Why we actively turn customers away from our startup (and why you should too)
When you’re building a startup, every customer matters. Your first 5 customers help you confirm that you are indeed solving a problem that other people have as well. Your first 500 customers help confirm that it’s not just your friends, family, and extended network who think your product is worthwhile. And the first 5,000 customers help confirm that you’ve found that elusive product/market fit, which is integral to a company’s long-term success. But just as important as the customers who do purchase your product are the people who don’t. Their behaviour and feedback provides insight into how you can improve your product, and it confirms which customer segments don’t resonate with your solution. Even the very vocal, very negative feedback matters: after all, as I once heard a prominent VC say, “you can’t iterate around indifference.”
But it shouldn’t only be the customer’s responsibility to decide if you’re the right fit for them. To stay true to your mission, you might have to proactively turn customers away even to the detriment of your bottom line. At Willful, we’ve had to be as equally laser focused on who our customer is as who our customer isn’t, and the quality of our product depends on it. And it’s not just about helping users to self-select away from our platform: it’s about actively telling them NOT to use our product when it’s not the right fit, in service of helping them solve their problem in the most effective way.
As an online will platform, we provide a set of template legal documents drafted by estate lawyers in each of our active provinces. While every word is written and reviewed by a lawyer before being implemented into our system, our customers are essentially creating their own will and power of attorney documents on Willful — similar to how TurboTax guides you through completing your taxes, but doesn’t give you live advice from an accountant. From the start, Willful has always been designed to provide people with simple situations a cost-effective, accessible, convenient option to get the legal documents they need.
Every day we communicate with customers via phone, email, live chat, and social media, and there’s a common thread to the questions: people want to know if Willful is a fit for their situation, and what actually makes it complex enough to visit a lawyer. A lot of customers (and lawyers) assume that our answer will always be shoehorning them into Willful, but the exact opposite is true. I should know — I answer many of our customer calls. We’re the first to tell them they may want to visit a lawyer — sometimes because they have a complexity we can’t address (they need a dual will, or wills in multiple jurisdictions, or a specific type of trust we don’t offer, or they have conditional gifts), and sometimes because they just have a lot of questions and we can’t give them legal advice, and they may feel more comfortable speaking with a lawyer.
Whatever the reason, we’re always very clear when we can’t accommodate them, and we’re also clear that even if they are a fit for Willful platform, they may want to choose a lawyer to sit across from them and get legal advice specific to their situation. While we don’t refer to individual lawyers (it would be difficult to create a local network across Canada, since most people visit lawyers in their area), we send them to the Law Society website in their province to find help.
We also bake this into our product. When you sign up for Willful, you see a warnings page that outlines a variety of situations that may require you to visit a lawyer, and we link to an article that outlines more scenarios in depth. Every customer who signs up sees this page, which discourages people from using our product and encourages them to visit a lawyer or professional. Not to mention, we have a 30-day no-questions-asked refund policy for anyone who decides our documents aren’t a fit for them and they’d like to visit a lawyer instead.
So why should you send people away from using your product? For four simple reasons.
One: It aligns your values with your sales strategy.
You’ve built a company to solve a problem for someone; if they’re using your product when it’s not really a solution to their problem — or it may create more problems down the line — you’re doing them a disservice, and not pushing your mission forward. Our values at Willful include empowerment, and we’re not empowering customers if we’re not giving them all the information and helping them decide for themselves what’s the best fit.
Two: It builds trust and word of mouth.
Customers don’t expect you to say “don’t use our product,” and they’re always surprised that we send them away. They’re so used to being told that all roads lead to purchasing that company’s product, and it’s refreshing to hear that a company has their best interests at heart instead of the bottom line. When we refer people away, we always ask them to share Willful with their friends and family who might be a fit — and they’re more likely to recommend a company they feel values integrity over profits. This also helps when building partnerships, since corporate partners know the end client is getting what’s best for their situation.
Three: It opens up partnership opportunities.
There are likely a lot of estate lawyers who see us as competition when they hear about us. We see ourselves as a complement to lawyers, and we’re serving the millions of Canadians who would never go to a lawyer’s office and pay hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars — we’re serving the folks for whom the alternative is no will at all. Instead of competing with lawyers, we’re actually a viable source of leads for them, since for many lawyers their biggest challenge is acquiring new clients — and especially since for many lawyers, drafting simple wills is not their bread and butter.
We also don’t want to become a law firm who handles complex wills, so we’re not long-term competition. Rather, we’re helping clients finish simple wills — for lawyers who see us as a friend not foe, we’re a great way to refer clients to a cost-effective solution in order to build a relationship and provide other legal services in future. And as we grow, we’ll become a top referral source for lawyers across Canada. This opens up partnership opportunities that we wouldn’t have if we weren’t turning clients away.
Four: It’s a short-term move that will help with long-term success.
We don’t want wills out in the world that aren’t the right fit for the will-maker — this will lead to families who are upset about their relatives’ documents, and it will lead to documents that aren’t actually achieving our mission of making it easier for families to wrap up an estate. We have a vested interest in sending clients elsewhere when they’re not a fit because long-term, it means we have the right documents with the right people. That helps us as a company, but it also helps us achieve the mission we established very early on: to reduce the stigma around end-of-life conversations, and to ensure every Canadian family is protected through a solid estate plan. That larger mission is more important than one more customer today.
If you’re building a startup, it’s as important to think about how you’ll vet customers to ensure they’re the right fit as it is to think about how you’ll attract them in the first place. Saying no to customers in the short term is a long-term strategy that builds trust, opens up partnership opportunities, and ultimately allows you to show that you’re not focused on the bottom line at the expense of the consumer.
