Greg Isenberg - How to have happy customers & followers

Today's post is about how to have a sea of happy customers & followers.

You’re out on a date at a nice restaurant. The bill comes, and the waitress brings out two small cookies for you to share. No charge.

When you walk into the gym, the person at the desk hands you a cold towel smelling of eucalyptus and wishes you an awesome workout.

On a morning coffee run, the barista sees you walk in and says, “Look who it is!” They start making your favorite drink before you reach the counter.

Don’t these moments just feel amazing? Whatever expectation you had for the interaction, the other person overdelivered on it.

Yet when you’re a founder, entrepreneur, or just building a side project, you tend to get sidetracked away from these small moments. The focus is always on How much money can we raise? How can we make Forbes 30 under 30? How do we optimize valuation? How do we create a stronger brand? How many followers do I have?

We worship these things that don’t matter. In reality, the game is simple:

Build an audience. Form a community. Create a product. Overdeliver on each.

You can make a career out of under-promising and overdelivering. You can manufacture this into your process, too.

At our Late Checkout Agency, we'll be doing innovation for a Fortune 500 company. The contract might say we’ll deliver one design prototype based on AI mining community insights — but we always deliver at least two. I love seeing the look on people's faces.

The result is ~90% of our revenue is recurring. It makes no sense. You can only reach that metric because clients are coming back every month for the surprise of what’s coming next.

The true reward of overdelivering

When something exceeds your expectations, what do you do?

You tell your friends about it.

“I couldn’t believe it — after our meal, the server gave us these little homemade croissants made from the chef from France. It was soooooo good and the chef even came over and said bonjour. I took a funny selfie with him. You have to try that place!”

When this happens in business, what do you do?

Let’s say you built a to-do list app for teams. You didn't just clone Todoist, but added music when you complete a task. It makes people happy. They’re so happy, they go home and tell their wife about how great the project turned out and how you went the extra mile to make them happy.

Well, it turns out their wife works at Nike. Two weeks later, you get a call from Nike and they want a license for 10,000 employees. Pay day!

You can spell word-of-mouth marketing in just 11 letters: overdeliver.

Simple mindset shift, big results.

I’ll leave you with this…

Whether you’re an employee, founder or just doing someone a favor, how can you overdeliver to the point where they have to tell their husband or wife about it?

If everyone is designing in black + white, how do you use colors?

Sell happiness and you'll earn dollars.

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Be well,

Greg Isenberg

Note: the beginning of the year is a good time to make some moves. Here are my trusted partners:

Marketing partner: Dispatch Pro. I've never publicly shared this link. This is a $200k/year service that's unlimited marketing, engineering and ideas as a service. Not for everyone. Don't share this link, we're keeping this service small.

SEO partner: BoringMarketing.com. I get most of my customers via two ways, community and SEO. BoringMarketing used AI tools to be the best in the business to grow your business via organic/Google Search. I'm blown away with what they do.

Your unfair advantage: Community Empire. $99/month membership is everything you need to have the playbooks. templates, research, tools, accountability, p2p groups to win. It won't be $99/month forever so join now. You can cancel at anytime.

"I don't know what I'd do without Community Empire. I told myself in 2024, I want accountability and Greg/Patrick have hours of playbooks that make this membership 100x value."

Below are my bookmarks of the week.

1. News: TikTok is now charging 8% on TikTok Shop. I knew it was too good to be true...still tons of opportunity though. View tweet​
2. The fastest way to build an audience in 2024 is to set a challenge. I agree with this strategy 100%. View tweet​
3. How to get free traffic from Facebook. People sleep on FB, but there's still traffic to be had. View tweet ​
4. How this brand is doing $75k/month of sales with this subtle TikTok strategy. View tweet​
5. "In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth – Patti Smith

New episode of the pod is live with Erik Torenberg We jam ideas around B2B creators. If you care about building a B2B empire, this episode is or you. Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify. ​ Pick your podcast platform ​YouTube ​ ​Apple Podcasts ​ ​Spotify​ There are zero ads in my podcast. All I ask is you share it if you enjoy it. That lets me know that I should keep recording it.

Be well,

Greg Isenberg
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