Steve Blank

APRIL 4, 2011

The good news was that customers said that their minimum viable product (easily organizing research papers) was correct. Politely it was described as “poor customer retention” but in reality it was because the product was really hard to use.

Customer 234

Customer Business Model Cloud Nebraska 234

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

Consider the superb results companies are getting from this new way of thinking about customers: - Customer salespeople achieved, in effect, 80 percent close rates for Salesforce.com , which was key in growing their business in the face of much bigger, better-funded competitors. -

Customer 154

Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

ConversionXL

DECEMBER 2, 2020

The stage where your customers are actively researching for more information; during this stage social proof , and testimonials play an important role. The stage in which a customer makes a purchase. The stage in which your customers develop brand loyalty. Building your custom marketing and sales funnel.

Churn Rate 78

Churn Rate Analytics Retention SQL 78

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 11, 2019

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.

Seed Stage 149

Seed Stage B2B Seed Capital Revenue 149

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 10, 2014

Francois Bondiguel is from Vend, a point-of-sale, inventory, and customer loyalty software that helps over 10,000 retailers manage and grow their business. Professionalisms customer development customer relationship management customer retention Francois Bondiguel'

Customer 228

Customer Retention Programming Customer Development 228

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 17, 2009

Gathering real-world feedback from customers is a core concept of Customer Development as well as the Lean Startup. When I asked him if he actually had personally left the building and talked to these potential customers, or even had gotten them on the phone, he sounded confused. Customer needs are non-deterministic.

Metrics 239

Metrics Customer Customer Development Lean 239

The Startup Toolkit

DECEMBER 12, 2012

For example, succeeding at PR before you have retention is actively unhelpful. Customer Development and UX both have good tools for doing this. You need to decide which questions matter to your particular business, and then obsess about answering those. When you talk to your team or VCs, bring them back to your own questions.

Lean 54

Lean Startup Metrics Retention 54

Steve Blank

MAY 1, 2015

Customer Development for us meant a lot of hard-won learnings. The endless emails we received describing the exact need we had uncovered were the powerful validation of the customer development approach. Incredibly high usage and impressive retention prove that we are on the right track. There was no going back.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Lean Customer Development Startup 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 23, 2012

But all that investment in growth and sales force didn’t have a long-term payback, and the actual value of the product to small businesses wasn’t as high as claimed, even though the simplest of customer development reveals this fact (ask any restauranteur). Is your company building something of lasting value?

IPO 240

IPO Flash Bootstrapping Private Equity 240

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Some products have relatively obvious monetization mechanisms, and the real risks are in customer adoption. Products can find sources of validation with impressive stats along a number of dimensions, such as high engagement, viral coefficient, or long-term retention. Labels: agile , customer development 15comments: Scott Shapiro said.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Customer Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2014

These groups are adapting or adopting the practices of startups and accelerators – disruption and innovation rather than direct competition, customer development versus more product features, agility and speed versus lowest cost. existing enterprises are establishing corporate innovation groups.

IRR 335

IRR Startup Business Model Agile 335

VC Cafe

JULY 26, 2020

Ditch the business plan and when assumptions are proven wrong, pivot Customer Development: Build a product your customers want (vs. what you think they might need) by talking to customers and testing every aspect of the product features, pricing, etc.

Lean 214

Lean Seed Capital Startup Burn Rate 214

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

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.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

ConversionXL

JULY 1, 2014

Who you survey will be largely be dependent on the outcome you’re looking for & the customer segments you’ve set up. If you want to start a loyalty program to improve customer retention , survey frequent buyers. If you want to start a VIP program for top spenders, survey customers who spend a lot of money with you.

Customer 76

Customer Design Software Review Lead Generation 76

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.

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Cofounder 60

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2021

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. In other words, you prove retention. With both growth and retention, you earn the right to build more.

Product 436

Product Viral Channel San Francisco 436

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. Retention competition is how you get people to come back to your app. Then, if your retention is good enough, you can stay there.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean SEM Retention 68

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

This means users love it, that there’s lots of retention and engagement, even at small numbers. On Sean’s GrowthHackers.com , categories include… So, essentially everything from customer development and onboarding to persuasion and social marketing fall under the umbrella of growth hacking.

