We were recently in negotiations to be acquired. Talks lasted about five minutes, but during that time, the VP of Business Development from the prospective acquirer kept warning us not to divulge any of the ingredients in our "secret sauce", lest the deal fall apart (which it did) and we ended up suing them for stealing all our invaluable intellectual property (which hasn't happened... yet).
Every time he used the phrase (which was often) I found myself becoming more and more amused. What the heck is a secret sauce? I assumed he meant competitive edge, or intellectual property, but being a marketing type, he liked using that buzzword instead. Wikipedia tells me that it means any component of a product that is closely guarded from public disclosure for competitive advantage.
So, what is our secret sauce? Do we even have one? We certainly do, and the primary ingredient is the knowledge regarding how to design and build a social game (and its underlying virtual economy) that is both engaging and monetizes well. That certainly constitutes a fair portion of our secret sauce.
But our special sauce (i.e., our sauce that is not a secret to any of our competitors) is our commitment to customer service. Anyone can steal that, but it takes a huge commitment.
When we first started with Scratch and Win on Facebook, I handled all of the customer service. I felt the job was too important to be trusted to anyone else in the organization. Unlike a lot of CEOs who pay lip service to how important customer service is, I put my money where my mouth is and actually put in the hours to respond to posts on the discussion boards and answer every single email from our growing customer base. Given the viral nature of social networks, I figured the investment in building a loyal fan-base and branding Backstage as a company that cared about its user community would ultimately pay off. And it did.
I remained in charge of customer service until it reached a point (almost a year later) where I could no longer devote the time and attention required to do the job justice. I still make the occasional appearance on the discussion boards, but my Community Managers are happy to relegate me to pseudo-mythical status (see Figure 1).
Our competitors built their business on monetization. We built ours on customer service. Here is a typical post to the discussion board for Scratch and Win that illustrates the point.
