When Jonathan Congdon threw a party in 2001, he wasn’t sure if anyone would show up.
The “party” was actually an online forum for customers of Product Partners LLC — the parent company of Beachbody and its in-home fitness and weight loss programs like Power 90 and P90X — where Congdon serves as president. There were plenty of customers, but he felt the way an anxious party planner feels after sending invitations.
“I just remember nervously watching those forums and wondering if anybody was going to come on and ask anything or start talking to each other,” Congdon says. “We realized we had people that were doing our program who needed to talk to other people who were doing it and needed to talk to us. We saw people coming on the [message] boards and very actively posting and speaking to each other and asking questions, giving incredible support to each other — better than we could have done.”
Soon after Congdon founded Product Partners in 1998 with Carl Daikeler — who’s now chairman and CEO — they realized they were good at creating comprehensive DVD-based weight loss programs and clearly articulating what customers could expect from them. But not until those message boards started filling up did they realize they were good at something else, too: building relationships with customers beyond the product.
“What we became was a company … that provides a community for people to interact with each other, which probably quintuples the likelihood that they’re actually going to do the program all the way through to the end,” Congdon says. “If you’ve got five times as many customers doing the program as you would have if you weren’t good at creating community for them, you then have five times the number of satisfied customers who are willing to buy more from you. And then you’ve increased the odds that some of those people are going to become evangelists for your brand.”
Congdon learned the secret to satisfying customers is offering support then staying out of the way so they can use it.
“Our job is to make sure that the customer experience is top-notch, that we deliver products really quickly, that when they call and have a complaint, that we handle it really quickly, and that we’re just a well-oiled machine,” he says.
