[Question] Is more important for your early-adopters to love you or trust you?

[johnathanrapp]

Hello folks,

We are building a gym management system for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu academies called Strive, this is the first piece of the puzzle for our bigger vision of having a marketplace for BJJ practitioners, where people can find gyms and train everywhere they go.

Having said that, we are at the stage in which we have some early adopters and some revenue (something like 1.2KMRR). Our revenue is growing, but not at the speed I imagine it should be to be called PMF.

We have early adopters, which in this context means people who have adopted us early. Some of them truly love us, while others simply trust us because we consistently deliver on their expectations/requests. We don't experience much churn (actually only 1 customer in 10 months), so we are doing something right. I would say that the ratio of love vs trust is about 20-80.

I have the feeling that some of the customers we have don't really buy our vision, and sometimes is a bit of a fight to bring them back into the problem space when they try to push "solutions" at us (ie: "you should do feature X that do Y").

Also, we are in a quite crowded space. There are many solutions already implemented and some of them are perceived by our customers as "the norm", we challenge some of those norms because we think there are better ways of solving the problem, but still until they buy in, this is a source of attrition.

To give some context here, we mainly started this project for our own needs and since this wasn't meant to be a product we were thinking to sell we didn't bother to think about "the industry" or "the competitors" and we take our own path when we face some of the problems others have already solved reaching our conclusions independently.

So far we are either being right or lucky enough to not screw it when we push for an opinionated solution, but I have the feeling that a big chunk of the customers we have would ditch us if we fail to do so.

Now to the question, Is this ok? At our stage, all the early adopters should love you "unquestionably" o simply trust you to deliver is ok?

 

[jraycaen]

@johnathanrapp Customers love you until something better suited to their needs comes along, or you do something to upset them.

(Most customers are happy to buy from (just an example) both coke and Pepsi. It depends on the time and the context. What makes it worse is they will also happily buy Fanta, Dr Pepper, and good old plain water if their needs dictate it.)

I would listen more to their suggestions, your vision should be set aside, and they will eventually be paying your mortgage for you.

You are doing well. Keep going.

I would look to open it up to other types of gyms, and you could be on to a winner.

I wanted to take my kids to a Kickboxing class, I gave up trying to get hold of the guy about 4 months later he replied to a message. Maybe I would have been his new customer if they had your app. He could have spent less time on admin and more on customer service.

 

[ezra932]

@johnathanrapp It depends on what you're trying to do. If it's a startup, you'll want growth (refer to pg's essay on startups) vs a business (nothing wrong with a successful business).

If it's a start up, then you need early adopters to "unquestionably" love you b/c your early adopters are going to be what drives growth. You want to push your product (i.e. talk about your product whenever they meet like minded folks who have the same problem)

If you're simply delivering trust, it's not enough and in most cases is indicative that your product is delivering value that is "linearly" better as opposed to "exponentially" better w.r.t your competition.

Give them the option to opt into the your opinionated solution. If they don't want to opt in there are two possibilities:

1. the way of solving it is not good enough to replace the current way of solving it. This can be because the problem isn't painful enough or your solution is just incrementally better.

1. you're not communicating what they will lose out on if they don't solve it your way.

good luck!

 

[joda22322]

@johnathanrapp Your users will never think in the problem space. That is your job. When they suggest solutions you need to try to figure out the root of their problem (I.e. ask 5 whys). I don’t think your customers can love you without trusting. More importantly they are showing you how they feel by paying you every month and giving you feedback. Focus on identifying their core needs and improving your product to meet them.