Tips and tools: Costco’s unconventional approach, Trello’s unusual support desk, an excellent copywriting resource, and more

Here are some great resources we have recently shared with one another

(We don’t profit from recommending things. We just love sharing things we think you’ll appreciate. You can see our other Tips and Tools articles here.)

How Costco has thrived by being unconventional

Exterior view of a Costco Wholesale store with people entering and exiting through the main entrance.

We took a lot of notes while watching this interview with Jim Sinegal, co-founder of Costco. In case you don’t know, Costco is a US-based retailer with revenues of more than a quarter-trillion dollars.

What’s especially impressive about the company—and this case-study interview—is how two of the co-founder’s brilliant moves came from his own research and walking the floor of his stores, Genchi Genbutsu style.

Trello: How do they do that?

Bar chart comparing Trello members to support staff, showing millions of members and a very small number of staff. — Trello customers versus support staff (2014).

Imagine that you’re a company with 4,000 customers: You probably have a few customer-support people. But how many staff will you need in customer support if your company has four million customers?

If your company is Trello, the answer is one. As in one person to support four million customers.

We’ve been fans of Trello for years. It pioneered a cloud-based app that allows you to use blocks of information in creative and productive ways. We use it daily for various planning and collaboration functions.

This article is a few years old and the Trello support desk is no doubt larger now. But that does not lessen the lessons we can take from how one person can effectively support millions of customers.

A real time saver for a common situation

Screenshot of the Grabbit browser extension interface with options to copy selected or all tab URLs and open copied links, alongside text promoting faster URL management.

We’re very big into process improvement. Any time we can find tools that eliminate manual, repetitive work—we’re interested to at least try it out.

This is just such a tool. Let’s say you come across a webpage with many links you want to keep: They may be URLs for articles, YouTube videos, or products. This is a Chrome extension where you highlight a range on the screen from upper left to lower right, and the extension will copy to your clipboard all the links it finds within the area you specified. It has even more features but that single one makes this tool useful.

An aspect of human nature you may not have thought a lot about

Think about a topic you’re very knowledgeable about. You are at a cocktail party and you’re talking with someone who makes a statement about that topic—and you know that the statement is totally off base. What are you likely to do?

If you answer: “Of course, I’m going to correct the record!", then you need to hear what Chase Hughes has to say. He calls this phenomenon “elicitation” and you need to know what it is, if even to be inoculated against it being used on you.

And finally, a fun window into other occupations

Red and white name tag graphic on a teal background reading: What It’s Like To Be… with Dan Heath.

We’ve been listening to Dan Heath’s entertaining podcast, “What It’s Like To Be…”

On the show, Dan interviews people who have many interesting professions, like veterinarian, aircraft carrier captain, Christmas tree farmer, PR crisis manager, barman in Dublin, and dozens of others.

As an aside, the show is a great reminder of the cardinal rule for copywriters, the need to know your target market inside and out. As each episode proves, every group has its own insider language, along with the hopes, fears, and needs that make us all human.

If you’re new to this podcast, start with the Dublin barman. Apparently “Craic” (pronounced “crack”) is a term used all the time in Ireland but the barman says it’s untranslatable to outsiders. You can listen here.

Have you come across something worth sharing? If so, let us know. We could include it in a future article.

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