When Bad Support is a Feature, Not a Bug
The Cable Industry's Legendary Product-Market-Fit
One of the toughest questions for startups is do we have Product-Market-Fit?
If you have a product that has great retention even if your support is terrible, then you likely have tight PMF.
This is not an argument for bad support, but…
In a recent interview, Andy Rachleff offered a great frame on achieving PMF:
First, answer the question: What do you uniquely offer that people desperately want? You will only find PMF if you have desperate customers.
How do you know if customers are desperate? A fantastic example comes from Cable Cowboy, which describes the rise of John Malone & the cable industry.1
One of the many fascinating takeaways from Cable Cowboy is learning that cable’s legendarily awful customer service was intentional. It was a feature, not a bug.
Customers were desperate for cable and loathe to cancel it, even with its terrible service. Cable companies knew this. They were up to their eyeballs in debt and deliberately prioritized allocating cash for interest payments and other expenses over customer support.
At Malone’s cable company, TCI (bold text added for emphasis):
… calls for repairs were frequently, often indefinitely, put on hold. TCI’s sins were repeated by nearly every cable operator in the country as the industry focused more on hanging wire than on customer service. Cable installers traipsed through tulip beds; repair personnel never showed. Complaints ended up on the steps of City Hall.
If you’re a SaaS startup selling to businesses, then a baseline level of customer support is table stakes for staying solvent. That said, if one of your main selling points is “amazing customer support” then you might be farther from PMF than you think - because if your customers are truly desperate for your product, they probably don’t need it to be accompanied by amazing customer support.
A recent Founder Podcast episode offered an excellent review.