What's our responsibility to be a community help desk?

Small businesses are expected to be knowledge centers. Is that fair?

I got an email last week from a high school senior looking to connect with owners of garden centers and plant shops because he's exploring an idea for a startup designed to help nurseries answer post-purchase plant care questions.

I'm always happy to help young people workshop business concepts. It's my way of giving back, because I've also been this person, kicking the tires on an idea I think might work and hoping anyone with experience in a particular industry will talk with me about it. So I chatted on the phone with him last week.

The problem he's identified is that mom-and-pop nurseries get asked to provide a lot of plant care instructions via phone, email and social media after a customer makes a purchase. Because we're so small, we don't have the staff or tools to provide that support.

He's totally right about this. Fernseed has this problem. Several times a week people DM us on Instagram to ask for help diagnosing their struggling plant—even plants they did not purchase from us!

While we're happy to answer questions like this in the shop, we eventually drew the line via email and chat in the form of a canned response.

Sorry, we're a little understaffed, and as you can imagine we get a LOT of plant questions, so we can’t answer individual queries after our 14-day guarantee has expired. We recommend first trying Google or one of the amazing plant community groups on Facebook or Reddit, or visiting one of our two locations during open hours where we'd be happy to chat plant care with you!

I've written before about the expectation that, even though we're less resourced than the retail giants, we're expected to provide a high level of service, so it's no surprise that this response still receives negative pushback from some would-be customers. People really expect us to be a plant care resource and can’t understand the economics behind why it’s taxing. Clearly this high school entrepreneur has identified what's known as a "pain point" in the startup community.

His early-stage solution (I didn't sign an NDA, so I'm okay telling you this) is to develop a chat bot tool that plant and garden shops can use as customer support on their websites. The robot responder acts like a typical support chat tool, scanning customer questions for keywords and directing people first toward pre-existing content that might answer their question. If it doesn't, the robot will escalate the chat to a real human.

I told him I would be reluctant to install a chat bot on my website, because I think people come to small shops to find real human help—and they’re savvy enough to know the difference. Inserting robo-chat would result in the same frustrations our canned response does, because it gives the impression we're too busy to provide personalized help. People don't want to hear that from a small shop!

What if, I pondered, you could Wizard-of-Oz the solution? In other words, have a real person answer the questions, rather than investing time and money building a robot to answer the simplest queries. The true pain point isn't that people can't Google something, it’s that they want access to a real human who knows more about plants than they do.

I mentioned that as a business owner, I would prefer to outsource that help to a centralized chat tool where real humans—but not my staff—responded to plant care questions. Could he just provide those real humans? Most questions aren't hard to answer. We get the same ten questions again and again: Why is this leaf turning yellow? Do I need to re-pot this plant? Why does this leaf have brown spots on it?

Look at the home and garden shows, I told him. You've got a line 18 people deep waiting to talk to the master gardeners about how to grow tomatoes. What if you could provide a direct line to a master gardener? I would be happy to install a tool like that on my website, especially if those experts could point our customers to additional plant care products and tools that they could purchase from us, or a network of other independent plant and garden shops sharing affiliate revenue on purchases made via the chat tool.

Let's say, for example, someone uses the Fernseed website to ask about a plant they think has mold issues. The plant care technicians at your startup engage in a real chat session to confirm that yes, that's probably a mold issue, and there's a wonderful bio fungicide product made by Arber that we can ship directly to you to help deal with the issue. The customer purchases the $24 fungicide, Arber drop ships it, and Fernseed and the startup get $6 in affiliate revenue from the sale. At scale, this is a total win-win for independent shops and product producers, as well as the startup.

This doesn't just work in the plant and garden space. Several years ago when I was remodeling a building in Chicago, I came up with this idea I called "the hardware store concierge." Like anyone attempting DIY home repair, I was making several trips each day to a hardware store, usually one of the big boxes where it felt like no one was available to answer my questions. The “hardware store concierge” was a retired builder or contractor you could hire to walk you through your DIY project, someone who would make trips to the hardware store with you. Maybe this tool could work on hardware websites, too?

But in reality the hardware store concierge is just a mom-and-pop shop. In the midst of our remodel I realized that if I drove the extra few miles to Clark Devon Hardware, an independent hardware and lumber store, I could talk with someone named Sandy, or Ron, who could definitively answer the question of whether a recessed light fixture could be converted into a pendant light, then put the conversion tool in my hand with all the correct hardware to install it. It comes back to real people in a real community answering questions in real time.

