all of his executive meetings so that everyone knew who was the most important individual in that room and who should have the final say: the customer.

People within Amazon who worked on the leadership teams had to spend time listening to phone calls from the customer service department so they could understand their customers' desires and pain points.

Jeff himself used to spend time looking at emails coming into the customer service team. If he saw something he didn't like, he would send an email to the executive responsible for that area of the business and put a question mark on it.

Now, I can only imagine how much an executive would s**t themselves after seeing a slightly passive-aggressive email from Jeff wondering what's gone wrong and wanting them to go fix it.

However, Jeff was obsessed with Amazon customers. He made every decision in the business with one person in mind—the customer.

That's all he ever cared about.

Too many businesses make decisions without ever considering their customers. Too many businesses launch products their customers don't want to consume, run marketing campaigns that don't resonate with them, and try to sell products their customers don't want to buy.

When all they need to do is pull up an empty chair next time they have a decision to make and ask the question.

"What does my customer actually want?"