We signed 100,000 new clients during the pandemic… by listening-DesignSoftwareUsers

We signed 100,000 new clients during the pandemic… by listening

Antony William December 04,2022

Drawn to solving complex problems, I spent decades of my career in managerial roles at top tech companies Frank And Oak and building ad tech solutions for companies like Shopify and Clash of Clans. But throughout those years of growth and achievement, I always had a voice in my head saying, “Is this really the best thing I can spend my time doing?”

I quickly realized that building technology that helped companies sell virtual soldiers, blouses, and pants was just fundamentally dissatisfying for me. Eventually, I decided I wanted to build a company with a bigger impact.

With Eytan Bensoussan, I founded NorthOne and we did just that. We saw that small businesses were not having their needs met by traditional banks and we built a digital bank that specifically served them.

Then the pandemic hit.

Businesses closed, startups couldn’t find funding, unemployment rose. But even during these difficult economic times, we signed 100,000 new customers .

How did we achieve that? In short, we listened.

We conducted a “customer discovery” program in order to understand the specific needs of our customers. By understanding how we could best help them during this difficult time we set ourselves up for success. We used our learnings to quickly address our customers’ needs and grow our business.

Following our model, here’s how you can drive growth in difficult times using a laser-focused approach to customer experience.

1. Know your market

The pandemic changed everyone’s needs across industries and locations. During this global shift, we paid close attention to the businesses that we were built to serve: those with under 20 employees.

In fact, small businesses with under 20 employees make up almost 90% of the businesses in the US. We saw that almost as soon as pandemic restrictions went into place, these businesses were the ones to drive the accelerated demand for digital financial services.

The increased demand was fortunate for our business, but it posed challenges as well. We were prepared to meet the demand, but with a rush of new customers, we needed to adjust our offerings to cater to their needs.

So at NorthOne, we worked to make our offerings align with the needs of our customers as closely as possible.

2. Determine customer needs

In order to add the most customers during this time of high demand, you need to find as many ways as you can to listen to your customers in order to learn what products and services that are right for them.

And then you need to deliver those products. Our company’s approach was to connect with thousands of customers and closely go through what they needed.

Not all businesses are alike, even within a certain demographic, like those with less than 20 employees. We started by having conversations with business builders in our networks. Then we created personas based on geography, industry, and financial experience. To understand the specific needs of those different demographics, we conducted methodical outreach calls to business owners who were representative of each persona.

3. Implement a customer discovery program

So what is customer discovery?

We define the discovery process as answering these key questions:

Where do problems exist for our customers?

How do our customers interact with that problem?

How is this problem solved today?

How painful is this problem for customers today?

What are our customers’ business flows and habits?

For clarity, this process is not user testing, feature set discovery, or running focus groups. It involves direct conversations with existing and potential customers. The process starts by determining who to speak with to gather these insights and answer our core questions.

To “discover” a customer, we:

Talked to many, many existing customers

Identified those who experience the problem we care about

Within that group, identified those who are motivated to act to fix that problem

To source the people we wanted to interview once we understood the core problems we needed to solve, we targeted:

Former interviewees

LinkedIn contacts

People in relevant LinkedIn groups and relevant Quora threads

Attendees of industry conferences

Members of small business councils

People complaining about money management or banking experience on social media

People posting on social media with relevant hashtags

School alumni

Former co-workers

To standardize and make the most of each interview, we developed scripts for different length interviews with questions like:

What is a day in your life?

At which points in your day do you interact with finances or money?

What are the kind of metrics you want to track when it comes to finances or money?

What kind of internal resources do you have dedicated to financial management and money?

How does your company make spending decisions?

4. Understand the problems you discover

Once you begin to talk to these target interviewees, you will see different problems emerge and, when you do, it is important to understand the different categories that they fall into.

The types of customer problems you will discover include:

A latent problem — they have a problem but don’t know it

A passive problem — they know of the problem but aren’t motivated to change

An active/urgent problem — they recognize the problem, are searching for a solution, but haven’t done the hard work of actually solving it yet

A vision — they have an idea for solving the problem, have cobbled together a home-grown solution, but would pay for something better

Don’t get caught up in all the problems you record. Some are more valuable than others. In fact, the problem that you should dedicate your energy to is the “vision problem.” It is key to note that they have found their own solution but would pay for something better .

And you can become the one they pay to do that.

(Here’s a deeper dive into our Customer Discovery Plan .)

5. Determine what solution is needed

We found that business owners who had never set up a website, let alone a website facilitating e-commerce transactions, suddenly needed help moving their financial operations online.

In a world where every business needs to convert to digital, people without financial or technical backgrounds are now the ones embracing digital transformation. What they needed more than anything is a solution that didn’t require them to learn the intricacies of financial management or tech development.

And this is something that is easy for entrepreneurs to forget. Often we build things for people like us. But the people that need the most support are often the ones who didn’t have backgrounds similar to us at all.

6. Deliver those products

Following our discovery program, we determined that our customers told us they needed speed, ease of use, and financial management tools that are designed for small teams rather than for companies with hundreds of employees.

