I’d like to take a moment to gloat about Spark’s portfolio company Boxee.
A couple days ago Boxee held a Meetup in NYC that drew a crowd of over 600 people. That is a truly remarkable feat for a company this early in its life cycle, or any company for that matter.
Bijan wrote a great post yesterday highlighting the strength of Boxee’s innovative product. I want to focus on one thing the Boxee team is doing that I believe is the most important driver of their early success…and will hopefully be the ultimate driver of their long-term success.
Boxee’s excellent CEO Avner Ronen is fanatically focused on providing the consumer with the best possible experience. The team builds product with the customer need firmly in mind, solicits endless feedback and continues iterating in an unyielding attempt to deliver the customer what he wants.
This is the unmistakable mark of a great consumer company in the making. Think Amazon as the best example. Or what the folks at Zappos are building. These companies engender goodwill beyond the products or services they sell. Consumers root for them; They want to see them win.
Even during these earliest days, one can start to see the percolation of this same dynamic with Boxee. As the NYTimes noted yesterday:
Avner Ronen, the 33-year-old founder and chief executive of Boxee, attributed its popularity to the company’s honesty and openness with its fan base. “We have been very open with our users, even about the bad stuff,” he said.
To be clear, this is not to say that a company shouldn’t have strong convictions as to what they want their product to be. Jeff Bezos certainly exhibits incredible vision and clarity of purpose, and to a very skeptical crowd in the early days. But it is to say that companies should always put the customer first in everything they do — listen to them, early and often. This way they’ll love your triumphs, and more importantly they’ll tolerate your shortcomings and mistakes.
Boxee is certainly fighting a tough fight in the complex media landscape, but if they keep giving the customer what they want, they’ll do just fine.
Yes.
