Morgan Friedman: Hello, hello everyone. Welcome to the latest episode of Client Horror Stories. Very excited to have Matt Estrin with us today. Did I pronounce your last name correctly?

Matt Estrin: You got it.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah. Perfect. Gold star for me. I can go retire now.

Matt Estrin: I always tell people it rhymes with estrogen if that helps you.

Morgan Friedman: So, I like the mnemonic. Very modern, too.

It’s a tradition on this podcast that we drink some alcohol while we have a fun conversation. I’m drinking a whiskey with coffee. What are you drinking?

Matt Estrin: I’m doing—so, I live in Colorado, very hot here right now. So, I went with coconut rum and lemonade. And I own a distillery, so it’s my coconut rum. 47 Coconut Rum. Pretty solid.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah, it’s a coconut day drink. Clearly the best.

Matt Estrin: Yes, absolutely.

Morgan Friedman: And as the episode progresses, as you get more and more drunk and crazier, it will be because of your rum.

Matt Estrin: You know, I make alcohol for a living, so my tolerance is pretty good. I’m not going to lie.

Morgan Friedman: Okay, I love it. Now, with the drink in hand, tell us about your craziest client horror story ever.

Matt Estrin: Oh my gosh, I have a bunch of them. But, you know, you and I talked before this and we thought it might be kind of fun to discuss some of the wildest one-star reviews that we have received as a business.

You know, I own a distillery. I own a couple restaurants, and what I found is the distillery is a little bit easier to get good reviews because whether you like the drink or not, there’s still alcohol in it and you’re still going to feel good when you’re done drinking it.

But restaurants, oh my gosh, it is another world. I’ve been in the restaurant game for a little over two years and I never expected to experience the backlash of internet keyboard warriors that I would experience in my life.

Morgan Friedman: So, you want me to read you a couple?

Matt Estrin: I printed a couple out.

Morgan Friedman: We can discuss how fun—

Matt Estrin: I’m so excited.

Morgan Friedman: Yes. Before you read, I just want to preface. I love how on point your hat is because when you have a restaurant, you work in a restaurant, anything client-facing, the people that come—I know, owner—are the most unbearable people alive.

Matt Estrin: They are. I will say they are. However, they spend money in your business, and so the more people that know the owner, the better it is for your business.

Morgan Friedman: As annoying as they can be.

Matt Estrin: That’s for sure.

Morgan Friedman: I appreciate your positive and optimistic interpretation of that.

You want me to read a couple of these?

Matt Estrin: Yeah, let’s start the action.

Morgan Friedman: All right.

Matt Estrin: So, I own a gourmet waffle restaurant. Our primary dish is chicken and waffles.

Morgan Friedman: I’ve never even heard of chicken and waffles before.

Matt Estrin: What?

Morgan Friedman: What? I live in South America.

Matt Estrin: Okay. Well, that makes more sense then.

Morgan Friedman: But I’ve been here about 20 years, but I grew up in New York. At least in New York 20 years ago and earlier, chicken and waffles was not a thing. So, it started—

I think everybody assumes that everything starts in New York, and every New Yorker assumes that everything starts in New York.

Matt Estrin: There are some different arguments about where chicken and waffles started. It is quite popular.

From—I’m from Southern California, born and raised Southern California, and I believe it started in Los Angeles at a restaurant called Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles. Made it famous. But you see a lot in the South now.

I lived in Jacksonville, Florida for a time, so kind of the northeast part of Florida. So, more is still kind of the South. And you see it quite a bit. I mean, Waffle House is really prominent in the South for sure. But they’re starting to spread.

I mean, chicken and waffles is a thing. There’s something about having that savory piece of chicken, that nice breaded waffle, and then smothering it in syrup to get that sweet in there. I’m telling you, it’s a pretty solid dish.

Morgan Friedman: I like it. I think you have sold me to bring that to Argentina, at least for my family. I’m not going into the restaurant business. No way. But I think it will be a fun dinner to make with the kids.

Matt Estrin: It’s a great one. I can guarantee you that they will like it, and it tastes great.

Morgan Friedman: Okay. So, you own a waffle and chicken restaurant.

Matt Estrin: Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: And then there’s some people that wrote about it online.

Matt Estrin: Yeah. And I just pulled some of the highlights. You know, you’re welcome to get on and—

Morgan Friedman: Best of the best.

Matt Estrin: Yeah. Best quotes. I’ll give you my responses now, or do you want to talk about how to deal with them? Because there’s some stories in here that make it real fun.

Morgan Friedman: You know, let’s start with where you’re just reading. Let’s start with a good one and then we’ll take it from there.

