We go to the mattresses

In the world of mattress reviews, the battle is not fought over delis and sanitation concerns; it is about the mattresses, the companies that sell them, and the people who review them. The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare, from Fast Company, is worth your time. 

In the latest episode of The Supportive Podcast I chat with one of the key characters in that mattress drama; NapLab founder Derek Hales. While he can’t talk about the court case, he shares how his own bad mattress shopping experience was the impetus for NapLab, which has now reviewed over 380 mattresses. Derek doesn’t make or sell mattresses himself, so customer service for NapLab is a little different than for most of us in the support world.

You probably only buy a new mattress once a decade, and sleep on them for thousands of hours. You want to get it right, but the sellers don’t always make that easy. NapLab (and other review sites) fill an information gap that’s deliberately created by the marketing efforts of mattress manufacturers, who make it hard to figure out what a mattress is made of and how it compares to competing options. 

For Derek, a mattress review is the service he provides. It’s his one shot to make you a happy customer, to create word-of-mouth, and to get you to come back next time. The stakes are high.

In the episode, we get into:

• How Derek still provides personal mattress recommendations by email
• Why NapLab tries so hard to provide objective testing on mattresses
• Derek’s documentation solution to his quality concerns when delegating critical work to other team members
• Which mattress Bilbo Baggins should buy

And then there is my favorite section, where Derek explains how he handles people who read a review, ordered a mattress through his affiliate link, but immediately hate it. You might think that your customers hate when you change some UI in your product. Imagine if they were also unable to sleep!

“The number of people that I’ve had sort of reach out furious in the first week and I get them to wait and then by week four they love the bed is tremendous.” 

It turns out mattresses and SaaS apps have quite similar change management challenges. It was a fun chat and worth your time—especially if you are one of the people who didn't know the podcast existed (I heard from you in last week’s (still open!) survey).