Hi, I'm Derek severs and this is human intervention as a competitive advantage.
The listening algorithm a year after I started CD Baby when it was still just me in my bedroom
the CEO and VP of a hugely funded Silicon Valley online music
company contacted me saying
they wanted to fly out to New York to meet
me. I said, okay and we met a week later for dinner dinner with a lot of blah blah blah small
talk and I wondered what they really
wanted then they finally got to the real point
though. The reason we flew
to meet you is because we've been looking
at many music recommendation engines and
the one that's powering cdbaby.com is one of the best we've found could you tell us a little something about the algorithms and the data points you're using
I was confused and I asked what they
meant. They said the music
recommendations on your site don't seem to be sales driven like Amazon the music matching algorithm comes up with Incredible recommendations. What software are you using for that
I get it? I just smiled and pointed to my ear. I said no software. I just listened to everything that comes in and I recommend other good stuff like it.
Now they looked
confused. But how will that scale you can't just listen to every single album. What will you do when you start getting a hundred albums a
day? I said, maybe
hire someone to listen. I don't know. I'm not there yet. I'll worry about it then and yeah years later, that's what I did when we started getting a hundred albums a day. It became someone's full time job to listen to every new
arrival and do the internal recommendations minimizing.
For maximizing when everyone else is trying to automate everything
using a little human
intervention can be a huge competitive
Advantage. The problem was when business owners see it
as a cost instead of an opportunity Trying to minimize costs instead of maximize income
quality loyalty happiness connection and all those other wonderful things that come from real human
attention.
You can buy a fancy
See phone routing system so that people have to listen to nine options choose option five then listen to six more
options, or you can hire a Charming person to pick up the phone on the first ring and make a great first impression. Which one do you think will win you new
fans? You can put rules in to your online forms so that if someone puts a dash in their phone number or rights coming soon as their URL, it'll tell them they're
wrong and make them go back and do it all over again.
Or you can have new submissions
be checked over quickly by a real
person. It's worth the 10 seconds of human effort to keep the end-user experience easy, but the internal data, correct. It's
fun for techies to try to find the tech solution to everything but don't forget that even a tiny touch from a real
person can be the best algorithm and a massive business maximizer who should do the work.
I understand the mindset. It's saying by having
our software and our users do most of the work we can keep our business efficient and scalable.
But if you want them to pay you if you want to be more valuable you have to take on more of that
work. I meet so many entrepreneurs who are convinced. Their thing will be as big as Facebook. So they can't afford to have a personal touch for all those billions of users that are going to come flowing through their
app.
But by removing all human contact, they're making their app less valuable. They'll never get big enough for the question of scale to matter. Go to Sever's dot org slash h i
