How Do You Kill Your Business? Ask @Delicious

in Customer Service, entrepreneurship

delicious maintenance

Companies get killed because they grow complacent and get disrupted by a different and better offering. Clear signals that a business is dying is when they don’t give a damn about their users.

Case in point: delicious.

Delicious, a popular bookmarking service born during the Web 2.0 days, has made it clear to its users that it’s killing itself by making the service worse and then ignoring our pleas for help. All you have to do is read through user Twitter mentions to see what all the fuzz is about:

These are comments from yesterday, but you can scan through previous mentions and they go well over a month. And, Delicious don’t respond to any of them. Complete radio silence. Beyond a blog post informing us that they will be in maintenance, no heads up whatsoever as to when we can expect the service to be back again.

That’s a big time fail in my book.

Here are some of my own comments starting over a month ago:

And more recently:

Customer obsession means outcaring

As stated in the last comment, this situation is a classic case of just not giving a damn about anything. I’ve been a loyal Delicious user for almost 10 years, I’ve stayed loyal through the transition period when it was saved by the co-founders of YouTube almost 6 years ago.

But who knows what happened to it ever since, as it’s gotten worse and worse. I believe that user obsession is what’s missing, the likes of Amazon and Google have.

Customer obsessed businesses focus on delight, satisfaction and retention. Simply put, they give a damn about customers.

Bottom line: Pinboard didn’t kill Delicious, it killed itself by not giving a damn. And that’s how businesses die.

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