Remove Customer Development Remove Design Remove Product Development Remove Viral
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Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Startup Lessons Learned

I break the answer to that question down into three engines: Viral - this is the business model identified in the presentation as "Get Users." Here, the key metrics are Acquisition and Referral, combined into the now-famous viral coefficient. If the coefficient is > 1.0 , you generally have a viral hit on your hands.

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Business ecology and the four customer currencies

Startup Lessons Learned

I think this concept is necessary in order to answer the truly vexing startup questions, like: “Should startups charge customers money from day one?&# Let’s begin with the four customer currencies. I had a lot of use for this concept back when I worked on game design and virtual worlds. As soon as possible!&#

Customer 156
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Learning is better than optimization (the local maximum problem)

Startup Lessons Learned

There are often counter-intuitive changes in customer behavior that depend on little details. In fact, the curse of product development is that sometimes small things make a huge difference and sometimes huge things make no difference. Split-testing a single element in an overall coherent design seems ludicrous.

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Engagement loops: beyond viral

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, December 16, 2008 Engagement loops: beyond viral Theres a great and growing corpus of writing about viral loops, the step-by-step optimizations you can use to encourage maximum growth of online products by having customers invite each other to join.

Viral 140
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Lessons Learned: The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the time

Startup Lessons Learned

This kind of result is typical when you ship a redesign of some part of your product. The new design improved on the old one in several ways, but these improvements didnt translate all the way through the funnel. Usually, I think that means youve lost some good aspect of the old design.

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Lessons Learned: Validated learning about customers

Startup Lessons Learned

Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule.

Customer 167
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Andrew Chen: Growing renewable audiences

Startup Lessons Learned

vs. sustainable: Compare this to the renewable strategies, like viral marketing, SEO, widgets, and ads, which can scale into 10s of millions of users but are primarily centered around tough, non-user centric work. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Audience 119