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Lessons Learned: Validated learning about customers

Startup Lessons Learned

Every board meeting, the metrics of success change. For a startup, having great sales DNA is a wonderful asset. This is the magic of sales: by learning about each customer in-depth, they can convince each of them that this product would solve serious problems. But here’s where a truly great sales artist comes in.

Customer 167
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Andrew Chen: Growing renewable audiences

Startup Lessons Learned

In an enterprise sales context, this is called a "repeatable and scalable sales process" - once you know how to do this, your company can graduate from early adopters and make an attempt at the mainstream. Problem is, you inevitably become yesterday’s old news. Expo SF (May. Conference streaming, sponsors, discounted tickets.

Audience 119
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Lessons Learned: The four kinds of work, and how to get them done.

Startup Lessons Learned

Now its time to start to think seriously about how to find a repeatable and scalable sales process, how to position and market the product, and how to build a product development team that can turn an early product into a Whole Product. Growth - when you have existing customers, the pressure is on to grow your key metrics day-in day-out.

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Lessons Learned: What is customer development?

Startup Lessons Learned

This theory has become so influential that I have called it one of the three pillars of the lean startup - every bit as important as the changes in technology or the advent of agile development. Mark Leslie has articulated a very similar methodology to "4 steps to the epiphany" in his "sales learning curve" model which I also find compelling.

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

Startup Lessons Learned

Focus on the output metrics of that part of the product, and you make the problem a lot more clear. To promote this metrics discipline, we would present the full funnel to our board (and advisers) at the end of every development cycle. Max Levchin of Slide and Paypal has noted that 10% of Slides headcount is devoted to metrics only.

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Datablindness

Startup Lessons Learned

That’s because many of our reports feed us vanity metrics: numbers that make us look good but don’t really help make decisions. Yet even among those who have access to good actionable metrics, I’ve noticed a phenomenon that prevents taking maximum advantage of data. Too much of this data is non- actionable.

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Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot

Startup Lessons Learned

To acquire new money managers, the company makes traditional sales calls, which means they’ve interviewed many, many professionals and gotten a strong sense of their needs. .&# says Rachleff. At the same time, whenever a customer closes an account, kaChing contacts the person to find out why; most agree to a short phone interview. .&#