I writing this post because I’ve been confused lately.

I’ve had several conversations with founders in the past several weeks where founders are speaking with me as if they don’t know where to find more customers…

My conversations with each of these founding teams circled around to this main point 👇

✅ Happy customers are a startup’s #1 asset to acquire more customers. Period.

Yet, this asset seems to be highly misunderstood and highly underutilized. ✅

Investors, like myself, ask about and talk about startup growth.

✅ Yet, startup “growth” tends to assume something very subtle:

It tends to assume what matters most in acquiring customers is the efforts of the startup.

I assert that what may be most important in acquiring customers is actually the efforts of your customers, if activated and empowered properly. ✅

Neither the founder, nor the investor, discuss how to activate existing customers in the effort towards acquiring more customers.

I believe this is because founders or investors don’t really know how to activate happy customers well.

And yet…

✅ There are three truths about happy customers 👇

I felt this unfold right in front of my eyes recently.

Two Tundra Angels members had invited me to present Tundra Angels to their Vistage group. For context, a Vistage group is a group of about 10-12 CEOs of companies in a geographical area.

I was especially excited because the two investors were happy and proud of being in Tundra Angels. After finishing my presentation, I asked the two investors to add onto anything I shared or share their experiences. I just shut up and listened as I handed the floor to these two investors.

Let’s think about this for a minute.

These two Tundra Angels members are already convinced that the Tundra Angels experience is awesome. They know others just like them and know where to find them. And they connected the value of Tundra Angels to their specific situation.

30 minutes prior to this moment, the 10 other CEOs in the group had never met me nor hardly knew I existed. But through the Vistage group, the 10 CEOs had known these two Tundra Angels members for years. There is no better person to communicate the value of Tundra Angels to a CEO than another CEO who has already experienced the value and has existing embedded trust.

These two investors fielded a lot of the Q&A from the group, they even responded for me when hard and theoretical questions came up from different individuals.

Our two Tundra Angels investors were defending their experience. Yet, that’s what happy customers do… 😀

Potential customers need to hear from your existing, happy customers.

Most empowerment of existing customers feels forced. 98% of word of mouth referrals are not sustainable because they are one-off favors. Thus, word of mouth referrals become sporadic, highly variable, and not predictable.

✅ Startups can’t win on one-off favors and introductions. They need a word of mouth flywheel where happy customers continue to evangelize the message of your startup. ✅

So, how does a startup activate the customers so that they reach potential customers out of their own self-interests?

Maybe instead of doing all the talking, startups should instead build a platform and give the customers a microphone 🎤, a message 💬, or an incentive 💵 👍.

Focus the questions around the problems that they are trying to solve in the market. Ask how your startup product has helped them solve their problem(s). Edit this conversation into 3-5 clips that can be posted on social media, shared on your website, etc. This is better for more educational related content, not as much closing a deal.

Founders can get creative with this. This could involve interviewing key opinion leaders in your given space. If they are customers, then the conversation will naturally turn towards how your solution has helped them.

All you did as a startup was create a context that gave them a platform and a microphone to talk about your startup.

Carter Brown, CEO of GoGuide, a startup in the outdoors industry, put together this great video featuring reviews from their customer base. It drives home the emotional part of why the product is awesome. A video like this is a perfect tuck-in for a potential customer that is on the fence about using your product. Video example below 👇

On a handful of occasions, I have spoken with startups who shared with me that customers have asked them for materials to send along to a prospective customer in their network.

This symptom reveals an opportunity - maybe customers don’t feel adequately empowered with your message?

Think about that. They are showing signs of activity of telling other people about the startup in question, but their elevator pitch needs to be followed up with additional details.

For some startups, perhaps activating your happy customers is no harder than empowering them with the message on an ongoing basis?

HINT: This works well when the customers have a predictable place to go to access your collateral so there isn’t any friction in them asking you for it. Provide them the context and platform to access it themselves.

At one point, I was made aware of an email exchange between a customer and a startup company. It went like this…

Customer: “Question - what's the thought around not doing anything with referral-based relationships? That hinders the GTM strategy considerably if your existing customers cannot be activated and incentivized to tell others…”

Startup: “I really appreciate the note. We see tremendous value in referrals driven by our customers and partners - we are proud to say that close to 50% of our new customers come from WOM or a direct referral. We may explore a formal, incentive-based referral program in the future once we have the bandwidth and infrastructure to support it.”

The startup is completely missing a low-hanging fruit opportunity:

Instead, this startup should be asking, “Why can’t the 50% be more like 90%?”

Sometimes an incentive referral can change word of mouth behavior drastically. The startup’s job is to figure out what your customers want to receive as an incentive.

Then, unlike this startup above, for the love of winning the market, make it happen.

To gain an asymmetric edge in the market, it’s table stakes to have happy customers.

Happy customers need to be mobilized.

So, I’d ask the following questions:

A startup will only tip the market in their favor if their happy customers become mobilized customers, repeatedly.