Recently, our product team conducted a research on small business owners who happen to be a significant part of the WordPress.com customer base. In the report, there was one thing that stuck with me so clearly I kept thinking about it:
A “website first” approach may turn potential small business customers off.
A perfect website isn’t our customers’ success—their business is. That’s so easy to overlook when you work for a company that offers one.
The tech industry likes positioning their fruit as the next big thing. The press keeps grabbing our attention by saying how disruptive and essential Product A is. Marketers pitch that we’ll be successful online with Product B.
What if our potential customers repress the thought of choosing us, because we set the bar too high? When we center the idea of success around a product or a feature, there’s no spotlight left for running the business.
Instead, consider going a different route. Demonstrate how undemanding your product is—how efficient the user will be with reduced busy work and the time they’ll save. After all, we’re just a tool on our customers’ path to success. A bicycle for their business, if you will.
Cover photo by Josh Nuttall.
Automattic Design 
Comments
Love the title!
“I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good. But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts.
And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.” ~ Steve Jobs”
https://www.brainpickings.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle-for-the-mind-1990/