But did I expect Sandy from Clark Devon Hardware to answer my follow up electrical or plumbing questions via Facebook Messenger? No, I did not.

The bigger issue I see for independent shops trying to solve the issue of how much time, energy, and money to devote to customer education is: are we really leaving that much money on the table here?

People in the startup space might read my example about the fungicide and think, “Yes! Scalability! Affiliate revenue!” My staff would read it and think, "That customer is never going to buy the fungicide!"

How do we know this? Through direct, boots-on-the-ground experience. People looking for free advice are also looking for free solutions. Everyone on my staff has spent upwards of 15 minutes providing detailed advice for a customer who brings in photos of their plants asking for help, then watched that customer leave without buying anything. Just the other day I answered a woman's questions about repotting a calla lily. What soil should she use? If it's in this size of a pot today, what size pot should she upgrade to? I pointed out several 8-inch pots in our shop that would work for her project, one of which was $64.

"I'm not paying $64 for a plant pot!" she exclaimed.

"We have these amazing raw terra cotta cylinders in that size for $30," I showed her. "Or these round clay pots for $20." She looked at me skeptically, told me thanks for the advice, and left.

Remember when I said I'd been this person with a startup idea, desperate to talk to someone in the space who knew the industry and could tell me whether or not my idea was viable? That business, which I came up with the idea for a decade ago, was called Upholsterrific. (It's such a great name, it pains me to this day that I let that domain expire. Or did I? What’s my Bluehost login?) The pain point I was solving was one I had experienced as a vintage furniture dealer interacting with my friends and customers: no one could find a decent upholsterer. The process for getting a quote and picking the right amount of fabric for a reupholstery project was confusing, and upholsterers want you to bring the furniture to them—a difficult task for big city apartment dwellers.

Could I create a tool that would allow consumers to upload photos of their upholstery projects and have qualified upholsterers bid on the job, then pick up the furniture from the customer after a down payment for the work? Not only would it encourage more people to reupholster old furniture rather than buying new, we could partner with eco-friendly fabric companies to provide sustainable materials. More business for upholsterers, happy consumers, better for the planet! What's wrong with this concept?

Cary from Covers Unlimited, a Chicago-based upholstery company in business since 1987, shot down my idea in a single phone call. And god bless him for it.

Upholsterers don't want to bid on one-off residential projects, he told me. In fact we'd rather avoid them altogether. Where Cary wanted to spend the bulk of his energy as the president of an upholstery company was in winning business from repeat commercial customers, primarily hotels and theaters. Second to that was working with builders and designers in the hospitality space. Covers Unlimited does not want to reupholster your old chair. They want to upholster custom booths for an interior architect whose firm designs a dozen new restaurants a year.

By that token, I don't want to answer the question of why someone's plant is dying in the hopes that those warm fuzzies generate repeat business. I want to continue to delight the realtor who buys $100 each week in flowers and plants from us as closing gifts. In the time it takes me to respond in detail to a couple of Instagram plant care questions, I could have spent an hour training my staff on non-sleazy and incredibly effective upsell opportunities that increase our average in-store cart value. While the mom-and-pop hardware store is happy to sell me a wiring kit for a light fixture upgrade, they don’t want to work super hard to earn my $30 business. Their best customers are contractors, builders, and tradespeople.

Yes, I am happy to be a plant resource in my community for those customers who are standing in the shop with me, even if they don't buy something. I do think that's part of my job. But I'm not going to go out of my way to provide virtual help to people who don't understand that my primary job is to sell products so I can pay my staff.

In the end, I told this high school entrepreneur that if he could figure out how we could monetize our knowledge in a way that felt equitable, I'd be happy to continue to kick the tires with him on this idea.

I didn't say the other thing I was thinking, which was this: you can solve the world's problems all day from the protective bubble of a classroom or incubator. Startups are founded this way all the time. But startups aren't businesses. Startups are ideas that take huge amounts of investment capital to pay people to build tools to solve a problem that, ultimately, your target market won't pay you enough to continue to build. (Which is why most startups just sell your data, making YOU the product, not the consumer.) Spend some time working in different industries and for other people who have found a way to make more money than they spend selling a product or service to people who are willing to pay for it, and you'll come up with a business—not a startup—idea. That's what real entrepreneurship is.

People asking us for free advice is definitely a pain point. But it's not one that a real business, or real entrepreneurs, actually needs to solve.