article thumbnail

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

Startup Lessons Learned

is an elegant way to model any service-oriented business: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue We used a very similar scheme at IMVU, although we werent lucky enough to have started with this framework, and so had to derive a lot of it ourselves via trial and error. The AARRR model (hence pirates, get it?)

article thumbnail

How One Startup Figured Out What Could Really Help Deaf People

Steve Blank

A month ago, Jason, one of my founder friends, shut down his startup. 1 rule every founder hears over and over: Nobody wants your product until you prove it. How come so many founders still wake up to this horrible truth, after months or years of hard work? Customer Development for us meant a lot of hard-won learnings.

Cofounder 120
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Pitch Deck Month: “Is It Working?” (aka the “Traction” Slide)

View from Seed

Pre-launch customer development data is another way, sometimes in the form of user surveys for consumer companies or interviews with potential beta customers for B2B businesses. For consumer companies this is usually around user acquisition, engagement, and retention. B) Post-Product Companies.

article thumbnail

Lean Startup fbFund wrap-up

Startup Lessons Learned

The same has been true of an unfortunate number of startups, they manage to generate a lot of hype, raise a lot of money, and sometimes make some of their investors, employees, or founders rich. bigs : @ericries says Stealth dev is a (undesirable, failure-presaging) customer-free zone. Use some customer development to find out.

Lean 60
article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: Validated learning about customers

Startup Lessons Learned

It should be even more important to the founders themselves, because it demonstrates that their business hypothesis is grounded in reality. These founders have not managed, to borrow a phrase from Steve Blank , to create a scalable and repeatable sales process. Get product into customers’ hands. More on that in a moment.

Customer 167
article thumbnail

Lessons Learned on Mashable today

Startup Lessons Learned

The core of the article is my first attempt to articulate the key metrics (in graph form) that I believe demonstrate customer value. When startups ask me what to measure, I always come back to these three as a starting point: Revenue per customer. Retention cohort analysis. Funnel averages over time.

article thumbnail

A Path to the Minimum Viable Product

Steve Blank

Shawn immediately said the name I had given the four steps was confusing – I had called it market development – he suggested that I call it Customer Development – and the name stuck. And Jennifer is now my co-instructor in the Stanford Lean LaunchPad class.). In other words, you prove retention.

Product 436