Without interest in customers, a company shrinks into a job
A founder in love with the product keeps tinkering. A founder curious about the customer keeps finding more of them.
If you don’t have a passion for your customers… you won’t create a company, you’ll create a job.
The distinction between a company and a job is an old one in small-business writing. Michael Gerber built The E-Myth Revisited around a woman who opens a pie shop because she loves baking pies and discovers that she has bought herself a job with longer hours. Dan Martell, a Canadian founder who has started several software companies, including the social marketing service Flowtown, moves the diagnosis earlier, to what the founder loves in the first place.
A founder whose passion is the product tends to spend the day improving it. The code gets cleaner, the features multiply, and the number of customers stays about where it was, because nobody is out learning what those customers struggle with or who else has the same problem. The founder ends up running a workshop, doing all the important work personally, unable to step away. That is a job.
A founder whose passion is the customer spends the day differently: on calls, reading support tickets, watching people use the product, noticing which requests keep coming back. That curiosity produces the things a company needs to grow beyond its founder, including a clear picture of who buys and why, and a reason to hire people to serve them.
The line has a blind spot, though. Plenty of founders want a job, in the best sense: a small, profitable business that pays well and answers to no one. Marco Arment runs Instapaper largely by himself and has written often about running it that way. For him, loving the product and serving customers who share his taste is enough. Calling that a failure misreads what he set out to do.
There are also founders who are their own customers, where passion for the product and passion for the user are the same thing. In that case the risk is different: mistaking personal taste for a market.
The useful test is simple. If the founder disappeared for a month, would the business keep serving customers? If the answer is no and the founder wanted a company, the next hire should be someone who talks to customers, and the founder should become one too.