Originally published by Marc Lore on LinkedIn: Are Your Customers in Love with You or Are You Stuck in the “Friend Zone?”

You just started a new business – inside a company or as a standalone – and your colleagues/investors review the financial plan and leave the meeting excited about the short-term opportunity. That should be a good thing, right? I’m not so sure.

In cases like this, a business may be solving for financials with a customer proposition that might be just “good enough.” And time and time again, I see this approach fail because they end up underinvesting in creating something truly differentiated for the customer. As a result, they aren’t able to get enough traction to achieve scale.

Making money takes patience. And, building a truly innovative business means people should be asking…“Is this customer offering too good to be economically viable?”

Building something that really pushes the boundaries on the customer experience will earn you true loyalty and customers that won’t stop referring their friends, the most cost effective form of marketing. And, assuming you’ve picked the right industry with a huge market potential, as you grow, you will get the advantages of scale that make your business economically viable. And, that scale combined with an amazing customer value proposition will create a powerful moat around your business.

Focus on Being Loved and then Work Backward into a Profit

Building something that customers love is the hardest part and then, later, you can work backwards to get to a profit. Moreover, with the understanding of the optimal customer value proposition you can most effectively deploy your resources.

When we started Diapers.com, we were solving a big problem for overwhelmed parents who wanted diapers delivered fast without paying a markup. We came out of the gate and guaranteed boxes of diapers, overnight, at equivalent pricing, with a 365-day return policy and immediate answers to customer queries all without a membership fee. The experience didn’t just create a buying preference, it created an emotional connection with our brand. Even today, parents tell me they miss Diapers.com.

Getting to that kind of customer experience could not come with an immediate profit. In fact, to most people, the value prop looked too good to be true, but from the beginning, the strategy was to win customers hearts and then pursue the difficult task of achieving profitability as we got to scale.

We knew as it scaled, we would drive efficiency in our purchasing and supply chain, and by selling more long-tail baby products with better margin, we’d ultimately achieve strong profits and, most importantly, a truly defensible offering.

Economic Viability Can Come as New Technology Matures

Beyond scale, sometimes the roadmap to success is even less clear and relies on how you and the market, including technology, evolve. In that vein, we just launched something called Jetblack with the vision of offering a magical click-less shopping experience.

If you live in Manhattan, you can text (or use your voice) to order anything under the sun and get it delivered same-day with best-in-class service. You can order paper towels, a tent, a belt to match those new shoes, or even a birthday present for your child’s nine-year-old friend the same way you text your friends and family. When you aren’t sure exactly what you want, we make the most relevant, personalized recommendations and get it to you almost immediately.

Jetblack may seem too good to be true and, to be sure, our Jetblack team today is pretty hands-on to make sure every experience is magical. But as our AI continues to learn, the system will continue to make more and more of our recommendations. We’re readying ourselves for a world where people will shop very differently, and these voice/text shopping experiences will then be primed to scale across Walmart.com, Jet.com and all of our properties. As it scales and advancements in AI continue, we believe we’ll get to economic viability, but that is the challenge.

Go Extreme on Your Customer Offering…And Then Push It Further

I get that funding can be hard to come by, but don’t settle. If the value prop doesn’t have the potential to be amazing, drop it fast and don’t waste your time or money. But, if it does, make the investment, even if it takes a lot of capital.

We funded Diapers.com with our own money, and it was hard, really hard, some days. I can’t tell you how many times we could have just decided to raise our prices or cut some corners to get to profitability faster. In fact, one of our competitors did, and it didn’t take long before they went under. If we would have ever waivered, we would have been blown out of the water by the next company with a better customer offering. The customer proposition needs to be so good that it doesn’t leave room for a competitor to swoop in and offer a superior customer value prop.

Whether you’re self-funded or funded by investors, you must have a path to profitability. But, don’t worry if that takes time and doesn’t happen until you get to scale and start gaining efficiencies. Work backwards into that after you’ve perfected your customer value proposition.

It’s not easy. Be prepared to invest…and potentially invest a lot. It can seem intimidating and risky to bet on a longer-term return, but in reality, it is much riskier to put money and time into something that customers think is just so-so. Pick the right market and raise the capital to bridge the gap and prove to investors that when you get to the endpoint, you will have created a substantial return.