Matt Estrin: Okay. Here’s one:

“If you like dry, cold, and overpriced waffles, this is the place for you. Worst waffles I’ve ever had. I’d rather eat a frozen Eggo waffle. Do not know how this place got such a high four out of five ranking.”

Morgan Friedman: By the way, I just want to say, I’m used to the world of very high-end professional services. Not consumers leaving reports online. I hear that and I cringe for you. Like, I—if I owned a restaurant, I would be obsessing over these and every little person. If my food was too cold, I would be like, “Oh my God, I want to jump off a bridge.”

Matt Estrin: I haven’t jumped off a bridge yet. I’m still surviving.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah. Okay. So, first, do you know the backstory behind that particular person?

Matt Estrin: No idea.

Morgan Friedman: No.

Matt Estrin: So, here’s the tough thing with reviews. And I’ve got several more I can read that are quite funny.

The thing with reviews is they’ve really blown up in the last probably six years. Since COVID and the birth of social media has made it so that people can express their opinion behind a keyboard and not have to say anything to their face.

And one of the things that’s become so tough, so tough in the restaurant industry is people feel like they have been given this permission to be as judgmental and as critical as they possibly can.

So, I had the most wild experience about two weeks ago. I kid you not, this actually happened. And I didn’t put this one-star review on my list of things, but I was sitting at a table in my restaurant in the back corner of my restaurant, which I do often. And I always sit there with my computer. I’m not a big office guy, so I like to sit in the back corner.

And this couple came in and they were giving me a review live while they were sitting at that table, but they were sitting one table away from me. So I could hear everything that they were saying.

Morgan Friedman: But they’re giving you a review online, not to you in person.

Matt Estrin: Not to me in person. They’re doing it together online while they were eating there, but I’m sitting next to them listening to their discussion about it.

And it was like—I mean, you can imagine. They didn’t like the way the door swung open. We’re a counter-service restaurant. I’m a huge fan of low-overhead costs, having less employees than you need to. So we’re a counter-service restaurant. You order at the counter, we bring the food out to you.

They didn’t like having to order at the counter. They hate the fact that our POS system asked for a tip when they—we haven’t done anything yet, even though we’re about to make you food and we’re going to deliver it to your table and try to give you good customer service. Whatever. They didn’t like that.

They didn’t like how close our tables were located to the restroom. They didn’t like how hard our chairs were.

At the 10-minute mark on the food—which, by the way, 10 to 15 minutes is a pretty good turnaround in terms of ticket time. If you get food within 15 minutes, that’s pretty solid. 20 minutes is good. 30 minutes, it starts to get a little bit long—but at the 10-minute mark on their ticket, they came up to the counter and asked where their food was.

They didn’t like that they had to pour their own coffee. We have a self-serve coffee and water station. They hated they had to pour their own coffee.

And it was just wild.

I actually ended up feeling bad for them. Not for me. I never felt like I needed to defend it, but I felt bad for them because my whole time I thought, “What a disappointing experience they’re giving themselves.”

Back in the day, you know, I went to Europe this summer. I went to London in May and spent lots of time in pubs. Loved every second of being in every pub.

But the thing I loved about the pubs is you’re getting drunk in pubs just because you wanted to experience the authentic culture. I just wanted to be a raging European drunk for one week.

But the thing I loved about the pubs is it was all about the experience of the person across the table from you. You know what I mean?

And if you’ve ever been to a pub, their food is mediocre. It’s nothing you write home about. Fish and chips is great. I love it. But they give you these gross peas on the side, and it’s just not like, you know, if you’re thinking about fine cuisine, it’s okay.

The beer that they’re most known for in London is flat beer. It’s called cask ale beer, which is crazy. It’s literally flat beer, which for somebody that gets a little gassy with beer, it works out great for me.

But all that to say is, like, the food experience specifically—the food experience—you order at the counter at every pub in London, and the food experience isn’t great. But nobody cares there because they’re there for the people across the table from them.

They are experiencing restaurants for what restaurants were made to experience, which is a chance for you to connect with the person across the table from you, to enjoy a conversation, to have fun.

And this entire review culture, I think, has ruined that for a lot of people.

I mean, this couple that sat there, I never heard them talk about their kids. I don’t know if they had any kids, but I never heard them talk about their kids. Never heard them talk about their day, never heard them talk about their ambitions or their dreams or anything that they want to experience in their life.

The only thing I heard them talk about was every little detail of their experience in my restaurant.

And it’s like, my gosh, man. You’re making it worse for yourself than you are for me. I felt bad for them because I know the meal was good. We made it. It was good. My restaurant does a good job. I can assure you that.

