// Good Morning
Picking up where we left off last week (let customers close the deal), this one’s about what it actually looks like to build around your customer — and not just talk about it.
Hope you enjoy today’s edition of Signal // Noise — the dope AF newsletter read by founders, execs, and scrappy builders every Thursday.
While I Was Writing Today’s Signal // Noise:
From sound to signal—let’s get this baby rolling with what’s on my mind…
The Signal
One big idea, insight, or take - grounded in the real work, not theory.
Stay Close to The Customer
By now, most of you have probably heard this story before - in the late ’90s, Larry Page and Sergey Brin walked into a meeting with excite.com — one of the biggest search engines at the time.
They demoed their new product: Google (actually called backrub at the time).
By most accounts (the CEO of excite debates this part), it returned better results, faster — and it sent users exactly where they needed to go in just one or two clicks.
But, as you probably now know, excite passed.
Why?
Because the product worked too well.
Their whole business model was built around keeping users on-site to rack up ad impressions. The idea of sending people away — even if it was the right answer — was a dealbreaker.
They weren’t optimizing for their customer; they were optimizing for time-on-site.
That meeting could’ve gone two ways:
Purchase or partner with Google and put users first
Ignore Google, protect the metrics and hope for the best
Obviously it goes without saying, they chose wrong.
Now anyone can play look brilliant with the benefit of hindsight, so I’m just using this as one of thousands examples of how we all (myself included) lose sight, at times, of our customers.
“Customers are always the ultimate judge and jury,” Michael Dell once said. “No matter how brilliant the idea, it’s the customer who decides if it lives or dies.”
That’s easy to say, but, super hard to operationalize.
Lemme tell you a quick story.
When I was CEO at Hampton, we created a program I loved called Epics.
Any employee — product, ops, growth, engineering — could spend up to $200 on a customer. Every month. For any reason. No approval needed. And the only rule was that they had to make it personal.
That meant champagne when someone got engaged, a cash-counting machine for a big exit. Flowers after a death in the family, and a freaking mountain of baby onesies.
To make sure that learning didn’t stay siloed, we set up a Slack automation. Every time someone sent a gift, it would ping the whole org: who it was for, what they sent, and why. It turned one person’s gesture into a company-wide insight — a drip feed of customer intel and creative ideas.
To be really clear, this wasn’t about the gifts. Or even about customer service, or satisfaction.
It was about creating a culture where everyone in the company got to know the customer. What they cared about. What made them tick. What season of life they were in.
That closeness became one of our driving values inside the org. It wasn’t just about sharing good vibes — it was actionable intel that shaped the future business:
We knew that customers who sold to bigger companies didn’t plan to stay in our community.
We heard loud and clear that in-person events were more valuable than digital ones.
We saw that virtual groups weren't enough — people needed more context and depth.
We found out when customers were upset about certain topics - and they let us hear it.
Those kinds of insights don’t show up in dashboards or KPI trackers; you can’t EOS your way into it.
You gotta feel it.
The best companies aren't just transacting with their customers — they stay close to them.
And when tough tradeoffs show up — metrics vs. mission, growth vs. trust — they know which side to stay on.
Field Notes
Dispatches from the field - lessons, stories, interviews, experiments.
No New Friends (Just the Real Ones)
Since 1990, the number of men with 6+ close friends has been cut in half. Meanwhile, 1 in 7 guys say they have zero. None. WTF is going in America, UGH.
That stat is sad AF — because as you get older, you can see how easy it is to let friendships fade. This piece is a personal story about poker night, midlife drift, and how you can change direction, if you want to.
A few Jawns to Checkout
Smart reads, sharp tools, or internet gems.
📕 Great post | Inside Shopify’s AI Culture Shift
Shopify’s execs didn’t just greenlight AI; they rewired the company’s culture around it. Engineers now ship faster, make bets with fewer meetings, and build like owners. One of the best behind-the-scenes looks at how top-down clarity can unlock real speed.
📚 Book rec | The Thinking Machine, by Stephen Witt
I love these types of books. A sharp, fast-paced biography of Jensen Huang and Nvidia — part business story, part behind-the-scenes chip war thriller. If you want to understand how we got to trillion-dollar AI, this is the guy and this is the book.
✍️ Content & Creators | Substack as OnlyFans?
In case you missed it, ****Substack just raised $100M at a wild valuation. Brian Morrissey asks the real question: is it a media platform… or a fan service for parasocial relationships? Sharp take, worth the read.
How do you and your crew keep it fresh?
What do you do for fun that isn’t just texting memes or liking each other’s Instagram posts?
Reply back. I wanna steal your ideas.
Have a good weekend you animals.
Love yous.
Jordan
