(2020-12-06) Maurya The Customer Factory Manifesto

Ash Maurya: The Customer Factory Manifesto. 1. All Businesses Share a Common Universal Goal: To make happy customers.

2. Making Happy Customers vs. Making Customers Happy

Making happy customers, on the other hand, is not just about making customers feel good. It’s about making customers achieve results (desired outcomes).

3. Throughput (aka Traction) is The Goal

4. The Customer Factory Blueprint

At a basic level, a customer factory takes in unaware visitors as input (raw material) and turns them into happy customers (finished product).

5 macro steps that can be found in all businesses: acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue. (AARRR)

5. The Activation Step is Where You Make Happy Customers

While all the steps are needed to make your business model work, the most important step is the activation step.

This is where value is created for your customers. When you create value for your customers, they reciprocate — allowing you capture some of this value back in the form of monetizable value.

Making customers happy at this step causes customers to

• buy from you,
• keep coming back, and
• refer others.

6. The Customer Factory Isn’t Just A Cute Metaphor

We have been running real factories for a long time and have learned how to model and optimize them as systems.

Your business model is also a system.

7. Focus on Systems vs. Goals

focus on building systems that move you towards a goal.

Goals focus on outputs. Systems focus on inputs.

use goals for ballparking your desired outcome, and systems for formulating key steps to achieving the goal.

Systematizing the 5 macro steps in the customer factory blueprint is how you achieve your goals in a business model (aka growth).

8. Establishing Repeatability is a Prerequisite For Growth

When is the right time to start prioritizing for repeatability? Right after your first sale.

9. Grow Your Customer Factory Systematically in Stages

Going fast on everything is a recipe for getting lost faster.

slowing down to focus on building a repeatable customer factory in stages.

Every product goes through 3 stages:

• Problem/Solution fit,
• Product/Market fit, and
• Scale.

10. Systematic Growth Comes From Focusing on Constraints

At any given point in time, there is always a single weakest link or constraint. Growth comes from correctly identifying, prioritizing, and breaking this constraint.

80% of your entire team’s effort should be focused on your weakest link and nothing else.

Once a constraint is broken, search for the next constraint, and repeat the process.

How do you know when a constraint is broken? When your customer factory throughput goes up as a result of something you just did.

11. The Customer Factory is non-linear

Sometimes 1 + 1 + 1 can equal 5. This is when every step in your customer factory is aligned for customer value creation

Other times, 1 + 1 + 1 can equal -2. This is when you attempt to brute-force or game a step at the expense of making happy customers.

Examples:

• Using sleazy or aggressive sales tactics to close,
• driving low quality leads into your customer factory.

12. Focus on the bigger context

Your customers don’t care about your solution but about achieving their desired outcomes

If you continuously focus your efforts on removing the obstacles standing in the way of your customer’s desired outcomes, you systematically build a repeatable and scalable customer factory.