If you spend your energy wishing for smarter customers, your business will definitely grow – downwards!. The best customers a founder can have are the ones who look “dumb” on the surface. I put the word dumb in quotation marks on purpose, because nobody who pays for a product and sincerely tries to use it deserves the label.
Most customers are capable adults who live in a different context from mine and yours, and the gap between their worlds and my own little bubble is where most of a product’s growth sits waiting to be found. A founder who learns to read that gap as information will build a better product than one who reads it as a character flaw in the people paying the bills to keep the founder’s kids in school.
Everybody is dumb somewhere
I sometimes consider myself fairly sophisticated, and I still have a long list of things I can’t do by myself. In fact, the list is longer than the number of hours it has taken me to move open banking from concept into everyday use. A good number of them land on my Assistant, who has the misfortune of being the person I hand things to when my patience runs out. When she isn’t around, I call friends and ask how to do whatever has me stuck, usually with the tone of someone who expects the answer to take anywhere from thirty seconds to thirty days.
In the same vein, my friends also reach out to me in the same way, asking how to do X and Y, and I answer them with the patience I hope to receive. Everybody is an expert in their own corner and a confused retard in someone else’s, so the context behind a question matters more than the question itself.
When I look at the most successful products we have built, they share one trait. People can discover and use them without anybody walking them through a process, sending a guide, or booking a call. Nobody had to explain why the product existed or where to click first, and the customers who adopted those products were no smarter than the ones who struggled with our weaker features.
We had put in the work to fit the product into their context, which meant using words they already use, showing them one obvious next step, and filling in whatever we could on their behalf. A loan officer at a microfinance bank who sits down to set up a loan product has a head full of interest rates, tenures, and repayment rules from years of doing this on paper, and they will move fastest in software that speaks to them in those same terms. Our internal vocabulary matters very little to them, and every label that sounds like it came from an engineer is a small tax on their afternoon.
Why can’t they click the button?
This is a constant battle I fight internally. My team is young and still growing, and I understand the instinct that comes up in product conversations. Someone says we have already trained the customer on how to use this feature, we showed them exactly where it lives during onboarding, so why can’t they click that thing? I sympathize with the frustration, since the team has put a lot of effort into the explanation and it stings when customers still get lost.
I also know where that line of thinking ends. If you have to train customers to use your product, you won’t go very far, because every customer you add to the business adds another training session you have to deliver. Do we train people at Lendsqr? Yes, we do. I know fully well, though, that if we are going anywhere, the product has to be super intuitive, which means training stays an optional extra for the customers who want to go deeper and never becomes the price of getting started. A product that needs a facilitator in the room caps its own growth at however many facilitators you can afford to hire, and that number is always smaller than the number of customers you hope to serve.
The habit I push on my team is to watch a new customer use the product without saying a word to them. Sit beside them or join the screen share, keep your hands off the mouse, and write down every moment where they hesitate, scroll up and down looking for something, or open a new tab to search for an answer. Ten minutes of that will teach you more than a month of internal debate about whether a button is visible enough. I also like testing with people outside the company, and my friends have been unwitting participants more than once. If someone smart who has never seen the screen before cannot finish the task on the first attempt, then the screen needs another pass, regardless of how obvious it looks to the people who built it.
Nobody reads the manual
If you think customers are a nuisance when they complain, you are in the wrong business. Every complaint is a customer telling you for free where your product fell short, and each one should send you back to the same exercise of asking how to make that step easy enough that nobody has to read documentation to get through it. If your customers have to read your documentation to use your product, you are in serious trouble, since nobody likes to read.
I include myself in that. I don’t like reading documentation to do anything, and I can’t remember the last time I opened a manual for a product I bought. When you buy a TV, you plug it in and press the power button. Only when the screen stays dark do you start wondering how this thing works, and by then your goodwill is already running low. The best products ask the least of you, so you spend your attention on whatever you bought the product to do and very little of it on operating the product itself.
Plenty of small decisions get you closer to that standard. Forms can ask for fewer fields and fill in whatever the system already knows. Defaults can be set to the choice most customers would make anyway, so a first-time user can click through and still end up with something sensible. Error messages can name the exact problem and tell the person what to do next, which beats a vague code that sends them to a help article. Empty screens can show a sample of what the page will look like once it has data in it, and each screen can carry one obvious primary action so the eye knows where to land.
Support teams have a role here too, because if an agent finds themselves explaining the same step twice in a week, that step belongs on the product team’s list. Documentation still has a place, and I would like it to be where customers go for depth after the product has already gotten them started.
Confused customers are free research
If you have a product today and customers keep telling you they don’t know how to do something, or they drop off halfway through, you are in good shape. Confused customers are the best resource money can give you, because they point to the exact step where your product loses people and they do it without charging a Big 4 consulting fee.
Keep working on the product until customers can complete everything end to end without you telling them anything and without any form of assistance on your side.
A few practical habits help you collect this research. Look at your funnel and find the step where the largest share of people stop, then treat that step as the most urgent need-to-fix. Read your support tickets every week and tag them by the screen or feature they mention, because after a month the tags will show you where the confusion piles up.
Measure how long it takes a new customer to reach their first useful outcome, and keep trying to shorten that number. Ask the people who sit on support calls to share the three questions they heard most often, and give those questions a place in the next sprint planning meeting. None of this takes a large budget, and all of it keeps the team pointed at the people who use the product.
That is my mantra at Lendsqr going into the new year. I want to dumb things down so far that customers never have to spend one extra brain cell to get something done. Every hour we put into that effort pays back in fewer support requests, faster adoption, and customers who feel clever for using our product. So yes, “dumb” customers are a blessing in disguise, and I would take a thousand of them over a handful who needed no help at all.
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