The surreal life
My Textio journey was filled with surreal experiences. For instance:
- The time we got our sales team internet by running cables outside of a downtown Seattle high rise 19 floors up
- The time we pitched a famous VC firm with 40+ men (and only men) packed into a 10-person conference room
- The time we hired a con artist who was defrauding a non-profit hospital in Alaska at the same time as he was defrauding us (no, really)
But among the many surreal experiences I had, none was more mind-bending than the time Amazon and Salesforce told The Wall Street Journal they were Textio customers when they were not.
Everyone wants a halo
It is hard to remember now, but there was a time when companies wanted credit for building inclusive workplaces. One survey after another showed that people preferred to work in environments where they felt a sense of belonging (go figure). Tech companies were especially eager to show that they were good places for women to work.
Textio's first product helped companies fill roles more quickly by changing the language in their job descriptions. This had many use cases, most of which had nothing to do with gender or inclusion.
But in 2018, everyone wanted credit for being the kind of company that hired women into leadership roles (whether or not they hired women into leadership roles). In this climate, publicly affiliating with Textio became a way for people to signal these values (whether or not they used Textio).
Victory laps all around
Early Textio customers spoke to media and went on stages sharing their success stories. We never had to twist customers' arms to get permission to use their logos; the Textio brand was synonymous with inclusion, and everyone wanted to be associated with it.
This was a real gift, but sometimes things got strange. For instance, our most enthusiastic customer advocate often spoke publicly to share the insight she gleaned from her experience using Textio daily. This made both her and us look good, so, initially, we were happy to hand her the mic.
There was just one problem: while her company had a subscription, we could see from the user logs that she personally never used Textio. This was a more common pattern than you might think. Over the years, multiple people:
- Added the Textio customer advisory board (which did not exist) to their LinkedIn, without ever having been customers
- Recommended us online without having personally used our software
- Spoke in the press in glowing, specific terms about Textio's impact in their organizations when they had never rolled out the product
We never asked anyone to do any of the above. Most of the time we only discovered people had done these things when we got google alerts about it. In our first few years, we discovered several examples like these every month.
I never knew how to handle these situations. It's hard to call someone out whose endorsements lead to customers. On the other hand, if you love us so much, why not use the product? Something didn't add up.
Most of our loudest fans were active Textio users, and we loved them all. However, the poser crew was a surprisingly vocal minority. They never came to see our band perform, but they wanted to wear our t-shirts around town.
Enter The WSJ
In late 2017, I published the most viral data story of my career to that point. Textio analyzed the most common career site language from eight major tech companies and published the results in a blog covered by The Wall Street Journal (and then by Business Insider, Bloomberg, Fast Company, Fortune, Inc, and many others).
Our data revealed interesting patterns that surprised no one. Amazon used the word maniacal in their job posts 11x more often than other tech companies. Facebook described themselves as ruthless 21x more often. Uber was looking for candidates who would do whatever it takes 30x more often than everyone else.
In covering our blog, The WSJ called all eight companies in the article for comment. At the time we published, only two of the eight companies in our blog were Textio customers, Apple and Slack.
Imagine my surprise when the reporter called me back to say that four of the eight companies claimed to be Textio customers: not just Apple and Slack, but Amazon and Salesforce too. I told the reporter that there must be some misunderstanding, because Amazon and Salesforce were not actually customers. But when the reporter called them back, Amazon actually doubled down, insisting they'd been customers for years!
In the year following publication, four other companies in our blog (including Salesforce) went on to become Textio partners. Not Amazon though, up through the present day.
The bottom line: It feels good to get applause, but people don't always put their money behind the stuff they clap for. They sometimes clap just when they think they'll look good clapping.
Kieran
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