We all want to be true. And truth is all about consistency. That is false. No one wants to be false. This applies to everything, including building a software company.
Inconsistency breeds doubt about your claims and turns users away. What if HubSpot was terrible at marketing? Would you buy their marketing software? What if Intuit failed an IRS audit? You get the point. Help Scout is supposed to be helpful. It says so in their name. So what would you think if they had spammy advertising, pushy salespeople or a product that was frustratingly hard to use? That would be inconsistent and false. Help Scout practices what it preaches.
And he takes it one step further. Money later. The consensus view is that customer support is a cost center. And costs should be minimized through automation. But what about the customers on the receiving end of this mechanized support engine? It was user research. And people love helpful products. Many founders have studied Steve Jobs and taken his design philosophy as a personal license to fortify their myopic product ambitions.
Network effects are magical and all good businesses have them, right? But you can alienate users by trying to manufacture a network effect. Other companies have an exploitative sales process. If we focus on helping and getting users to fall in love with Help Scout, network effects will happen naturally.
Make a good product first, deliver value, and the rest is kind of gravy. A lot of content marketing is self-serving fuel for a demand gen engine. But the heart of content marketing is long-term influence, not direct response. A high-quality content operation is expensive and may seem frivolous to someone in love with CAC ratios. But managing solely by SaaS metrics is like trying to drive a car while staring at Google Maps.
