Customers, clients- what if you did not have to deal with them at all?
Is a business a business if it does not require customers?
If you invest in a portfolio do you have customers?
If you never deal directly with your source of revenues are you a business?
These questions have been rattling around in the back of our minds lately. If we’re building an affiliate site, for example, and getting commissioned for referrals, do we technically have customers? Are the businesses we’re sending traffic to our customers?
If we’re parking domains and monetizing them with great content, are our visitors our customers? Do we owe them anything?
Our business cards are these cute little Web 2.0 cards from Moo. We got them because they are different and we are unconcerned about being ‘businesslike’ or ‘professional’ by the old standards. We don’t solicit customers and any networking we do is because we find it interesting, not because we need to do business development so the card is more like a calling card than a business card.
Ironically, people really like them and remember them.
So, we acquire our customers by joining programs or doing a good job promoting our sites. We don’t typically communicate with them face to face. We do get feedback via blog comments and the occasional email but 99% of the time this comes from peers doing similar things, not from someone who ‘did business’ with us.
This is a different business model. I think it’s something new…