Focus on your customers. Ignore the rest.

caterpillarcowboy:

Let’s remember two quotes, one by Google CEO Eric Schmidt and one by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.

Eric Schmidt: “Let’s not check the rearview mirror, or else we’ll drive off the road.”

Jeff Bezos: “A different way to organize your energies that can be very effective is to be competitor-focused. If you’re competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering. We have found that, on the Internet, “me too” strategies seem not to work very well.”

Yesterday, there was some ridiculous discussion about the death of RSS. It started with Steve Gillmor, moved on to Mike Arrington, continued with peHUB, and got so out of hand that Fred had to post about it. Read Fred’s post if you need more help understanding why it was a ridiculous discussion.

As a startup entrepreneur, there is definitely a lesson to be learned here: Understand who your real customers are and focus on solving their problems. Ignore the competition and ignore the tech mob. This is something we’ve taken to heart with Postling.

Obviously, Postling is a very young product. But we do have a clear understanding of who our customers are and what the problem is: Business adoption of social media is here to stay, but there is no unified interface from which to interact with all the different tools one needs. Businesses are spending too much time learning and using the ever growing number of social media tools and platforms. That time could be spent focusing on what they know best, which is growing their business.

When we launched Postling, a bunch of the comments we saw on TechCrunch, Mashable, and ReadWriteWeb were centered around “Ping.fm does this and supports all these other social networks” and “Posterous already lets me do this plus has all of these other features.” Ping.fm and Posterous are great products, but they are solving different problems for different customers. So instead of playing “feature catch-up”, we launched some unique features of our own:

  • All comments left on your content are pulled into one place, regardless of if it is from your blogging platform or Twitter or Facebook or Flickr.
  • You can publish status updates and photos directly to your Facebook Fan Pages.
  • You can choose where you publish to, instead of ignoring community context and blasting it out everywhere.

It’s been one month since we launched Postling, and we’ve been overwhelmed by the response. We have more customers than we would have expected and have been working on various partnerships that will allow hundreds of thousands of people to benefit from using Postling. And we’ll keep listening to our customers and learning about what they need and ignoring the rest.