212: The Customer Experience for New Hardware Products

With Jason Friedman, CEO at CXFormula

Hosted by Kevin Mako, President of MAKO Design + Invent

Jason Friedman serves as CEO at CXFormula, a firm dedicated to assisting entrepreneurs with elevating the customer experience. With almost 3 decades of experience, he has collaborated with a wide range of budding and established companies, achieving multiple successful business exits along the way. In today’s discussion, Jason will share the insight he has acquired into how modern inventors, startups, and small manufacturers can enhance their offerings and marketing approaches to drive organic growth. He will delve into the significance of understanding the customer journey and share strategies for ensuring customers engage with, purchase, and become passionate advocates for your innovative product.

Here are the key takeaways from the episode:

• What is customer experience?
• Customer experience is a key factor in scaling a new hardware startup product.
• Customer experience results from everything you do with your brand and your product.
• Inventors often get caught up in the features they provide but forget about the customer benefits.
• The customer experience is all about the journey they go on with your product.
• Refine the touch points your end customers have with your product and brand to improve their journey.
• Try to pretend to be your customer by literally playing it out.
• Think about method acting as an informative research process to better understand your prospective customer.
• Look on Amazon for reviews of similar or complementary products and collect feedback on what features, or lack thereof, are frustrating people.
• Look at Google’s suggested questions that are similar to the questions your product gets.
• Talk to prospective customers! You will gain insight into the exact words they use to describe their wants, needs, and frustrations.
• Craft the perfect customer testimonial. Write it out, use impactful words, and include a lot of detail. 
• Once you have that ideal testimonial, reverse engineer the customer journey so their feedback includes all of the points you mention.
• Why do people get stuck, and how to avoid it?
• How do you reduce customer buying friction points?
• If you don’t have a clear understanding of the customer experience you are providing, it will cause increasing problems.

Jason Friedman Links:

LinkedIn | CXFormula | Free Gift

The Product Startup Podcast Links:

www.ProductStartup.com

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MAKO Design + Invent Links:

www.makodesign.com

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Kevin Mako Links:

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Producer: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. To assist our startup and inventor clients, in addition to the above, we help with business strategy, product strategy, marketing, and sales/distribution for all consumer product categories.