Empathy · Principle 06 of 16
Show you care
Lewis Howes answers his DMs. People are so surprised they tell him.
The first thing Lewis Howes told me about standing out in a crowded market wasn't a growth hack. It was about saying no to his friends. (Bobby's suggestion for standing out was high visibility clothing.)
We were talking about podcasts. He reckoned there were close to half a million of them at the time, and he couldn't understand how people expected to launch one and get big quickly. Then he explained his filter. People pitch him constantly, including friends, and he turns a lot of them down. "I feel bad saying no to," he said. "But I'm like, you know what? I'm really trying to think of my audience here."
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06
Show you care
People notice who bothers to reply. Be the one who does, and say thanks when nobody's expecting it.
"I think you've got to really show people you care about them."
> set caring to 100%. my fans got louder. is that the same thing.
I like that this is where he started. We usually picture care as warm and generous. Lewis's version begins with a boundary: protecting the people who give him their time from a guest who's only there because it would be awkward to say no.
Care you can see
Lewis was episode one of WojCast, and a big part of the reason the show exists. I'd listened to The School of Greatness for years, and in 2015 I wrote him an open letter to say thanks. So I paid close attention when he talked about how he treats the people on the other end.
Two habits came up. The first is the way he thanks his guests. He described it like this: "giving to them my full energy and acknowledging them for giving me that time and for giving my audience that time. Because most people don't. I don't know anyone that does that."
The reaction surprised him. People don't quite know how to receive it. He sees them get embarrassed, or overwhelmed. "It's the human element of caring and seeing people for who they are is what we really want."
The second habit is replies. Lewis answers comments and DMs across Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, as many as he can. "That takes time and energy," he said. "But it also shows that I care. And people are always like, I can't believe you replied."
That sentence, "I can't believe you replied", is a pretty damning review of how the rest of us behave online.
It doesn't scale, and that's the point
Lewis was honest about the cost. He doesn't like the word scalable, but he admitted replying to everyone gets harder as the audience grows. His fix wasn't a chatbot or a canned response. It was hiring a person, a community relationship builder whose job is to make sure people know someone will get back to them.
When care stops scaling, the temptation is to automate it. But people can smell an automated thank you from a mile off, and it lands worse than silence. Lewis put a human on it instead, which lines up with a principle Mike King gave us later in the season: you can't automate empathy.
The same thinking turns up in how products get built. Oli Gardner told me Unbounce runs ten different overlays across its own site, but once you've seen one, you never see another. "We don't let you have that experience because we care about doing it responsibly." It's Lewis's "no" again, in code.
Care when it costs you
Wil Reynolds gave me the harder version of this. He built Seer largely on referrals, and when I asked how, his answer was that "the way you get referrals is by making the right decision about the customer at tough times."
He meant the moments where the agency had got something wrong and still had payroll to meet. In the early years, he'd tell clients: "look, don't pay us." He knew that meant no money for him that month, and paying the minimum on his credit cards.
Nobody's going to put that in a brand guidelines document. But clients remember it, and they tell other people.
If you want to know what this costs you, reply to every comment and review for a week, in your own words, and keep track of the time. And work out who owns replies. If the answer is "whoever sees it first", nobody does.
Our guide to asking for and responding to customer reviews has a line I like: "Apologising is not about admitting fault or guilt. It should be about showing empathy and understanding for your customer."
None of what Lewis described is clever. It's showing up, thanking people properly and answering when they talk to you. It works because so few people bother.
You can hear the whole episode or read the interview on kwasi.com.