CEO Unplugged

Wooden pens

I spoke to a homestead customer the other day who makes beautiful "turned" heirloom wooden pens and bowls.  The customer had some gripes which he emailed me about, so I called him back.  I can't stress enough how important and beneficial it is to engage customers who have complaints or issues with your service or product.  Think of each customer who reaches out to you as a gift--worth much more than whatever cost you incur to speak with them, resolve their issue, and/or refund their money.   

I try to personally respond to every customer who emails me (sometimes over 100 per week, so I can get behind!) but I typically call ones who have complaints--as long as they are reasonable and constructive.  This is where I learn the most, not only in the many ways we could be better serving our customers, but also in improving my understanding of work our employees do on the "front line."  This latter point can be crucial, as our failure to empower them with the proper tools/products/policies handcuffs their ability to delight our customers.  And it's very easy to lose touch as your company grows and you're busy "at the top."

But back to wooden pens.  One thing that struck me as I was talking with the wooden pen maker was this: he wasn't going to be happy, no matter how great his website was (it was actually pretty great), until it actually started delivering him real revenue.  And his definition of real revenue was pretty significant.  He wanted to know why he wasn't first in the Google search for "wooden pens," why he couldn't easily create back links, why his SearchLight campaign had "salad bowls" as a word when he didn't make salad bowls, etc.  Reasonable but challenging demands.

The "aha" moment for me was that no matter how hard we try to be the best "DIY website" company out there, what our customers actually need is for us to be a "DIY online business success" company.  Now, there is no way we can single-handedly make small businesses successful online--they need quality products, business sense, a marketing plan, and a lot of entrepreneurial drive.  But there is so much more we could be helping them with, above and beyond building a website.  So I'll promise right here and now that we will dedicate much of our product resources over the coming years to helping our customers not just build websites, but build successful businesses.  And I think I'll start with our customer who makes such beautiful wooden pens: click here to check out his work.

--jsk 

Happy 10th Anniversary Homestead!

We just hit a big milestone here at Homestead: 10 years in business!  Technically, we didn't launch the first version of Homestead until January 1998, but we use October 1st as our official birthday because it lines up with the anniversary of the original company, KartoffelSoft.  I started KartoffelSoft on October 1st, 1994, so it's the 13th anniversary of our company if you trace it back to the very beginning.  It's amazing how far things can progress once they gain a momentum of their own.

KartoffelSoft was an educational software company that paid the bills by "bootstrapping" (read: doing anything that was legal for money) while we tried to invent great software that would free us from the indentured servitude of technical consulting.  All these years later we've built something quite different than what we set out to do, but in many ways it is much more exciting and bigger than our original dreams. 

Maybe there is a lesson there for aspiring entrepreneurs?   You rarely recognize the true "big idea" at the beginning, but if you don't start somewhere you are guaranteed to get nowhere.

Happy Birthday Homestead.  A sincere "thank you" to our hundreds of employees and millions of customers who have been a part of our journey so far!

--jsk