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Aaron Levie Lost Tens of Millions by Saying 'No' to Customers. He'd Do It Again.

By Aaron Levie · Startup Growth · 1 min read

Levie says Box lost tens of millions of dollars because they refused to build features that would hurt the user experience. The customers who left eventually came back.

Key Points

Box lost tens of millions of dollars by saying no to customer requests
Every decision point, they favored the end user over the enterprise buyer
The companies that took their business elsewhere ended up coming back

We've lost tens of millions of dollars of business because we said no to certain customers. But the companies that once didn't say yes to us ended up coming back.

Hundreds of Moments to Say No

Levie: There are going to be hundreds of times where the customer is asking for something that is antithetical to the simplicity of the user experience. Maybe it's a security feature, maybe it's a compliance feature.

Every single one of those decision points, we have made sure that we always favor the end user over the enterprise. In some cases, that means we will lose deals. We'll have to say no to a customer because building that feature would not deliver the delight and user experience we're looking for.

Every single one of those decision points, we always favor the end user over the enterprise.

Tens of Millions Lost

Levie: That gets really, really painful. If I look back over the past 10 years, we've lost tens of millions of dollars of business because we said no to certain customers.

What we benefited from was a product that many years later could serve a much wider population of customers. That ended up making our existing customers much more successful with our product.

We've lost tens of millions of dollars of business because we said no to certain customers.

They Came Back

Levie: Funny enough, the companies that once didn't say yes to us and took their business somewhere else ended up being unsuccessful with those products and had to eventually come back to us.

The key point is you have to be right. If the user trade-off truly was going to be disastrous for the user experience and you remain true to that north star of always focusing on the user, eventually over the long run you will end up winning in that market.

But you're going to lose deals along the way. That's going to be really stressful for you, for your team, for investors. But it's really important that you're crystal clear on the principles of how you're building your product and what you're going to say no to.

The companies that took their business somewhere else ended up being unsuccessful and had to eventually come back to us.