Guest blog post by Tayler Cusick Hollman, Enji Founder
Tayler Cusick Hollman is the co-founder of Enji, the only project management tool that brings marketing planning and doing together and is built for the small business owner who’s tired of knowing what they should do and never actually doing it. If that sounds like you, come check us out.
I’ll be honest with you: I thought I knew a lot about customer experience when I started Enji.
Having previously been a part of 2 startups will do that to you. I had opinions. Had done this before. A whole lot of confidence. And when my co-founder and I set out to build a project management tool specifically for solopreneurs trying to stay consistent with their marketing, I figured the “customer experience” piece would be straightforward. I’d record tutorials, write help articles, and put together an onboarding email sequence to guide people through their trial period.
It was not straightforward.
What building a SaaS product from the ground up actually taught me is that great customer experience isn’t about having the right answers. It’s about making things so embarrassingly simple that people don’t have to work to understand you. And that lesson has humbled me more than I’d like to admit.
Here are the real lessons about creating a solid customer experience I learned the hard way so you can get it right faster than I did.
Outside opinions about your customer experience are extremely important (and valuable)
When you’re deep in a product, service, business, etc. you absolutely come down with a case of “the curse of knowledge”. You’ve thought about your thing so much, from so many angles, that you stop seeing it the way pretty much everyone else does.
In the early days of Enji, I assumed our users understood certain things (why planning and doing your marketing in the same tool mattered, why having a plan was important, all the reasons tracking your numbers was not something to skip). To me, these were obvious. Obvious enough, at least.
To someone landing on our site for the first time? Not so much.
To someone trying out Enji? Definitely not.
The expertise you bring to your work is so so so valuable. It’s what gives your business its edge.
But that expertise also creates a blindness around how you see your offer and how your customer experiences it. Not letting that get the best of you requires deliberately seeking out people who have zero context: fresh eyes, honest feedback, and zero loyalty to your assumptions. (That last one is the most important.)
Because the best insight you’ll ever get about your customer experience is from the person who has no idea what you’re talking about yet.
Just try really hard not to get defensive when you get the feedback…trust me.
Being crystal clear is the best thing you can do for your customers
Here’s something I’ve come to believe deeply: clarity is not a nice-to-have. It is the experience.
This is way easier said than done, but hear me out.
When a potential customer lands on your website, opens your email, or sees your product for the first time, confusion is a deal-breaker. And that confusion can hit not because they’re not smart enough to understand (they absolutely are), but because they’re busy. They have 47 tabs open and three things they’re supposed to be doing right now, and if they have to work hard to figure out what you do and whether it’s for them, they’ll move on.
This is something that has been a real challenge for Enji as a piece of software that does a lot of things. And we have had to strip Enji’s messaging down more than once. Because every time we thought we’d hit “simple enough,” we’d talk to a real user and discover there was something else we hadn’t noticed, another assumption we’d baked in, another place where we were making them do mental work we should have done for them.
Clarity means saying the obvious thing, even when it feels too obvious.
It means answering the question they haven’t asked yet. It means writing like a human who genuinely wants the person on the other side to get it, not like someone showing off how much of a smarty pants they are.
If someone has to re-read your sentence, that’s feedback. If someone has to ask a follow-up question that should’ve been answered upfront, that’s feedback. Clarity is a practice. And it takes a lot of it to get things right.
Start simple because you can’t cram everything into day 1 of your customer experience
Here is another thing that has been a major lesson learned for me. When we first built Enji’s onboarding flow, we wanted people to know everything. Every feature. Every use case. Every reason it was different from every other tool they’d tried.
We had so much to say. And we said all of it. Right away.
Turns out this is a very common mistake, and I suspect it happens in service businesses just as much as in tech. You know the full depth of what you offer, and you want your customer to know it too… immediately (ideally before they even decide to work with you).
But people don’t learn that way. And more importantly, they don’t need to know everything on day one.
What they need on day one is to understand enough to take the next step. That’s it.
The best customer experiences are layered. You meet people where they are, give them what they need right now, and trust that if the experience is good, they’ll stick around long enough to discover the rest. Because front-loading every piece of information doesn’t make people feel informed, it makes them feel overwhelmed.
And overwhelmed people don’t buy, they bounce.
So pick the one thing that matters most at each stage of your customer’s journey, and say that thing clearly. Save the rest for later because if you do the first part right, there will be a later.
How you can apply these lessons to your own customer experience
Lead with your expertise, but stay humble enough to listen. Be so clear that understanding feels effortless. And give people just enough, not everything.
These lessons didn’t come from a business book. They came from real users telling us (sometimes very directly) that we’d made things harder than they needed to be. And they’ve shaped a lot of the decisions we’ve made at Enji, from how we write our onboarding emails to how we talk about what the product actually does. And even if you’re not selling software, you can approach planning how you’ll guide folks through working with you in a similar way.
In the end, customer experience isn’t a department or a project you do once and walk away from.
It’s the collection of every single moment your customer has to decide whether to keep trusting you.
Make those moments simple. Make them clear. Make them worth it.