Previously, owners’ options were either to go to a large bank that provided small businesses with an anemic, bare-bones view into their finances or to go to a new financial technology company that assumed that they already had a financial operations background.

Consequently, our research led us to prioritize operation speed and to update our tools to make all of our services as easy to understand as possible. By listening to our customers we were able to maximize our impact. And by maximizing impact, you can maximize your growth.

Your product isn’t ‘broken’ or ‘unbroken’ — it’s somewhere in between

Boris is the wise ol’ CEO of TNW who writes a weekly column on everything about being an entrepreneur in tech — from managing stress to embracing awkwardness. You can get his musings straight to your inbox by signing up for his newsletter!

A few days ago, I passed a couple of kids on the street. They stood by their bicycles, getting ready to head out. I didn’t really pay them much attention (except from trying to keep 1.5 m distance), but I did overhear the younger one defiantly saying ‘I didn’t break it!’

The other kid replied with something I couldn’t quite catch. Then the younger one — slightly less defiant now — said, “It isn’t really broken OR unbroken. It’s sort-off in between broken… and… unbroken…”

I couldn’t help but smile. Obviously, the little boy was just trying to talk his way out of something and trying to divert the blame, but he also had a point. Objects, relationships, deals, and software rarely really totally break down.

The world is full of subtleties. There are gradients of brokenness, and we’re always trying to find out if we’re closer to broken or unbroken. You are not successful or unsuccessful: You’re somewhere in between, and either on your way up or down. It all depends on circumstances and your own analysis and perspective.

The challenge isn’t to find the truth or the actual status, but the amount of broken/unbrokenness of your situation, and to take the next logical step to move towards less brokenness. Don’t be disheartened when facing a ‘broken’ product or some other problem; it’s a spectrum, so just try to keep moving towards ‘unbrokenness.’

There’s a scene in a James Bond movie where someone is fixing a car that was shot up, burned down, and then blown to pieces. The person fixing it remarks it was quite an effort to fix the car because the only thing they had to work from was a steering wheel.

Apparently, that car wasn’t really broken either, it had one whole part, and that seemed enough to fix it up. It wasn’t broken. It was sort-off in between broken… and… unbroken.

Can’t get enough of Boris? Check out his older stories here , and sign up for TNW’s newsletters here .

You can’t hire friends… or can you?

As I wrote last week , I’ve made and currently have a lot of friends I met through my own company . It’s not like I only hired friends — which would be weird and, you know, nepotism — but to me, it feels logical that some of the people I hired eventually turned into friends .

Once upon a time, I spoke to a manager that I respect for his management skills. He had noticed I was friends with someone at my own company and warned me about the risks that come with that.

He warned me about possible conflict, about that person not delivering the right results , me having to be strict or even firing that person, and how my personal relationship would then complicate matters.

I took this all in, swallowed hard, and gave him my perspective: yes, there are risks of being friends with employees for all the obvious reasons, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. See, there are also huge benefits that, to me, outweigh the negatives.

First of all, it’s almost unavoidable to befriend smart and passionate people who are working with you on a common goal, which goes towards fulfilling strong underlying values you both believe in. Working closely together and going through the worst and best of times is a perfect foundation for a long-lasting friendship. You’d have to be a psychopath not to create an emotional bond.

Now let’s assume that after a while they don’t perform well, and the worst scenario comes into play: you’ll have to fire your friend . In my experience , the better you understand each other, and the better the relationship , the less chance of there being any misunderstandings.

If you have a good relationship and have been communicating well, then surely you’ll both already know what’s what before you even have that difficult situation. And… wouldn’t a friend work hard to not disappoint his or her friend ? My gamble has always been that people choose to work hard for me.

I’ve never been able to force people to work hard. Instead, I try to create a safe and creative atmosphere where hard work is appreciated and then expect people will feel bad for not doing it. I’m of the “I’m not angry, I’m disappointed” management style , and that simply works better if there’s a relationship based on mutual respect.

But then there’s still the risk of favoritism. If I’m friends with one manager and less with another, and only one of them can get a promotion , will I be able to objectively pick the right person, or will my friendship with one of them influence my decision?

I’ve been in these situations before, and so far it hasn’t been an issue. Or, maybe it’s always an issue, so it’s better that you’re especially conscious of it due to the friendships you’ve made.

If you promote one manager and not the other, you better have great reasons and be able to explain those well. It’s only when your reasons aren’t well-founded that you run the risk of favoritism coming up.

I think that people, when they look at how I treat employees, have found me fair. In the 25 years I’ve been doing business there hasn’t been a single issue about favoritism, and this is because I always focus on providing logical arguments for the actions I take — and not because I don’t have employees as friends .

To sum it up, I think it’s a sign of a healthy and efficient workplace if there’s room for friendships among coworkers. It means there’s room for emotions and intuition and for everything that makes us human.

I like looking at employees and coworkers as human beings, with interests and flaws and talents. I know that’ s an imperfect world, but I love it.

Can’t get enough of Boris? Check out his older stories here , and sign up for TNW’s newsletters here .

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