Answers

"We try to surprise and delight our customers all the time. The cookie came as a way to do that in the beginning. The whole thing is to do things that don't scale. It's consumed our brand and become a really big piece of it. We never expected it, but we're sticking to it. 

Doing laundry and dry cleaning is a repeatable business. Many companies have come to us asking us to do a promotion with them to help spread the word about their business. We rarely say yes to those opportunities. 

When we find a promotion or opportunity that brings a massive amount of value to our consumer that's the type of deal we do. 

In the case of nice laundry, they offered us to give away thousands of pairs of socks to our customers. Not only do our customers get a really nice pair of socks they get to learn about a cool new brand. 

That to us is the ideal type of partnership. Everyone wins."

"Be confident. Once you have the facts you're never going to be 100 % confident that the decision you're going to make is going to be the right one. If you have 70% confidence you're lucky. Once you've made the decision there is really no turning back. 

When we made the decision to pivot we had 3,500 makers on our platform. 25 people left because of the switch. We contacted each one of them individually and we let them know why we were making the switch. We took it very seriously that we made the switch and that the deal was going to be a bit different for them. We earned a lot of their trust and respect because we were open with them and we never backed down. Even if they had complaints about our change we were unwilling to back down from what we knew was the right move."

"When you build software you don't want to get into the business of custom development. 

You have to understand if other customers need the feature or service before implementing it. 

When you're dealing with a consumer business, especially a scalable service business, you have to make sure that each experience is pleasant and exactly what the customer wanted. 

You have to listen to customers when they call you. For example, we had someone call and say that someone in their family passed and they need to store their things. Our customer happiness team sent them a customer condolences card. 

I say it candidly, but giving a shit goes a long way. 

There are times when customers have single inquiries and want us to do something different. That might just be what differentiates us. That's when they go in and spread the word saying: 'Makespace accommodated me the day before Christmas. I left my ornaments in my storage and they brought them.'

We didn't have anyone open and our warehouse was closing early. We jumped in a Zipcar and did it. It cost us way more than they were paying for the delivery, but that's not the point. They needed their stuff and Makespace had to be available. 

The best thing that I've heard came from Paul Graham: "Do things that don't scale."  

"Whether it's La Guardia airport or Montauk New York, we really believe that in order to be a modern brand born online you have to know that shopping is a visceral experience. People love to shop with their eyes. 

We always want to be a brand that gets to know our customers in real life. 

First and foremost we learn a lot. We speak with them, engage with them, we hear what kinds of products they're looking for, and what excites them about the Zady mission. 

To us, as technologists, we call that data. It's also real life experience with a large group of great test consumers. 

Pop-up shops are a great opportunity for us to show the real story of Zady. We lead with a mission sign displaying our five brand values. 

When people see that as they enter our pop-up shop they recognize immediately what we stand for. Our brand values are our strength. 

We will never turn our back to the physical experience. It's really important for a brand born online to be omnichannel."