We have customers, not users
I was reading a piece by Jason Fried at 37 Signals and it resonates well with our philosophy at Phanfare. At Phanfare, we call the folks who create albums customers, not users. This may seem like a minor semantic distinction but it goes to the root of one of the ways Phanfare is different. In the customer relationship, you pay for the service you receive. As such, your interests are well aligned with the other party’s interests. Compare that, for example, to a relationship where you get the service for free and the service provider has advertisers. In that scenario, the provider has two masters: the advertiser and the viewer. This conflict leads to compromise.
Photos and videos are the most important asset most people have on their computer. Yes, you also have your music collection, but that is just a copy of commercial content and is not irreplaceable. For your photos and videos having a customer relationship is critical. If your hard drive crashes and you need your photos back, you want to be able to call the company, have somebody pick up the phone, and ask them for your stuff back as a customer.
The other dominant revenue model on the Internet is to provide services supported by ads. But do you ever really feel like a customer of a free ad-supported service? For example, I watch Grey’s Anatomy on ABC, but I don’t consider myself a customer of ABC.
We love our customers. We also love that folks who decide not to buy our service go away after the free trial. That leaves us more resources to focus on our customers. We answer their email, fixate on their problems, talk to them on the phone and generally jump over backward to make them happy.
