Andy Walsh argues startups should treat first customers as growth assets, not just early sales. Sonos built a volunteer super-user program where enthusiastic customers ran forums, provided free support, and evangelized the product, cutting costs while fueling word-of-mouth growth.
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from a structural perspective, I would encourage anyone to think about who are your first customers? How do you build personal relationships with them? But even stronger, going that one step further, and I've talked before around Sonos. Sonos are an amazing case study of how they've mobilized that for their own benefit and even had cost savings. So they have super users that they bring on to the platform that run their forums and run their tech support. Basically, people get it for free. I mean, sorry, they do it for free. They don't even get paid. They love the product so much that they get early access to new products and they become these evangelists of what they're doing. And so, you know, I'm very familiar with it because the irony is that they have a lot of technical issues with their product. So they need those people.