Morgan Friedman: Is it your favorite style, counter service?

Matt Estrin: I don’t know. I mean, sorry that you had to get your own cup of coffee.

But it’s just like, it’s crazy how wild it’s gotten. But the thing is now is we’ve conditioned people to, like, that is their experience when they come into a restaurant.

And I think it’s—I don’t want to say it’s just the United States, but after being in Europe for two weeks earlier in the summer, it feels like it’s a U.S. thing, that we’ve conditioned people that they are now the ultimate critics of restaurants.

And the worst part about it is, I can remember—so I’m 44 years old, and I can remember growing up. I can remember growing up going to restaurants in my hometown in Southern California.

And if we had a bad experience, what would we do as restaurant participants in the 1990s? Bad experience at a restaurant. What do you think we would do if we had a bad experience?

Morgan Friedman: So, I’m—I grew up in suburban New York, and I’m 50. So, just about your same age, touch older. We would tell our friends and/or you would do nothing, or you would ask—or my mother was the sort of person that would go and tell the people that work there.

Matt Estrin: Exactly. That’s the point, right? Like, that’s where I wanted to get to.

So, I can remember when we had a bad meal. There was a restaurant that was really familiar in Southern California. There’s not a ton that exists anymore called Claim Jumper. And I can remember we had a really bad meal one time and my parents asked to talk to the manager, and the manager came over. They explained what happened. The manager apologized, comped some of our meal. It was a very, you know—

And we went back there the next week because, you know, yeah, it was a bad experience, but we appreciated the customer service of this manager. We understood that the cooks and the waiters and the waitresses—they didn’t wake up that morning and think, “I’m gonna give these people bad service intentionally.”

But we’ve lost that completely now with this online review culture.

And if there’s something that you experience that you don’t like, rather than telling the restaurant that you had a bad experience, you wait, you get on your little computer at home, and then you send this real nasty review in because it makes you feel real good about yourself.

Meanwhile, it doesn’t provide any value to the restaurant. So, it doesn’t give us a chance to improve on their experience, and it doesn’t give us a chance to make it right.

If somebody has a—we had a person give us a bad review for a meal that was cold one time.

Morgan Friedman: Oh, yeah.

Matt Estrin: And sure, we made a mistake. We don’t want to serve cold meals. That’s not what we do. And mistakes happen. You know, I don’t—we don’t wake up in the morning. I say this all the time, like, I don’t wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and go, “I’m going to screw someone’s meal up today.” You know what I mean? Like, that’s not my intent.

But did they tell a staff person about it?

Nope.

Did they bring it up and say, “Hey, this is cold”?

Nope.

What did they do?

They went home and they got on their computer and they left us a one-star review.

And what that does is, again, didn’t have an opportunity to fix it right then and there, which, if they would have told any of our staff, we would have comped the meal and we would have remade it for them fresh and hot.

Because that’s the right thing to do, and we do those things.

But now, you know, we have this ranking online. So if you get into Greeley, Colorado, where I live, and you search, you know, “I heard this Oak & Maple place is really good,” that’s the name of my restaurant. Well, Google’s going to show that we’re a four and a half out of five, which that one person couldn’t believe we were four and a half out of five because that person had a bad meal.

Rather than let us make it up to them and make it right, they just went home and gave us a one-star, and now our ranking is affected forever, which means people won’t come.

There are people that will not show up to a restaurant that has a three-and-a-half-star or four-star review. They only want to go somewhere that’s got five stars or 4.7 stars or 4.8 stars.

So the whole thing—the whole review culture has gotten so out of hand. It is completely unequal for the restaurateur as opposed to the person that’s reviewing, and it doesn’t give us an opportunity to make it right, and it’s really frustrating.

So I’m going to get off my soapbox and drink more alcohol.

Morgan Friedman: Such an interesting topic. I have so much to say, from deep and serious to silly and fun points.

I will start with the silly and fun point. By the way, I’ve never thought much about the restaurant industry or culture. I’m not in this space, but just thinking about going to restaurants as a kid.

I grew up in a small town 30 minutes outside New York City, so, like, the close suburbs. Not in the boondocks.

Matt Estrin: Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: And in the ’90s, I have clear memories. In my hometown there were like four restaurants. There’s Italian, Italian food, and there’s the really exotic Japanese place.

And it’s interesting now that it’s just where it’s with so many options. I think this is one factor that you kind of undervalue when you have a lot of options. You tend to devalue each individual one.

If they’re, “Oh, I can marry any one of these million girls who want to marry me, whatever. They’re all interchangeable.” Or there’s this one person, you need to be nice to them. That’s the one restaurant in your town. You’re going to keep going back to it.

