Makers often focus on the shiny object—the product they’re building—and forget about the rest of the journey until they’re almost ready to deliver it to the customer. But customers see it all, experience it all. They’re the ones taking the journey, step-by-step. And they can easily stumble and fall when a step is missing or misaligned.

Your customer doesn’t differentiate between your advertising and your app and your customer support agents—all of it is your company. Your brand. All of it is one thing.

4.4. You Can Only Have One Customer

“Regardless of whether your company is business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) or consumer-to-business-to-consumer (C2B2C) or some-yet-unimagined acronym, you can only serve one master. You can only have one customer. The bulk of your focus and the whole of your branding should be for consumers or business—not both.

Understanding your customer—their demographics and psychographics, their wants and needs and pain points—is the foundation of your company. Your product, team, culture, sales, marketing, support, pricing—everything is shaped by that understanding.

For the vast majority of businesses, losing sight of the main customer you’re building for is the beginning of the end.

Nothing is more maddening than hearing teams debate whether a certain idea is applicable in a business-to-business or business-to-consumer engagement. In the end, we’re all in the same business: people to people. None of us sell to companies; we deal with the people (consumers) inside these companies, who have the same motivations, challenges, and emotions as any other person.

Even when I ran my bar I followed the same policy. A lot of customers came to the bar. If one out of ten enjoyed the place and said he’d come again, that was enough. If one out of ten was a repeat customer, then the business would survive. To put it the other way, it didn’t matter if nine out of ten didn’t like my bar. This realization lifted a weight off my shoulders.