I sent this to my personal email list of 25,000+ founders, but thought it contained enough value to share on Medium too. Edited for brevity.

The number one metric we focused on at BigCommerce to grow it from zero to $100,000,000 in Annual Recurring Revenue was Net Promoter Score, or NPS for short.

If you’re not familiar with my background, I’m a “serial entrepreneur”. I’ve built 8 companies so far and I co-founded BigCommerce in 2009, ran it as co-CEO until 2015 and then hired a great CEO to “take the reigns”.

Our NPS At BigCommerce Sucked

When we started focusing on NPS, it sucked. The first time we measured it from our customer base, we got a 12.

What does that mean though? Here’s an NPS primer if you’re not familiar with it. But basically NPS goes from -100 (every single customer hates you) to +100 (every single customer loves you).

12 was HORRIBLE.

At the time, we were getting our asses kicked by Shopify (those darn Canadians!) and we couldn’t figure out why. Until we ran our very first NPS survey.

A Shift In Strategy

We quickly figured out that our product was best-suited for what we now call fast-growth brands — those doing $1–20M in online sales already, not the newbies who were just getting started.

Fast forward 18 months and we’d shifted our focus from small brands to fast-growing ones. We added some new features, changed our pricing, fired and re-hired most of our sales and marketing teams, etc.

A 541% Improvement

Our NPS went from 12 to 65. We now had a higher NPS than Amazon:

That was around 2014. We kept working on NPS, made it 50% of our leadership team’s bonus and restructured our entire support team around not just resolving issues but “wowing” every single customer, every time.

Last year (2017) we did over $100,000,000 in Annual Recurring Revenue (proof) and the company continues to grow and scale rapidly.

NPS transformed BigCommerce and ever since, I’ve used it as the #1 metric in all of my new companies that I’m either running or advising (20+).

The Problem With NPS

The problem with NPS, however, is that most businesses look at why their unhappy customers are unhappy — and try to fix their problems.

BIG mistake.

Instead, you want to AMPLIFY what your promoters (customers who love you) tell you.

If they told you they purchased your product because of your incredible ease-of-use, that becomes the headline on your home page.

You create endless case studies from customers talking about how easy your product is to use relative to your competitors. And you add those case studies to your web site to back up your headline.

Get the idea? That’s the huge, huge secret with NPS.

That’s exactly what we did at BigCommerce. Our customers LOVED that we included all of the features they needed to sell across multiple channels and have their team login in to ship orders, check analytics, etc “out of the box”.

So that’s how we sold the product from that day forward. We crushed it and continue to do so, winning deal after deal with huge brands.

Doing NPS The Right Way

Last week I sent out a survey to a portion of my email list using one of my new favorite tools, Fieldboom.

If you’re a founder and you took some time to fill it in, thanks. If not, you can fill it in here.

If you’re interested, this tweet storm includes a list of my other favorite tools which I’m currently using in my companies to grow them faster including UserTesting.com, Facebook carousel ads, Unsplash and the book Traction.

With this survey, I wanted to figure out if my email subscribers would be interested in some training around how to 3x their revenue and cut their marketing spend in half based on the specific strategies I use in my companies that revolve around NPS.

The answer was clearly a “yes”, with 99% of people wanting the training:

I was planning to deliver the training as a live webinar maybe once a week for a few weeks and then automate it from that point on, however, if you look at question 3, my subscribers HATE webinars.

Only 11% wanted the training delivered as a webinar. 61% want the training delivered as a recorded, on-demand video.

If I hadn’t asked, I would’ve created a “typical” webinar. It would’ve bombed and I would’ve had no idea why.

Pre-launch validation is the flip side of Net Promoter Score and is just as important. Over the next few weeks, I’ll share with you the process I’m using to build out the training and then I’ll literally just give you the training if you’re on my personal email list (subscribe at the bottom of this page).

No gimmicks, no bulls*it. It’ll be killer training if you’re a founder, especially if you’re like the 86% of people on my email list who aren’t currently tracking NPS.

It won’t be a paid course. It will be free. I believe in NPS and using regular surveys so much that I want to make sure you do the same thing in your business too.

And I want to help you do it using a framework that works. My framework.

If you want some actionable advice between now and my next email, create an NPS survey and ask just 4 questions:

• How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague? (this is your NPS measurement)
• Can you tell us why you chose that rating? (open-ended text)
• If you could wave a magic wand, how would you improve our product? (open-ended text)
• Leave your email if you’d like us to follow up (optional)

Send that simple survey to your customers and you’ll be blown away by the insights you receive. I guarantee it.

Here’s a sample survey you can copy

I use this simple survey in my education business for anyone who buys one of my courses, my book or even my consulting, but the insights I receive day in, day out are eye-opening.

Until my next article, keep moving forward. You’ve got this 🚀

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