The example I always give about how much these things have changed in my lifetime is I remember as a kid going food shopping with my parents and I remember in the supermarket there were only three flavors of ice cream, like strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate. And then they also had what used to be called, when I was a kid, Neapolitan.

Matt Estrin: Yeah. When they mixed the three of them.

Morgan Friedman: Dude. Yeah. And that was like the exciting, cool one.

But now there are like a million options, so you don’t even appreciate.

I feel like there’s this parallel there with just lots of options makes people devalue each one.

I, despite being a capitalist, think options are wildly overvalued, because it has these sorts of negative consequences.

So this is like a fun comment, a more serious comment on that is I often train managers, people I hire, and something that I always teach and I tell people is that the single most important skill and the hardest skill as a leader of a team is you need the ability to have difficult conversations.

And it’s shockingly hard. Most managers, most VPs, most directors, most CEOs fail because, “No, no, I don’t want to be the asshole. No, no, no. I don’t want to deal with this guy, so I’ll talk behind his back.”

Just going up to someone who’s making a mistake and talking to them in a way where they’ll clearly get the message, but also they won’t get angry, and it’s respectful, is freaking hard. So few people can do it naturally.

And what I realized when you’re talking is, I remembered, oh yeah, I always train my teams how to have very difficult conversations, and almost no one knows how to do it naturally.

And I think we’re seeing the kind of consequence that—I love your examples—that when they were kids, they would go up and talk to the owner and say— but that skill of having the civil conversation, criticizing but in a respectful way while looking them in the eye, that skill is disappearing at every level.

So, it’s not just managers, VPs, directors that don’t have it, but the people that go to restaurants to leave reviews rather than, “I don’t want to have an awkward conversation with a waiter. I’d rather anonymously go home and complain online.”

I think it’s an example. It’s an interesting, more mass-market example of how the skill is being lost.

Matt Estrin: Yeah. I couldn’t agree with you more. And the truth is, as a business owner, I want you to have the difficult conversation with me. I want to get better.

Like, if we’re not doing a good job on something, if our food isn’t to the standard that you like, if your experience isn’t to the standard that you like, I want to do everything in my power to try to make that happen.

But I can’t do that unless people—

Morgan Friedman: I feel like with myself.

Well, I never review online. So, I—I’m not an aggressive person. I personally never really tell the people that work there when I’m unhappy.

And I think I’m trying to model my own mind. My best prediction for why I don’t do that is I feel like everywhere is a chain, or like I’m just going to tell some waiter who won’t even do anything. And like, even if he’ll remake the food, whatever, he’s not the person that’s going to tell the manager.

He’ll tell the manager, he’ll tell the manager, like, “Wow, that was a brilliant insight and it’s going to revolutionize the business.” And it’s going to be lost in the flow of zillions of comments.

So I’m like, not even worth it.

It might be interesting for a restaurant to experiment on how to encourage that sort of healthy feedback.

Matt Estrin: Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. I would welcome it. I would welcome the healthy feedback. It’s—

Morgan Friedman: By the way, it’s a—

Is your restaurant a chain or just a one-shop?

Matt Estrin: We have two shops, but it’s my—yeah, we’re not franchise. It’s my concept.

Morgan Friedman: It might be interesting for you to do some experiments in order to encourage that.

I think people in the world where everything is turning into a commodity and robot and everything is increasingly like equal and boring—like even with all this ChatGPT stuff, every piece of writing sounds exactly the same now.

Matt Estrin: Sure.

Morgan Friedman: That, to show we’re human, you can come talk to us, is a very, very interesting competitive differentiator.

So, an interesting question is: how do you get people to say, “Hey, don’t go post online. Just come talk to us”?

I don’t know the answer, but it’s an interesting question.

Matt Estrin: Yeah. I would be curious to know how you do that effectively because I do think that if you broadcast it, right? You think about the bumper stickers on the back of corporate vehicles that are like, “How’s my driving? Call this number.”

And, you know, when I was in high school, we would call and be like, “Oh, you’re…” You know, make some inappropriate joke on the phone.

But I do think, like, if you broadcast it, it would give people permission to get in that judgment zone more than maybe they normally would. I’d want to be careful with that.

Morgan Friedman: Okay. But wait, by the way, because I do digital marketing. I help grow companies. This is a fun challenge. I’m going to take the challenge up here. I’m going in full brainstorm mode.

The whiskey and the coffee is taking effect.

Here might be something interesting. What if you have a weekly contest, maybe monthly, for the best feedback or the most useful feedback, and the winner gets like a free meal up to a value of X, and like some tiny—so the cost to you would be tiny, but people love free meals.

