Your customer isn't you

Are you familiar with amiunique.org? If not, take a quick look and come back. The website checks information your web browser exposes and lets you know if your particular combination is unique. Mine certainly is.

Nothing about my browser is exciting on its own. macOS, so what? So is 11% of everything they’ve seen. Firefox is a bit kooky in 2026 but a third of visitors still use it, two thirds share my language and a fifth my time zone. And I run uBlock, which I’d hope everyone does.

With enough variables you can always tell any two people apart. It’s like a game of Guess Who.

Here’s a different example. I used to use Reddit a lot, until they nuked the third-party apps. You join a subreddit for each of your interests, and without meaning to you build a Venn diagram with more and more circles until the only intersection is you. Many people write music, lots watch rallycross, and plenty listen to Queens of the Stone Age, shoot 35mm film or rollerblade. Target an ad at that intersection and you’d only annoy me, if uBlock didn’t catch it.

You are the combination of things that excite you, but no individual interest or view is specific to you. I’ve explained this to someone different most weeks for the last decade, usually someone launching something. Your buyer persona can’t be “me and people like me”, and the more your instinct is to argue with that, the more it’s true.

I’ve watched plenty of people fall into this, and I’ve fallen into it myself.

My first business was in the restaurant industry, and no trade has more failures from people who fell into this trap. For a while I specialised in expansions, reopenings and transformation projects, which meant listening to a constant stream of owners who didn’t realise they were the problem with their business.

One told me, “I’m really into champagne cocktails lately. Could you write a menu with six or so of those?” I could, but most people just want a Coke or a beer with a burger. You know you bought a burger bar, right? “My friends love them too!” Okay, but how often do they eat here?

Another had filled their pub with pictures of the Queen Mother, and I mean the whole bloody place. Care to guess their specialism? You’re totally wrong. Traditional British pub grub but for people with allergies or specific medical diets. No, I don’t see the connection either.

Both wanted the business to work, and neither could see past their own taste, despite plenty of investment, great food and good teams.

Deltastring came out of our consulting work. Fundamentally it’s a tool I built for me, and I’d hope it suits people like me too. But people like me aren’t a market, any more than champagne cocktails were a market in a burger bar.

We’ve spent months talking to support leaders, Zendesk admins and ops leaders, and we’ve redesigned our offering from the ground up. What we heard again and again was that most of them didn’t want another tool to run. They wanted the change made, checked and recorded, without becoming the person who makes it. The platform now sits underneath a managed service: you ask in your own channel, and our Zendesk specialists make the change through Deltastring. If you’d rather drive it yourself, like me, the platform is still yours to use.

See how the managed service works.

So we kept the tool I built for people like me, and put people like me behind it. You get everything it can do without having to use it yourself.

Your business is unique, but it still sits somewhere on a bell curve. If you just want your Zendesk looked after, we’ll do it: quickly, safely, and for far less than a hire or an agency billing by the hour. If your needs are unusual, and you’d rather your own Zendesk experts had Deltastring behind them, the platform is there for that. Most companies sit in the middle of the curve, and the managed service is built for them.