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Think you’re customer obsessed? Measure yourself against Lance Walley of Chargify.

Feb
05
By Aviel Ginzburg

The Payment solutions industry may not be new, but there are a lot of new players in recurring billing — and it’s a competitive space.  Everybody we’ve talked to over the past week recognizes the opportunity to help businesses overcome the pain of implementing custom billing solutions, and some very passionate people out there are addressing the issue.  One such person is Lance Walley, the CEO of Chargify and a seasoned pro at this entrepreneur stuff.  Last night Lance asked us if he could swing up to Seattle to talk startups and payments with us and others in the Seattle startup scene, and this morning he did just that.

We first interacted with Lance 3 days ago when he left a comment on our post about accepting payments on the real-time web.  He acknowledged the shortcomings we found in Chargify’s offering, thanked us for taking the time to consider them, and laid out his plans for improving their feature-set over the next several months.

The next day, Lance casually replied to a tweet of Damon’s about UStream’s latest funding announcement from his personal account.  He followed that up several hours later with a link to a Ruby on Rails sample Chargify had just released that he wished was available when Damon first tried implementing their API. Damon replied thankfully, and with that, he’d begun building a meaningful relationship.

They continued talking and Damon realized over the past 10 years he’d used the products of several of Lance’s companies.

See Lance is a person that loves to solve problems. Most of his companies have derived from the needs of his customers and Chargify is no different.  It’s clear that what drives him is the desire to identify and overcome the pain points that people are feeling and not just the prospect of a lucrative exit.

But having never met Lance before, we didn’t know any of that yet.  We wondered if his desire to fly up to see us was simply a publicity stunt or a glorified sales trip.  On top of that, earlier this morning I read Mark Suster’s post on “Crocodile Salesmen“, so I was extra wary of Lance’s visit.  In Mark’s words:

Crocodile Salesmen are people who are always talking.  They’re pitching to you. They don’t take the time to realize what your true motivations are because they’re too busy telling you what they THINK you want to hear.

But I had no reason to be worried.  When Lance arrived, it took him over an hour to even mentioned Chargify, and instead he recanted his successes and failures, focusing more on the latter and what he learned along the way (including a truly heartbreaking story of co-founder drama from his first company).  See Lance is one of those sincerely honest and passionate people that you don’t come across very often.  He’s learned from every success and mistake in his life, and he’s ready and willing to share that knowledge with whoever is willing to listen.

Aviel, Damon, and LanceLance listened to our feedback, laid out his goals with Chargify, and convinced us that they were a company worth working with — without ever pitching us.  He also conveyed a sincere passion for helping young entrepreneurs, which was a fantastic value add to the 10 or so people who joined us today at Uptown Expresso.  In a recent blog post he even laid out some of the basics for getting your company up and running, inspired by a customer support call he had with a young entrepreneur that transformed into an hour long crash course in building a business.

Lance also brought a present with him — the news that they’d gone ahead and implemented the missing feature (usable hosted payments) that was responsible for us writing off Chargify as a viable payments solution.

What Lance’s actions taught me:

  • Customer obsession is more than just a buzz word, but it’s also a heavy investment.
  • Reaching out directly to a customer or potential customer is important, but pitch yourself and your ambitions rather than just your product.
  • Focus on building personal relationships with your customers rather than just interacting with them on the product level.
  • Grand gestures work.
  • If you listen to your customer and fix their issues in short turn around, they WILL come to trust you.

That being said, we’ve already begun implementing Recurly on our current project, but we’ll be giving Chargify another shot next time around :-)

See some of Lance’s insights in our daily video.

  • Recurly
    This is a great post and I think it shows how developer focused companies are becoming. Regardless of the solutions being looked at or the needs they're fulfilling, obsessive and even fanatical customer service matters a lot. Its what got us to so quickly respond to your input into Recurly.

    In the end, developers are going to benefit from this competition, and we're looking forward to supporting you moving forward. 2010 is going to be an exciting year for us all- and we can't wait to help.
    Best,
    Tim
  • Definitely enjoyed coming up to Seattle, and still can't get over how cool it was that you guys played host and made it all come together so quickly once we agreed to the trip.

    In our earlier tweets and such, it became apparent that you guys are doing fun stuff and it reminds me a lot of the early stages of companies I've co-founded.

    As I started interacting with more Chargify customers and potential customers, I realized that many of them are trying the startup path right out of school or right out of careers in which they never needed to know the mechanics of how to get a business up and running. I had mentors and it still took years to learn the basics through trial and error.

    It's definitely great comparing business stories and even cooler if I can save someone time and pain along the entrepreneurship path.

    BTW, I'm glad that @blueboxjesse was able to catch up with us last night and talk about his business. He's right about at the same spot as I was around the same age at Parallax, even the same number of employees! Very cool to compare notes and convey how things unfolded at Parallax and Engine Yard as we grew past that size. Maybe that can help him make some predictions about his company.

    So, yeah, very fun trip indeed. I need to do this kind of thing more often :-).
  • That's really cool. I'll be considering them when they release!
  • Hi there, you're more than welcome to try us now, if you like. Sign up for the beta and we'll activate your account. We've been activating more and more as our team grows and more features get added.

    We're taking it slow and steady, but we're finding (very happily!) that the support load is definitely *not* growing linearly with the number of customers. I have to thank our developers and documentation/website folks for that :-)!

    That's a whole startup topic in itself: having really solid people on the team and not opening up *too* fast, keeping an eye on that relationship between customer growth and support. Right now, our dev team *is* the support team, with co-founders David and I helping to support them as much as possible.
  • Totally agree on the "too fast" aspect. I've been in too many companies where they tried to grow a really good team too fast and too large, and ultimately resulted in more of the core team members leaving.
  • I'm not there yet. I'll keep you in mind when *I* release. :-)
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