Story:
Building a Frictionless Company

By Michael Wilkes - President at Dynamic Answers

November 11, 2011 at 4:36pm

Marketing

web design

website design

business model

sales model

customer service

service-oriented

Moonshots

Increase trust, reduce fear

Take the work out of work

Transcend traditional management trade-offs

Summary

So often, we set our company policies with a desire to balance customer interests against our own. But what if we designed a company to be completely customer focused? What would that look like? Could it make a profit? Would it survive? We took this challenge seriously when creating the SiteMast website company.

Inspired by Seth Godin, Harry Beckwith, Michael Gerber, Ken Blanchard and too many others to name, we set out to create a company that would offer maximum service with minimum "friction."

Context

A million businesses are born in the United States every year. Most of those businesses want and need a professional website, but few of them have the cash to hire a professional design firm. In the midst of a major economic meltdown, cash is tighter than ever and trust -- at least in the website industry -- is low. There are too many stories of hit-and-run firms that grab the cash and never deliver. The variation in price for the same website borders on the ridiculous. Buyers often lament the disappearance of their website service provider after the job has been completed, leaving them with a site that grows stale and lifeless.

Triggers

After spending decades in the software industry, most of my work was behind a login page somewhere. Almost none of my work was visible on the new "main street" of the internet. I was also jealous of graphic designers, photographers, and other friends whose portfolio was so easy to see. So I set out to build a business that would serve real, everyday people and would do so in a visible, tangible way.

Key Innovations & Timeline

To design a better business model, here are the questions we asked:

Why are websites so expensive?
Why do companies charge so much up front for their work?
Why does it take so long to produce a website?
What customer-friendly technologies are available?
Why do companies have contracts that are so vendor-focused?
Why do so many friends have such bad experiences with web designers?

Challenges & Solutions

To design a frictionless service experience we had to deal with money, the service itself, and the customer relationship.

Billing
Instead of charging project fees according to the industry's usual half-down and half on delivery, we set a subscription price starting at $69 per month. This puts the risk squarely on us and makes it easy for customers to get started.

Process
Instead of dragging customers through a mind-numbing design process that takes weeks or months, we hand-pick ten elegant pre-built designs after learning about their brand and goals. This changes the design phase from an endurance marathon to an easy game of pick-your-favorite. Leveraging a world wide community of designers, we have hundreds of beautiful designs to pick from. Taking a few hours of our time to pick out relevant styles saves the customer many hours and hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.

Service
The final problem was to overcome the stigma of so many hit-and-run web firms that, having delivered the site, cannot be reached for service thereafter. The no-contract subscription model ensures that we keep customers only as long as they are happy with the service we provide.

Benefits & Metrics

Obvious benefits to the customer include

Low cash needs. The site cost is spread over many months.
Rapid startup. Once the customer picks a style, the site can be up in days.
Ongoing support. Customers never feel stuck or abandoned.

Lessons

We learned that, given enough customer contacts, there are people who will game the system. Even when you offer a completely customer-focused service, expectations still have to be managed.

We dismissed one customer for being a royal pain. Another was so hit-and-miss with payments that we eventually had to tell him that we could no longer help.

On the whole, however, customers have been very loyal and supportive of our goals as we help them to achieve their own.

Materials

Some of my favorite books that help me set the company's vision: