a single source, nothing corroborates it

Expect the review sites to skew negative

Unhappy customers volunteer reviews and satisfied ones almost never do, so public sentiment worsens as you grow even while the average experience improves: at enough scale somebody hits a rare fault every single day and those are the people who post. You cannot steer what a community says, and even the negative conversation keeps your name in front of prospects.

The method

1. 01

   Expect your public reputation to worsen as you grow even while the average customer experience improves, because at scale someone hits a rare fault every single day and those are the people who post about it.

2. 02

   Understand that unhappy customers volunteer reviews while satisfied ones almost never do, so the review sites will over-represent the tiny fraction who had an incident.

3. 03

   Accept that you cannot steer what a community says about you, and treat even negative discussion as keeping your name in front of prospects.

What it returned

• 1,000

  At 1,000 servers with a fatal fault every three years per machine, WP Engine saw roughly one fatal failure a day plus about ten smaller incidents, touching 20 to 50 customers daily.

• 99.99%

  He contrasts the affected customers who go and leave a bad review with the 99.99% who had no incident and no prompt to say anything good.

Sources

• Rare things become common at scaleJason Cohen · longform.asmartbear.com · Rare things become common at scale · 2014-01-28
• Spreading the Word: How to Do Marketing on a Shoestring Budget – The Bootstrapped FounderArvid Kahl · thebootstrappedfounder.com · The Power of Word of Mouth · 2020-06-11