Ascend Your Start-Up Chp 5

 Helen Yu flashes back to her immigration process to the United States. She is so close to making her grandma proud by coming here and making a name for herself.  The experience she is going through being a woman of color trying to immigrate to the U.S is not an easy one and explaining this is her "climb" by approaching all of the danger and risk that would entail descending from the mountain. She experiences uncomfortable body feelings since coming in as she would in the high altitude of the mountain. The path she takes in China is not well made and surrounded by Valleys off the road. It was the year before the summer Olympics so the torchbearers that marked a path up Mount Everest were not there yet. 

We take this flashback and then compare it to the next step of moving from your market camp to the customer camp. Listening to the feedback of your customers and adapting to new markets or environments to expand your growth which may entail taking steps back to make adjustments to any of your strategies or anything in your product to meet the satisfaction of your customer base. Yu explains you must "Acclimate" to the customers disconnect and listen to what they want. However, customers will often tell you what you want to hear which can be hurtful because they are not expressing truthful feelings and will find pleasure with other businesses. Therefore, listening to what your customers say and reading between the lines can set you apart from your competition. Listening to customer concerns is crucial and solving a short term solution for your product to keep a customer will save business. 

Treat customers like assets, your inventory, your employees and talent teams are just as important as your customer base that fund what you are making in the first place. Getting to know your customers and sticking with the customers that have invested in you previously creates a rapid growth. This element of being to understand your customers and build trust with them and know when to make adjustments is the key fundamental to build long term market base. 

References: 

Yu. Helen. (2019) Ascend Your Start-Up: Conquer The 5 Disconnects to Accelerate Growth