We recently received an enquiry from a prospective customer, asking us the difference between our daily deal platform and a competitor’s. It seemed like a reasonable question for a buyer to ask, but it led us to ask ourselves the crucial soul-searching question, “What is our advantage compared to our competitors?” Why should our customers choose us and then stick with us for the long term?

Our answer centered on two points: quality of customer service and risk factor. Here is what we said about our customer service:

“The other difference is customer support. We answer emails quickly (basically with the promptness with which we answered this email), and all our developers also double as customer service officers as a matter of company policy. So the people you're talking to can actually go into the code and fix things or add features as you need them. Quickly. Sometimes in hours.”

On risk factor, we stressed the importance of a low-risk entry point into a relatively-young market and of a quick route-to-market. Large upfront costs consume vital capital that is most likely scarce, and – let us face it – any player just entering a new market, no matter how experienced in adjacent industries, will be experimenting in the early stages of the business. Experimentation should not involve large amounts of capital. We are learning as much as our customers are learning, given how new the market is.

We provide our customers a commercially-prudent solution to get started quickly and cheaply, and we roll out the important-yet-not-indispensable bells and whistles to customers who are already doing well in the later stages. This is also the reason that we do not always win in a feature-to-feature battle with our competitors; other daily deal platforms boast an assortment of powerful features. Yet few vendors realize that, for a customer with limited technical knowledge who is just getting started with selling online, a giant array of features is more overwhelming and discouraging than anything else.

At the end of the day, really, our company philosophy is that we care, and we care genuinely. Revenue and profit are just means for us to gather and deploy the resources necessary to serve them better. We know that the quality of the product is only half of the offering; the other part comprises service, which is why we invariably pride ourselves in treating and serving customers with respect, courtesy, expediency, and reliability.