And doing that once a week, once a month—

Matt Estrin: Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: Like, just for—and you have to frame it like the best or, let’s say, the most useful feedback.

Matt Estrin: I like that. That’s a—

Morgan Friedman: Yeah, that’s a good idea.

I actually think if you had an ongoing contest, like once a month, 12 times a year, the cost to you is 12 meals per year, which is some number that’s close to zero dollars.

Matt Estrin: Exactly. It’s close to zero. But not just that, people love free meals.

Morgan Friedman: It’s like, I feel like I would be motivated. “Oh, I want a free meal,” and like, I’m good at coming up with feedback. And everywhere I go, I have a zillion ideas.

And I feel like something that ties into this toxic review culture is everyone has opinions, right? And because everyone has opinions and everyone wants to share them, but that comes out—that’s channeled negatively through the keyboard warriors going to Google My Business reviews.

But this is a way to channel that in a healthy way. I think you should do that. It would be amazing.

Matt Estrin: Well, we could give it a year-long test and get back on the pod and see what happens a year from now.

Morgan Friedman: See, that’d be pretty interesting, for sure.

For all the marketing consulting fee that you’re paying me, which is the big number of zero dollars that you’re getting, you’re getting your money’s worth.

Matt Estrin: There we go.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah, exactly. I’m—but actually, I’ve never seen anything like that. But I think people would do that.

By the way, I’m also going to continue riffing on this. If you do this, I think people would get really into it. I would publicize it. QR codes in the restaurant, etc.

But even more than that, you could have fun with it. Like, the winner every month with the most useful piece of advice, you can not just bring them in, you can do social media about it. Show how you’ve changed and how you’ve improved, even for their stupid little advice.

And also, by the way, because since you choose it, it could be something that maybe you’re thinking of anyway or it’s easy for you as well.

But then also on top of that, you could even have weird—because I’ve created a lot of viral campaigns—you could even have viral stuff around the reviews that you don’t choose.

Matt Estrin: Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: Clearly, the majority of suggestions will just be stupid and lame. You can even have social media like, “Oh, here are some of the suggestions and why we’re not doing them.” And like, “Yeah, you should paint the whole restaurant pink,” whatever.

Matt Estrin: Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: And just make obviously, obviously make fun of them. I think that would really engage people on social media as well.

Matt Estrin: This is revolutionary. You can go forward and grow your restaurant. This is awesome.

Morgan Friedman: And by the way, I think also part of where this inspiration comes from is in my universe, like tech startup land. So, I know nothing about growing restaurants. I know a lot about growing tech-oriented companies.

A key part of growing a company from zero to making lots of money a year is having a loop of rapid feedback. So, just so much of it is, okay, what did everyone do yesterday on the site? Wait, what product? Which version of the product are they buying?

Just this intense day-to-day obsessiveness on the users and building something that the users are obsessed with and crave and keep going back.

And there are people who are so good and so obsessed with it. That’s why they build like TikTok, like these addiction machines.

It’s—but taking the same sort of quest for feedback and how to get feedback in a useful and fun way and bringing it to an old-school industry like restaurants, there’s actually an interesting mechanism for you to actually get really good feedback on what you could improve.

And then finally, I’ll say, to cement my own real-time idea, I think if you do this, it will lessen the number of negative reviews you get online.

Because the people that have this energy to leave a review, I think a lot of them will channel that energy into leaving a review for you because maybe they’ll be the one person that will get the free meal.

So, as a result, I think it’ll also help you improve your rating, improve the average score, because the negative people will send it to you.

Matt Estrin: That’s not a bad call. I’m going to work on it.

Morgan Friedman: I expect you to send a follow-up to me even if it’s before the year coming back. If you actually do implement the crazy idea, just send me a message and let me know, and we could even have another call, not a recording, to brainstorm.

This stuff is really fun for me.

Matt Estrin: Awesome.

Morgan Friedman: Another meta-comment on the review and then maybe we can read a second one and then see what else. I want to make another general observation on the review culture, which is reviews are fundamentally lazy.

Matt Estrin: Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: It’s like the cheap seats. And I think the reason why I don’t do it is like, I know anyone building a company, building a product, selling something—hard work.

“Oh, my meal was cold.” Like, I feel like a loser, which is the reason why I personally, as I was saying before, have a no-review policy.

But it’s just so lazy. You’re pointing out that—

Matt Estrin: Oh, yeah. More and more and more. It’s also—it seems to connect to the societal trends of people wanting to do things the easy way.

Morgan Friedman: Here’s hard: going, opening your own restaurant, and making sure all the food is warm all the time.

