Customer Development, Product Development, Viral and Web

Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

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.

San Francisco

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire

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

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

That green button was part of a customer flow, a series of actions you want customers to complete for some business reason. If its part of a viral loop, its probably trying to get them to invite more friends (on average). You just constantly test little micro-changes and follow a hill-climbing algorithm to build your product.

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment

Lessons Learned: Using AdWords to assess demand for your new.

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

If you cant find any , maybe that means you havent figured out who your customer is yet. And if you dont know who your customer is, perhaps some customer development is in order? Labels: customer development , search engine marketing 13comments: Jim Lindstrom said. Eric -- This is a pretty interesting idea.

Demand

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment

Andrew Chen: Growing renewable audiences

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

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? Expo SF (May. .

Audience

Audience San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean

Lessons Learned: Validated learning about customers

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

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

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick

Fail Fast, Fail Cheap? A contrarian point of view

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 10, 2010

Others would go even further and say it is better to launch half a product than a half-assed product. The Four Steps to the Epiphany (highly recommended book by Steve Blank) preaches for customer development before product development, advocating a quick launch with a minimal feature set rather than a full fledged product offering.

Lean

Lean Customer Development Audience Viral

Lessons Learned: Three freemium strategies

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 27, 2009

At a high level, anything that drives virality should be free. To take your specific example about virality - why do we want to have more users sign up? Is it that they act as free advertising for our premium product? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC

Business ecology and the four customer currencies

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Each of these four currencies represents a way for a customer to “pay&# for services from a company. A great product enables customers, developers, partners, and even competitors to exchange their unique currencies in combinations that lead to financial success for the company that organizes them.

Customer

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean

Lessons Learned: CPI > CPC

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 11, 2009

If you ask an expert in Facebook apps to come help build yours, youll usually hear the same advice: build your app for virality. Thats sensible advice; most people who have made a business on Facebook rely on the viral driver of growth. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco

San Francisco Social Network Lean Continuous Deployment

Engagement loops: beyond viral

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2008

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

Viral San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment

Lessons Learned: The App Store after the gold rush

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 7, 2008

Acqusition competition is how new apps get new customers. On the web, we have many of these channels: SEM, SEO, world of mouth, PR and viral. If your app has strong word-of-mouth or viral components, your retention drives new acquisition, and its not so important to have good placement in the store. Expo SF (May. .

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Retention SEM

How to get distribution advantage on the iPhone

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

On Facebook, viral distribution has proved decisive. Those companies who have learned to build apps that optimize the viral loop dominate in every category where they compete. Not many customers ever browse the app directory or search for specific apps - they dont have to, they find out about apps by being invited by a friend.

Distribution

Distribution San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment

Lessons Learned: The metrics and levers of engagement.

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

This is a common problem that results from viral-loop optimization. By copying the exact same registration flow as every other successful viral app, many viral apps completely lose their positioning. Customers cant even remember what apps theyve signed up for, and become entirely dependent on notifications to bring them back.

Metrics

Metrics San Francisco Lean Viral

Learning is better than optimization (the local maximum problem)

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

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. When we’re optimizing, product development teams encounter similar situations.

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design

Innovation inside the box

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2009

(This is similar to the problem that viral loop companies have with the engagement loop : by making it too easy to join, they actually give away the positioning that allows for longer-term engagement.) Why was a team this smart, this disciplined, and this committed to waste-free product development creating so much waste?

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Metrics Continuous Deployment

Lessons Learned: Don't launch

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Do some Customer Development instead. If the product needs to be tweaked just a little bit in order to convert users into customers, you want to figure that out before the launch. If the viral coefficient is 0.9, And if your product doesnt retain customers, whats the point of driving a bunch of them to use it?

San Francisco

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage

Lessons Learned: Q&A with an actual reader

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Imagine you have incredibly precise metrics about every minute that every customer spends with your product, every mouse click, movement - everything. So you do a split-test, and you discover that Feature X causes people to spend 20% more time on a given part of your product, say a particular web page. Is that a success?

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC

Lessons Learned: Continuous integration step-by-step

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 8, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0, No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Expo SF (May. . Expo SF (May.

Software Review

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment

Lessons Learned: The hacker's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

Sometimes, a great hacker has the potential to grow into the CTO of a company, and in those cases all you need is an outside mentor who can work with them to develop those skills. At the end of the day, the product development team of a startup (large or small) is a service organization. Does this sound familiar? Expo SF (May.

Software Review

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco

The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Software Company

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

This is the simplest version of your product minus the frills and frosting. It’s a particularly popular strategy in the world of product development and is used to quickly and quantitatively test a product or a product feature. You can learn more about the agile development methodology on Version One’s site.

Software Review

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast

Assessing fit with the Wisdom of Crowds

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 30, 2008

Because of the experiences I had while in that job, trying to manage the process of hiring while still getting other work done, I built a web application to help people in a similar role to manage the hiring process, called Catch the Best. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC

The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part three

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 6, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0, No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Expo SF (May. . Expo SF (May.

San Francisco

San Francisco SCRUM Lean Continuous Deployment

[Excerpt] Earlyvangelists: The Most Important Customers of All

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 20, 2012

In Web/mobile apps, where multi-sided markets (separate users and payers) are often found, earlyvangelists can be users or payers. But even as nonpaying users, these earlyvangelists are willing or eager accelerators of your viral growth. The risk here is lost time and no product for customers to provide feedback against.

Customer

Customer Advisory Board Engineer Cofounder

Where is the best place to find a rockstar developer to bring it to life?

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

" Web Development Startups Solo Founders I am a creative guy with a startup idea. Where is the best place to find a rockstar developer to bring it to life? " => I have not bothered to put up a landing page, survey to test customer demand, or done any customer development whatsoever.

Developer

Developer Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder

The Superbowl ad test

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

Is the company growing because of an amazing viral loop paired with a strong engagement loop? Most of the article is about the features – new and old – of the product. Is the company growing because of an amazing viral loop paired with a strong engagement loop? The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

San Francisco

San Francisco Metrics Lean PR

Reframing the problems with “Freemium” by charging the marketing department

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 16, 2013

Freemium is not customer development Just imagine how much you’ll learn once you have 1,000 real, active users of the system: Everything from behavioral statistics (which features are actually used?) to democratic product development (voting on which features customers would like to see next?).

Marketing

Marketing Viral Campaign Business Model

Lessons Learned: Getting started with split-testing

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0, No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Expo SF (May. . Expo SF (May.

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC

StartUpRoar

Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

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

Trending Sources

Lessons Learned: Using AdWords to assess demand for your new.

Andrew Chen: Growing renewable audiences

Lessons Learned: Validated learning about customers

Fail Fast, Fail Cheap? A contrarian point of view

Lessons Learned: Three freemium strategies

Business ecology and the four customer currencies

Lessons Learned: CPI > CPC

Engagement loops: beyond viral

Lessons Learned: The App Store after the gold rush

How to get distribution advantage on the iPhone

Lessons Learned: The metrics and levers of engagement.

Learning is better than optimization (the local maximum problem)

Innovation inside the box

Lessons Learned: Don't launch

Lessons Learned: Q&A with an actual reader

Lessons Learned: Continuous integration step-by-step

Lessons Learned: The hacker's lament

The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Software Company

Assessing fit with the Wisdom of Crowds

The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part three

[Excerpt] Earlyvangelists: The Most Important Customers of All

Where is the best place to find a rockstar developer to bring it to life?

The Superbowl ad test

Reframing the problems with “Freemium” by charging the marketing department

Lessons Learned: Getting started with split-testing

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