I've been thinking about why startups end up competing with companies that have 500x their headcount and a christmas party budget larger than our entire seed round. And I think the answer is simple: they listen.
When a company gets big enough, something breaks slowly over time. Customer calls become quarterly reviews. Feedback gets filtered through six layers of middle management until it arrives as a PowerPoint slide that says "customers want more value." Groundbreaking stuff really.
A 13-person startup can build better solar asset management tools than companies with entire departments dedicated to "customer insights" who somehow still don't know what their customers want.
At Metris Energy, I sit close enough to our clients that I can hear the frustration in their voice when their monitoring data isn't lining up, and the relief when we ship a fix to their performance tracking in days, not quarters. We are building software that helps solar asset owners understand exactly what their portfolios are doing and get paid accurately for it, and that only works if we are obsessively close to the people who rely on it. Every feature we ship gets honest feedback from the people who use it, and that tight loop means a 13-person startup can build better solar asset management tools than companies with entire departments dedicated to "customer insights" who somehow still don't know what their customers want.
But here's what nobody puts in the LinkedIn posts about startup life: that feedback culture has to go both ways. Externally, yes, listen to your customers. But internally, you need people around you who will tell you when you're not hitting the mark. One of our values at Metris is "raise the bar," and that's not a phrase we stuck on a Notion page and forgot about.
I've had colleagues give me direct, honest feedback that I genuinely needed to hear in that moment. Not wrapped in three compliments and a "just a thought," but real, clear, compassionate honesty. The kind that stings for about ten minutes and then makes you better for the next ten months. That's been one of the biggest accelerators of my growth in customer success, and I'd take it over a sanitised annual review any day of the week.
So if someone asks me what startups get right, it's that they haven't yet forgotten how to listen. To customers, to each other, and occasionally to the juniors who points out the bug everyone else missed. I'm grateful to be somewhere that takes that seriously.