Matt Estrin: Right. Exactly. Yeah. You try it.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah. Exactly.

Actually, by the way, brainstorming—here’s another, I can’t stop myself. Here’s another—

Matt Estrin: Ignoring idea number one.

Morgan Friedman: Here’s another possible approach. I prefer idea number one, but to continue riffing.

It might be fun to also have, like, signs making fun of how lazy reviews are, because I feel like everyone knows reviews are kind of lazy. It’s one of these open secrets out there.

So, if I owned a restaurant and I didn’t do my idea number one, I think I would put up a sign in the restaurant that was something like, “You try keeping all the food in your 100-person restaurant at this number of degrees for this number of hours. You try to let me know how it goes.”

And just kind of like mock them, because I feel like if you’re funny, you can get away with anything. So, as long as you say these things in a clever, funny way, you can kind of put people in their place before they even leave the review.

Matt Estrin: Yeah. There’s a viral social media campaign now going around with restaurants where they highlight their worst review as a way to promote their business.

For us, we would write on social media, “Come try mediocre cold waffles,” says one guy one time on Google. You know what I mean? Something like that, just to—

Morgan Friedman: It’s pretty funny how they do it.

By the way, while I know nothing about the restaurant industry, I’ve also run initiatives to infiltrate competing companies and projects. So, I would also say I wouldn’t be surprised if the other waffle and chicken store that’s five minutes away from you is actually having people write those reviews, whether they went to your store or not.

Matt Estrin: Sure. Yeah, that wouldn’t surprise me. Our town is pretty collaborative in terms of restaurants. But yeah, I do know when my distillery opened and the second location of my distillery opened in Loveland, Colorado, we had a competing cocktail bar have people leaving us bad reviews, which is kind of weird.

Morgan Friedman: I wouldn’t say it’s weird. It’s just part of the game.

Matt Estrin: Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: So unfortunately there’s a game. You have to play it. And we wish everyone played the game in a very straightforward way. Like, hey, let’s let the reviews be honest.

Unfortunately, the way everyone else is playing the game is sending people in or not even sending them in to leave these reviews.

So, knowing that’s the system, how do you hack the system? And there are a whole bunch of different ways. The two different ideas we brainstormed before, then there are lots of other ways.

A lot of spots have policies to respond to bad reviews. Every once in a while I see viral—when I look at TikTok, Instagram—sometimes like people respond to bad reviews in really funny ways on social media. And I actually personally like that.

So that’s my philosophy.

Matt Estrin: Yeah. I go after them a little bit when they leave us some reviews. I can appreciate bad reviews if they had a sincerely bad experience. “Hey, we’ll try to get it fixed.”

But there are some where I have a lot of fun writing back to them.

Morgan Friedman: Okay. Okay. Okay. Wait. I’m on a roll. Alcohol taking effect.

Here’s another wacky, crazy idea. There are a couple of Instagrammers, TikTokers that always come up on my For You page that are like a waitress that reenacts scenes with annoying—

Matt Estrin: Reenact the reviews.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah. Well, do you know that sort of subgroup I’m talking about?

Matt Estrin: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: Is there like one person and it’s like they just repeat an interaction on both sides where some annoying customer says something and they just respond trying to be reasonable, and it just keeps on getting crazier?

It might be a fun social media idea for you guys to reenact your craziest customers.

Matt Estrin: Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: Like not just the reviews, just the crazy customers. But not just that, I think if I knew there was a restaurant that just reenacted customers being weird, I have the sort of personality where I would want to go to that place and I would want to purposely say something weird just to hope that you guys do your own imitation of me.

That would be so much fun, and that would attract me to the restaurant.

Matt Estrin: Yeah, I like that. Yep. Yeah. I—

Morgan Friedman: You see why I’m a digital marketer? I can’t stop thinking.

Matt Estrin: You can’t stop thinking.

I had somebody tell me early on that every bad review is an opportunity for you to win more customers. And the more comical you are with it, the more fun you have with it, the more it will get people to like you and like your brand and want to support your brand. So, I’ve taken that to heart.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah. By the way, I agree with that firmly. And I actually think that’s not just a point about marketing and brand building, but I think that’s actually a deep point about life.

And it’s a point that I intellectually understand, but I’ve only 85% internalized and acted out in my real life.

Which is every time someone’s an asshole to you. And it’s not nice. And guess what? That’s life.

To say, “Hey, it’s an opportunity to learn, to grow, to improve, to say, I need to change this, to say, I need to get away from that person and be around this other type of person.”

And taking the bad energy and making it fun is just so powerful.

