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 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 3, 2009

Use some customer development to find out. Split-testing is great for linear optimization; making our landing pages, conversion rates, and retention metrics incrementally better day-in day-out. But its also amazing for testing big hypotheses, like what our customers really want to get out of our product. Expo SF (May. .

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Cofounder 60

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

And anytime you strike a deal for digital distribution of any content, insist that your creators be given real-time access to the big-picture metrics: not just downloads, but engagement, retention and replay. As you and I have chatted about, a Zynga developed game versus an EA developed game is quite different. ideas (e.g.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

And most web applications do their positioning right in the first few screens of the app. At IMVU , we would routinely find retention effects that would stem from registration changes and have impact days or weeks later. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Metrics 88

Metrics San Francisco Lean Viral 88

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? Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 7, 2008

I think its helpful to think about two kinds of competition for distribution: acquisition competition and retention competition. 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. Then, if your retention is good enough, you can stay there.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Retention SEM 68

andrewchenblog.com

MARCH 10, 2010

Coupled with A/B testing, customer development, and thinking through business problems in a scientific, hypothesis-driven way, you end up with a powerful cocktail of techniques to build a modern startup in the most iterative way possible. If you liked this post, please subscribe or follow me on Twitter.

Technical Review 47

Technical Review Design Las Vegas Product 47

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2008

After youve acquired a customer, why would they bother to come back to your service? I wrote about this challenge for iPhone developers, in an essay on retention competition : the battle over what icon the user will click when they go to the home screen. Have you struggled with engagement and retention? Expo SF (May. .

Viral 140

Viral San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 140