Thanks,
Saku

…and for exactly this reason that I won't be a Tivo customer ever again. I switched to the crappy cable company DVR because Tivo and the set-top wouldn't play nicely together, having otherwise thoroughly enjoyed my Tivo experience. So I call up to cancel Tivo, and they do this high-pressure thing where they insult your intelligence, tell you how bad life is about to get, and in the face of me saying “no no no cancel my service” this goes on and on for 20 minutes. Totally ridiculous, and I was taken aback (given how good Tivo is otherwise). Screw Tivo.

Newly non-users are particularly useful – they've chosen to abandon their ££££'s – their disappointment is sharply felt and they tend to articulate it well.

Would an quit signal add any more value in my case? I don't think so.

The faster battlefield OODA is backed up with a slower training OODA. Layers and layers. The spiral is only visible when you step back and see the whole thing.

Regarding startup-as-learning-machine, has anyone looked at the process as essentially *risk*-based? The core idea seems essentially the same as in Barry Boehm's spiral model of software development. (The Wikipedia page for OODA doesn't mention the spiral model, though, or vice versa.)

Learning creates exit barriers beyond those of data movement. Learning-based exit barriers can be and should be reduced when moving an installed application online.

Even open software has implicit costs around the learning exit barrier. No software is ever free. Sure you may not see the dollars flowing out of your wallet, but your time is money as well.

I know that IDEO often has what they call “unfocus groups” in which they invite very extreme users, rather than trying to find representative normal people. And the reason, of course, is because they want as many strong signals as possible from people throughout the spectrum of love vs hate, not just the middle part.

Thanks for the comment!

Just to excerpt from the article that Rob linked, for readers of the comments:

The right goal for a company is to deliver customer experiences of such high quality that customers recognize the value in the relationship and become Promoters. These Promoters generate good profits and fuel true growth. They become, in effect, part of a company's marketing department, not only increasing their own purchases but also providing enthusiastic referrals.

By contrast, companies can boost short-term profits by exploiting customer relationships, raising prices when they can get away with it, or cutting back on services to save costs and boost margins. Those practices boost bad profits by extracting value from customers at the expense of loyalty, creating Detractors. Companies can not achieve long-term sustained growth on the basis of bad profits.

Conventional accounting can't distinguish a dollar of good profits — the kind that lead to growth — from a dollar of bad profits, which undermine it. The Net Promoter Score fills this gap. Just as managers use financial reporting to make sure they are meeting profit goals, they can use NPS to make sure they are meeting customer-relationship goals. Therein lies the path to true growth.

I'd add another point, which is that we all want to earn money from people who love our products. Earning money from people who hate them is often possible and almost always a short lived and unsustainable phenomena. I've found that it's often hard to tell the difference online. If you can tie a satisfaction metric to profitability, it's a good way to know if you have a sustainable businesses or a short-term exploit.

Here's a good discussion of that topic. http://www.netpromoter.com/np/profits.jsp

Quitters indicate that the product didn't fit the circumstance well, so the question remains, what was the circumstance and is there a common thread among quitters?

Thanks again for your posts, always a pleasure.