Matt Estrin: Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: Which goes into another point I wanted to observe before, but I just remembered, which is another interesting characteristic of bad reviews: there’s some percentage of them that you’ll never be able to win over.

Matt Estrin: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: Whether it’s 20%, whatever the exact number is, there’s always the people that are going to be angry.

In terms of client horror stories, this more broadly is a great lesson and reminder, because guess what? There’s going to be some percentage of your clients that will just be terrible to you, leaving you bad reviews. No matter how amazing you are, they just come in before it starts and they know the ending in advance.

So, you just have to accept, okay, he’s in the 10% that is going to be like that.

Matt Estrin: Yeah. You know, it’s interesting with that being said, too. I generally respond with a lot of sarcasm and humor towards the people that leave me bad reviews if the review is kind of ridiculous.

And I would say eight out of ten people that read our reviews will say something to us like, “Man, the owner is pretty funny. He says these things.”

The other two out of ten get really upset with me, like, “How dare you? How dare you not take our review into—”

I actually have a real-life story. I’ve gotten a one-star review from a lady that was reviewing my responses to reviews. Hadn’t even come into my restaurant. Didn’t even step foot or try my stuff.

She left me a review saying how offended she was by how I was responding to one-star reviews. It was crazy. It was like, I can’t even—

And then tried to talk about the integrity of the review system and how we take it very seriously to review with integrity.

I’m like, “Integrity, man. You’re not even—you’re giving me a review about my responses to reviews. Like, you haven’t even tried my restaurant.”

So, it was crazy.

But I’ve taken to heart, like, again, if it’s a legit review, you know, like, if we really made a mistake, you eat your crow and you say, “Man, I’m sorry. We’ll work on it next time. If you would write us personally, we’ll take care of your next meal.”

But if it’s like a ridiculous review, like this one that I read to you early on where it’s like, “This is the worst waffles I’ve ever had. I’d rather eat an Eggo,” it’s like, okay, my guy.

So then we have a good time with them. And the best is, like, on Google reviews, too. So, they leave a review, we can respond. We can respond and then they can respond, and that’s it. And then you can’t respond again.

So, it’s theirs, mine, theirs. And I would say about half of the ones that I respond to end up deleting their reviews after I kind of make fun of them, and then the other half just get so angry and then come back at me with a vengeance.

It’s pretty comical.

Morgan Friedman: So you basically divide all the reviews into one extreme or the other, right?

Matt Estrin: Exactly. Yeah. It’s either they realize how absurd their review is and they delete it, or they double down and hope that I perish.

Morgan Friedman: Which I actually think that feels like the correct strategy from you, because one, you eliminate half of the somewhat negative ones, and then the ones that remain, even if they’re more negative, I feel like most people who read reviews discount the extreme reviews.

Matt Estrin: Sure.

Morgan Friedman: So if the ones that double down—no, you’re not getting two stars. I’m giving you one star because—like, that makes them less likely to be taken seriously by the reader.

So, it’s good for you in that way as well.

Matt Estrin: And I think when they see their response, too, they’re like, “Okay, they’re a little off their rocker.”

Morgan Friedman: Exactly. It reveals the craziness.

Matt Estrin: It does. It absolutely reveals the craziness.

Morgan Friedman: So, we’re expecting to read a whole bunch of reviews and analyze them, but you only read one. But we got so much insight and commentary and analysis.

You like deep-dive textual analysis of just that one review, but we got so many lessons and stories in this episode.

Matt Estrin: Absolutely. Yeah. There’s some good ones.

Morgan Friedman: Do you want me to read the response to that one and how they responded back?

Matt Estrin: Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: Actually, let’s—we have a few more minutes. So, let’s read the response and then wrap out that one to go full circle, and then we can wrap up.

Matt Estrin: Okay. Sounds good.

So, remember they said:

“If you like dry, cold, and overpriced waffles, this is the place for you. Worst waffles I’ve ever had. I’d rather eat an Eggo waffle. Don’t know how this place got such a high four out of five stars.”

My reply was:

“Four out of five stars… I guess a lot of people really like dry, cold, and overpriced waffles.”

Just kind of making fun of them back.

And I just said, “We’re just here to give the people what they want. Enjoy your AOS.”

And they wrote back and said:

“Okay, I guess I should have been more to the point. This place is actually a joke. You are unprofessional as an owner responding to these reviews. So, I only wish you the worst in your future. Keep it up and you won’t make it another year.”

Morgan Friedman: Whoa. How many years ago was that?

Matt Estrin: Oh, this was probably six months ago.

Morgan Friedman: Okay. Yep. Well, you have at least six more months.

