Honesty is The New Black

Published 16 August 05 by Justin French, 1 comments

In his post Mark My Words Again, he (sorry, “he” doesn’t give us his name) discusses the brave new world of real business:

I foresee a brilliant future for business. One of transparency and simplicity. One that is devoid of contracts. One that relies on good design to attract and keep customers. One where the door to leave (with all of your data) is always open.

It is a glorious future.

Dramatics aside, I actually think it is here today. People are starting to realize that the value of design, transparency, and good customer service are significant enough to justify higher prices. When you have these ingredients then you don’t need a legal or technological contract (a technological contract locks your data into someone else’s system, preventing you from using a competitor’s system) to lock someone into using your services.

Reading a little further down, it turns out that the inspiration behind this post was one of the screenshots of Strongspace. Nice.

But I’d like to take that one step further. We don’t believe we can charge a higher price for transparency, honesty and freedom – in fact, we feel it’s the only way we can charge a fair price.

We don’t have a marketing/advertising budget, we don’t have a sales force, and we don’t have deep pockets. The only real way we can sell Strongspace accounts is by providing people with something they can justify (even feel good about) paying for.

It’s the result of a user-driven design and development process where we (the development team) built exactly what we wanted to see in the application.

We (as users) wanted billing details on the dashboard, so that’s where we put them. We have a “no refunds” policy, so we put it right there on the sign-up page where people could easily see it (rather than burying it in the FAQs), and explained why. We don’t like being locked into contracts, so Strongspace doesn’t have them (pay by the month, cancel any time). We felt that allowing unlimited read-only users would make the plans much more useful, even though it meant we’d sell less upgrades to higher plans.

I imagine there’s many development teams out there that would like to do this, but the difference is that we weren’t squashed from above by management and bean counters who felt the need to “lock things down”.

Jason told me to build something I would want to use and pay for, then gave me the power and resources to make it happen.

Make no mistake, Strongspace is a business. It has to recover the development costs, it has to cover ongoing costs, pay wages, etc, but we feel we can sell Strongspace accounts based on customer satisfaction, by word of mouth and by being responsive to customers needs. Current sales suggest we were right.

Of course, this isn’t ground-breaking news or a revolutionary new business model. I’m sure there’s plenty of business’ that work this way, and teams like 37signals certainly pushed these ideas up front with products like Basecamp, but in the end, this stuff just makes sense.

Who wants an angry customer hanging around just because they’re locked in to a contract or particular technology? Angry customers poison the rest of the user community, fill up support systems and frustrate staff.