Dan Pratt
2.4K posts
@danielppratt
Co-Founder / CRO @Broadlume (acquired by @cynclyco). We help local flooring retailers thrive 🚀 Previously @Google. I went viral on GIPHY ✌️
Don't fall for the ignorance trap of "our customers aren't technical." I hear this from founders in construction, flooring, HVAC, plumbing, pest control. They say it like it's a moat. "Our customers will never adopt AI. They barely adopted email." I used to say the same thing about flooring retailers, but I was wrong for saying it, and thinking that way. What's actually happening is that someone's 24-year-old nephew is home for Thanksgiving and says "Uncle Mike, let me show you something." And Uncle Mike, who runs a $15M concrete company and has never touched a line of code, watches his nephew build a custom estimating tool in 45 minutes that replaces software Mike pays $2,000 a month for. That nephew doesn't know anything about concrete. But Mike does. And Mike can describe what he needs in plain English. And Claude Code can build it. That scene played out at my Thanksgiving table. This is happening right now in every single trade vertical. It's not at scale yet. The next generation is going to write bespoke software for each of their uncle's stores.
the latest sales "growth hack" being passed around GTM circles is the "google docs notification”: instead of sending cold emails with bad deliverability, some reps are creating a "value doc" (website audit for example) and sharing it with prospects via the "notify people" checkbox on google docs because the notification is sent from a verified Google address, it bypasses all the filter and lands directly in the inbox with a custom message it looks something like this in your inbox: “person X (via Google Docs) has invited you to edit: [any custom message]" this is pretty smart if your only goal is to reach a specific person no matter what, but wouldn’t recommend doing this as your outreach strategy
I am living through one of the worst customer experience failures I have ever seen. I upgraded my phone with @Verizon and expected the simplest task: activate the phone and move my number over. What happened instead was unbelievable. Three hours on hold with outsourced support. They finally “activated” it and my phone instantly died. Completely bricked. So I drove to the local Verizon store. I spent another two hours there. The staff was kind, patient, and clearly powerless. They literally didn't have the power to do anything or fix it, and had to go through the same outsourced customer service I did. It was just as brutal. Customer support admitted something in the backend was corrupted. They told me it would take 24 to 72 hours to restore my number because it was stuck in “the switchboard.” Then today, 48 hours without a working phone) my mom called my number trying to reach me.. Except this time a woman in Alpharetta, Georgia picked up. She registered my phone number... a stranger is now answering my calls. Verizon did not just brick my phone. They reassigned my number to a random person who has been getting Broadlume calls all morning. The team at the store did everything they could. This was not their fault. This was a system failure from the top. It's embarrassing that a company of this size can have technology and support issues this severe. When a company stops caring about customer experience, this is what happens.... Frontline employees take the heat. Customers are beyond angry. And no one in the system is empowered to fix it. Verizon, you completely failed here and are a real life company startups can look at and learn what not to do. NEVER take support for granted. You can have the best product, the most pricing power, and the biggest brand.... but if your support fails, your company fails. Thanks for the reminder @VerizonSupport @VerizonBusiness !
The best cofounder pairing isn’t technical + business. It’s technical + technical
Chris Sacca's Grand Theory of AI: We are super fucked. cc: @sacca
