Customer Feedback Form For Security Company: Fill & Download for Free

Recently — I was getting some work done at the dentist.(Not me — thankfully.)I had to get a crown replaced (which can be shockingly pricey), I also had a cavity for the first time in 10 years, which was disappointing.Prior to getting the work done, they were reading off the itemized invoice and how much everything would cost. As the office manager read down this list, I tensed up.$60.01 for this fee.$180 for this fee.$82.28 for this.It was starting to read like a long grocery receipt. In my mind's eye, I saw all my money catching fire.Now the obvious thing to do in any negotiation is to use the internet to find cheaper prices. Unfortunately, that is not always an option. And even when it is — it can have a limited effect.Remember this: in today’s age, it isn’t just about good a job a company does. It is also about how well they are perceived to do that job.After she was finished, the imaginary ashes of all my money decorated my feet.I said — “Tell you what — this procedure is a bit outside my budget.“Would you be able to do anything for me if I wrote a great review for you right now on Google? You’ll have my word I’ll give a glowing review if there’s a survey call too.”As the words came out of my mouth, I saw the change. It was like I’d pushed a green button. She lit up. This was something she needed. It was obvious.She said, ~=“That would be amazing! Tell you what — I’ll waive the cost of the filling if you do. And knock another $50 off.”Ding.The office managers of many of these places have two key goals that often affect their own income(and job security):Profitability.And reputation management.If you can’t get any leverage on one. Often - the year end bonus of managers is even affected by their online reputation and customer feedback.Dangle the carrot of a good review. Watch yourself save a bunch of money :)

Given your savings and low expenses, I don't think you need to take money from anywhere. You never stated your financial goal but I assume it's to get rich enough to be financially secure for life, let's say $5MM. Realize that investors, especially Venture Capitalists, are looking for a large return. If you take $2MM from investors for 40% of your company, investors will want an exit that nets them $30MM, meaning you'll be under pressure to grow the company to $75MM valuation before selling. This is $45MM for you (less any equity you give to early employees) which is great, but is 9X what you actually need and much harder to accomplish.Fact: it's easier to create a company and sell it for $7MM than it is to create and sell a $75MM company.Here's what you should do:Keep your day job until you discover your Great Idea.Quit, and spend 6 months building the product yourself (since you are a programmer).Hire contract designers and marketers as needed to get your product ready for launch.Iterate/pivot on the product until you start to get traction - use customer feedback not consultants.Start hiring employees, maybe a business oriented executive, giving up to 20% incentive equity.Here's why this works:Since you are a programmer, you don't need to burn cash and equity on expensive technical hires early on.Since you can build a product and get customers before you scale, you don't need to give up huge amounts of equity to execute an idea.Since you don't have investors and own 80% of the company, you can target an exit at $7MM and meet your goal more easily.What you don't have is the network of advisors and contacts that investors usually bring, but if your product is consumer internet and you're sharp then the advice isn't necessarily going to be worth what you'd have to pay for it. I disagree with Michael's statement that you should risk other peoples money. The pitching and care and feeding of investors can be a huge distraction from building a great product. That said, there's no reason that you need to risk a large sum of your own money, you're mostly investing time, which at your age is not a risky proposition.

For an enterprise software company, early-stage customer development is critical. In many of the companies we’ve partnered with, the founders spend the first few months collaborating closely with customers and sketching the 1.0 product often before writing a line of code. The tighter the customer feedback loop is, the better - especially at the early of the company.Not all customers are equal and its important to be considerate about the customers you choose to focus on early. The best customers are 1) forward leaning and innovative thinkers 2) have a history of successfully partnering with startups early 3) prioritize the pain point or problem that you’re solving 4) have a sufficiently homogenous set of needs around that pain point so you don’t overfit to their environment/workflow 5) will be referenceable and advocates for you in the community. Of course, the size of customer (small business vs. medium enterprise vs. large enterprise) and contract ACV you target is very important. Large businesses can be built at all parts of the spectrum, but there has to be strong go-to-market motion fit for the product you’re building (can expand on this separately as its beyond the scope of this answer).As you go through the process of early-stage customer development, I also encourage you to continually iterate on your understanding of an ideal customer. Build a live document with 3–5 qualification criteria. If you’re building a new cloud security company, an example qualification criteria could be that the customer has workloads they need to secure on the cloud. In the beginning, you want these criteria to be very tight so that you ruthlessly qualify and best allocate your limited resources for pursuing and supporting the right customers. As you scale, and you build out additional product capabilities and get to feature completeness relative to competitors, you can broaden your qualification criteria (and by doing so, expand your serviceable addressable market).Customer development in the early stages should be founder led! It’s hyper critical to build empathy for the customer and have as short of a feedback loop back to product development as possible in this stage.At Greylock, we prioritize customer development. This includes the way we work with and support our companies as board members, and in our investment in a full CXO Partnerships team who just focuses on building customer connectivity, making highly qualified introductions and driving pipeline for our portfolio.