Matt Estrin: I got six more months to respond and say I made it another year. I made it to the year despite—

Morgan Friedman: I actually wish you the worst for your future. That’s pretty wild, right?

Matt Estrin: Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: So, I think that falls into the pattern we were saying a moment ago where it just shows that’s like a bad person. Like, only someone who’s just seriously has some sort of mental problem would wish a random restaurant owner, because the food was cold, would wish them the worst.

Matt Estrin: Yeah. That’s crazy.

Morgan Friedman: Okay, let’s think for a minute about your response, because to, you know, how sarcasm has existed on the scale of what in Latin they call Juvenalian versus Horatian, where sarcasm is a combination of being funny and being bitter.

And there are different types depending on whether it’s more funny or more bitter, and more bitter than more funny. Your response came off to me as a little bit funny but more on the bitter, angry side.

So, my instinct is the way to—is that the more effective response strategy would be less on the bitter side, more on the funny side.

So, let’s see if we can brainstorm for a minute to see if we can think of a funny response.

My mind immediately goes to wanting to respond logically, but that doesn’t work. We need, like, funny responses always work.

Matt Estrin: Yeah. I don’t know. They talk about cold, overpriced—

Morgan Friedman: Cold, overpriced.

Matt Estrin: Cold, overpriced, dry. It’s like the perfect store, just as we like them to be.

Morgan Friedman: No, it’s—by the way, when people just like—it is actually this interesting characteristic of criticisms that I feel like when you pile on criticisms it actually makes you less effective.

Like, “You are stupid and slow and it’s not good.” And when you have this whole list of things, it sounds like you’re angry. Like, it sounds like you’re just being emotional.

And it doesn’t sound real.

But when you just have one pointed one, “Hey, like, you guys were great, but it was amazing. You know, we waited 30 minutes and we had only allocated 40 minutes to be here, and I think 30 minutes is past the point of reasonable for wait time.”

Like, if it’s just that one thing, then you hear that and you take it seriously.

Actually, maybe this is a sort of funny response. I’m improvising, so this isn’t quite the right words, but I’m going with it. But this is the sort of concept.

What if it’s something like, “Hey, you criticized our cost, the temperature, and the whatever it was, and the texture. I think that there are a few other axes that you could have criticized us on that you didn’t get to, like the room temperature, the crowdedness, the speed of delivery. And feel free to criticize us on all those as well.”

Something along those lines.

Matt Estrin: Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: What I like about a response like that is, while I think it’s funny but not very funny—so while it’s not “ha-ha, I’m Seinfeld” funny—what I like about that is, in a slightly humorous way, it calls attention to this insight I was telling you in a serious way a minute ago: that if you have a list of 100 complaints, it suddenly sounds fake.

You’re encouraging them to add to the complaints so that the entire review sounds even more fake.

Matt Estrin: Yeah. I kind of like it.

Morgan Friedman: Feel free to use that next time you respond to one of these reviews.

Matt Estrin: I’ve actually used that once to somebody else.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah.

Matt Estrin: We had a review where it was like a list of 10 things, and I said, “Hey, you didn’t mention this and this and this. So, feel free to update it and tell us how horrible we really are.”

Morgan Friedman: You didn’t mention the odor.

Matt Estrin: Yeah. Yeah. Everything except for the odor.

Morgan Friedman: You should comment and tell us about how it smelled.

You know what’s weird, too, is like on Google. So, there’s the overall review, which is like one out of five or five out of five. But then there’s also three sub-reviews you can give, which is the atmosphere, the service, and the food.

Matt Estrin: So, it’s funny, like, on all these where we get like a one-star total review, you go back and look and it’s like five out of five service, five out of five atmosphere, one out of five, one out of five food, and then they give us the one out of five experience, you know, the whole thing.

It’s like, well, I guess we didn’t get it completely wrong if you like the service and the atmosphere. So, that’s good.

Morgan Friedman: That’s interesting. By the way, all this also reminds me of the famous Groucho Marx comment.

Matt Estrin: Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: “I don’t like the restaurant. I never go there anymore. It’s so crowded.”

Matt Estrin: Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: Like, yeah.

Okay. With that, wow. Super, super interesting. It was a creative, fun brainstorm. I love this experimental format we did today of diving into reviews, but I’m expecting you to implement at least that crazy idea I suggested before and let me know offline how it goes, and then we could do a follow-up episode in a year based on that.

Matt Estrin: Yeah, sounds like a lot of fun.

Morgan Friedman: Cool. This was fun. Everyone who’s made it this far to the episode, thank you for watching, and we hope you’ve had as much fun watching it as we have had recording it. Until next time.

Matt Estrin: Thanks, Morgan.