Dharmesh Shah describes a decision-making trick: put an empty chair in meetings to represent the customer. At HubSpot, they use a stuffed bear named Molly who gets a vote in every board meeting, forcing teams to ask what the customer would think before choosing a direction.
Chapters
The other hack that we did, so in my first startup, we had an empty chair in the room that was a designated chair for the customer. And we would literally pretend there was a customer in that chair when making decisions. We had this in all of our management meetings and founder meetings, like, oh, if the nickel stands right on its edge and you have to make a choice, how do you decide which way you're going to fall, right? Because we make these decisions all the time. They're non-trivial decisions. Do we raise prices? Do we lower prices? Do we do this feature or that feature? I found it very helpful in the first startup to actually have that. It's like, oh, well, what if we had a customer here that was savvy, that we trusted? What would they say? What would their vote be? And so at HubSpot, we took this one step further. So we actually have a stuffed bear, and her name is Molly. She goes to all board meetings, all management meetings, and then any other meeting that someone wants to invite her, they can go. But she's required to hit quorum, essentially, for board meetings and management meetings. Not a meeting will go by where someone will not pause and say, that's bullshit. What would Molly say? But it actually works. Like, you can have really, really smart people, like, debate things for 2 hours, and it becomes crystal clear sometimes. It's like, well, Molly would vote no on this particular thing. If we're evenly split, let's go with the customer. So that hack turns out that it works.
