Strangely Unremarkable

I’ve been a daily user of Feedly for years. Years!

Here’s the proof:

And on August 5, 2013 I went all-in and got Feedly Pro.

Here’s the point: Feedly built a simple product with a simple promise: Deliver blog post content via RSS…

… and they’ve kept that promise ever since.

I have not always enjoyed the updates or iterations over the past 7+ years, but, the core experience still works exactly the same when I first tried it many years ago; “as advertised” one might say.

Deliver on your promise, day-in and day-out. That’s it.

How does one become an “enduring” company? You earn (and keep) customer loyalty.

And customer loyalty, on the whole, is strangely unremarkable.

The model is simple:

• Do what you say you’re going to do at a fair and reasonable price as this is your promise to your community, your customer, and yourself.
• Do not waver from this contractual commitment as this is your brand, the very essence and quality of your relationship with your community.

Aside: The second one does beg the question of whether the relationship you’ve built thus far is actually trust or something else entirely.

I attempt to follow the above model for all the projects, businesses, and communities that I start, lead, and then operate. This also forces you to build simple products which is especially important in the early-days of a CommSaaS startup.

A recent and obvious example of this was my team’s decision to launch a community-centric newsletter where we promised our readers that we’d deliver 5 power-packed issues to their inboxes with the best tools, resources, and community-building strategies that they could consume in less than 5 minutes.

Now, I’ve technically broken that promise a few times because as we’ve grown in popularity our issues have become larger and more comprehensive — take these three issues for instance.

Consequently, I changed the About Page to reflect what is actually happening and not what I’d like to happen; essentially, re-aligning / updating this product’s core promise as a direct result of community and customer feedback (e.g. readers really liked the long-form deep-dives).

This isn’t a difficult process but it is one that requires a simple (reminder) system to make sure that you keep your promise updated as you iterate with your early-stage project, startup, and/or community!

And when you “land” on something that resonates you’ll simply know it by the numbers — this is effectively what the product-market fit process feels like; this isn’t the same thing as community-market fit (which isn’t a thing).

That eventual “landing zone” is your startup’s fundamental promise, the 1st of many that you’ll build products, services, and a wonderful community around. It should be so simple that it seems strangely unremarkable.

Remember: Great businesses have boring business models.