Retention 48

Retention Metrics Acquisition Conversion 48

The Startup Toolkit

NOVEMBER 15, 2012

Growth is acquisition plus retention. Acquisition and retention tend to be inseparable from the product. You shift from qualitative feedback (customer development) to quantitative feedback (metrics). In cases like that, you can just tick off that bit of the model and move on to other questions.

Startup 55

Startup Business Model Retention Acquisition 55

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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively. In a customer problem pivot, we try to solve a different problem for the same customer segment. When doing intense customer development, the problem team can attain a high level of empathy with potential customers.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Agile 167

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 5, 2012

They should understand the different states of the user (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue) and focus on moving users from one state to the next. Retention - Users come back to the site through emails, social media and stay active with product features (“you’ve got a message”). like/+1/follow?

API 167

API Viral Startup Retention 167

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 28, 2020

But it pays off in enabling much better engagement and retention. Not only the theorists but constituents for customer development, or with Main Street businesses and local constituents. We need to know what sweet spots for customer development work best with zoom and that don’t work best with zoom.

Lean 399

Lean Community San Jose Africa 399

Hippoland

JUNE 19, 2018

Is there a way to spread this cost of say $40k-$200k across time while simultaneously improving employee retention? And then at kindergarten, public schools are basically free for the next 13 years. I’m not sure if these ideas are any good, but I think childcare or the way to fund childcare can be completely reimagined.

San Francisco 48

San Francisco California Cost Software 48

Hippoland

JUNE 19, 2018

Is there a way to spread this cost of say $40k-$200k across time while simultaneously improving employee retention? And then at kindergarten, public schools are basically free for the next 13 years. I’m not sure if these ideas are any good, but I think childcare or the way to fund childcare can be completely reimagined.

San Francisco 48

San Francisco California Cost Software 48

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 22, 2017

Retention is the key to building a great business. Retention is a simple phenomenon—users choosing to come back to your product—but it can be elusive. Understanding the patterns that lead to retention. You could have three basic personas, each of which is going to exist in some proportion (and have different retention numbers).

Product 101

Product Retention Analytics Acquisition 101

ConversionXL

JULY 3, 2014

With only 6% of senior executives believing that their companies understand their customers’ needs extremely well, it’s no wonder why customer acquisition and retention has become a substantial problem. The Case For Building Customer Personas Out Of Data-Driven Research.

Customer 133

Customer Analytics Conversion Lead Generation 133

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

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.

Technical Review 47

Technical Review Design Las Vegas Product 47

ConversionXL

APRIL 30, 2014

When used intelligently, this can be used on every level of your marketing strategy from acquisition to retention to referrals. Understand these users will help you create new tactics to create more users that fit the profile. This report is also useful when diving deeper into cross-device analysis.

Analytics 97

Analytics eCommerce Software Review Campaign 97

usersknow.blogspot.com

APRIL 30, 2010

You need to have some sort of plan for testing to see how it’s affecting key metrics , whether those are revenue, retention, registration, user happiness, or some other number you care about. This feature will be part of a premium package that will only be available to subscribers/VIP members/paying customers.

Software Review 40

Software Review Agile San Francisco Metrics 40

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Either way, you would have been better off focusing your split-test on high level metrics that measure how much customers like your product as a whole. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

Product/Metrics (70%/30% time) * Get your product activation (sign-up + meaningful action) to 60% * then, Get your product retention to 20% weekly. 2) Co-Founders are the largest form of dilution (if you’re raising) 3) Everything around LeanStartup / Customer Development 4) Understand the micro economics of your business early.

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 26, 2013

And, professional development improves staff retention and satisfaction. Teams thinking about instituting more testing, or exploring the Customer Development model, will get direct information about how to implement these methods. Your team will come back energized. Look into the future.

Lean 166

Lean Leadership Retention California 166

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

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? And most web applications do their positioning right in the first few screens of the app.

Metrics 88

Metrics San Francisco Lean Viral 88

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?

Viral 140

Viral San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 140

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 28, 2013

We determined as a class that we wouldn’t pass judgment on ideas until we dove into the customer development process. I stressed to the students they would be assessed on their ability to move through the Customer Development process, rather than be graded on an idea’s perceived worth. ”We worked, but not 100%.

Lean 309

Lean Cleveland Ohio Business Model 309