YoungUpstarts

APRIL 19, 2017

In e-commerce, retaining customers is essential to the survival of your business. It has long been known that keeping a customer is much cheaper than acquiring a new one, as those customers tend to be far more receptive to sales and promotions after they have made an initial purchase with you. Engage your customers.

Software Review 104

Software Review Technical Review Retention Channel 104

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? This may sound crazy, coming as it does from an advocate of c harging customers for your product from day one. They are gaining valuable customer data.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

ConversionXL

JULY 1, 2014

Conversions are mostly about being relevant to your customers. If what you offer and the way you present it is relevant to your visitors they will convert to buying customers. Then again if you don’t understand who your customer is or worse it’s “everybody” then you have very little change of being successful at it. Demographic.

Customer 76

Customer Design Software Review Lead Generation 76

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 10, 2014

Today, you need ways to keep customers coming in the door. It’s the ability to “stalk” your potential customers all over the web. The customer saw your ad on a totally unrelated web search or a website. It can also annoy customers if they catch on that you’re following them all over the web. Incentivize Customer Loyalty.

Customer 199

Customer Retention Programming Customer Development 199

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

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?)

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

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 240

Metrics Customer Customer Development Lean 240

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 11, 2019

You’re obviously not showing charts of user growth, number of customers, or revenue. 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. B) Post-Product Companies.

Seed Stage 149

Seed Stage B2B Seed Capital Revenue 149

ConversionXL

DECEMBER 2, 2020

It wasn’t until we began creating custom dashboards to visualize our data that everything started to click. . In this article, I’ll share how to bring together data from different sources and visualize it at custom marketing and sales funnels that help you make better decisions. The Retention stage.

Churn Rate 78

Churn Rate Analytics Retention SQL 78

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).

IPO 240

IPO Flash Bootstrapping Retention 240

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

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

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far. The core of the article is my first attempt to articulate the key metrics (in graph form) that I believe demonstrate customer value. Retention cohort analysis.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

ConversionXL

JULY 3, 2014

When was the last time you took a long hard look at what makes your customer base tick? Think customer personas – those detailed representations of the different segments of your target audience. The UK based customer experience management firm, Thunderhead.com, conducted a similar study of U.S.

Customer 133

Customer Analytics Conversion Lead Generation 133

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 3, 2009

bigs : @ericries says Stealth dev is a (undesirable, failure-presaging) customer-free zone. Another recent meme that I hope more and more startups will take to heart: "stealth is a customer-free zone." See Validated learning about customers for more info. Use some customer development to find out.

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Cofounder 60

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

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. It’s really all that matters at the earliest stage.

Product 436

Product Viral Channel San Francisco 436

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, December 14, 2009 Business ecology and the four customer currencies Lately, I’ve been rethinking the concept of “business model&# for startups, in favor of something I call “business ecology.&# Let’s begin with the four customer currencies. And this is true outside of games.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Customers will get to consume the content they want, and support the producers of that content directly, rather than having to rely exclusively on intermediaries. Now, helping potential customers discover new things they might like is the job of the discipline of marketing. There are just too many of them out there. But guess what?

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. Some startups avoid getting customer feedback for precisely this reason: they are afraid that if early reactions are negative, theyll be "forced" to abandon their vision. One such practice is to pivot from one vision to the next.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Agile 167

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 7, 2008

The App Store is a channel for customer acquisition. Customers and prospects are overwhelmed by the number of media and companies clamoring for their attention. I think its helpful to think about two kinds of competition for distribution: acquisition competition and retention competition. So what can you do?

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Retention SEM 68

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

This means users love it, that there’s lots of retention and engagement, even at small numbers. It is simply getting customers. And by the transitive property, anything that gets customers is marketing. […] Welcome to growth hacking. Andrew Chen , Uber : “Startups don’t need growth hackers – at first. via FastCompany).

Retention 48

Retention Metrics Acquisition Conversion 48

The Startup Toolkit

NOVEMBER 15, 2012

The language we use for startup stages (discovery, validation, customer creation, company building) is abstract. 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).

Startup 55

Startup Business Model Retention Acquisition 55

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 28, 2020

Tactically, how effective would customer discovery be for the students? Would customers sit for virtual interviews? 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. This Summit.

Lean 407

Lean Community San Jose Africa 407

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 5, 2012

The term “Growth Hacking”, invented by Sean Ellis , and made popular by Andrew Chen , a Silicon valley marketer and entrepreneur, is a combination of two disciplines – marketing and coding: Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?”

API 167

API Viral Startup Retention 167

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. Listen to your customers. jamesshamenski 25 Nov 09 at 2:14 pm Great article Andrew!

Technical Review 47

Technical Review Design Las Vegas Product 47

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

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. Near shoring development with your team (ex: your team is based in Canada / India) is cool, but not outsourcing. Talk to your customers. It all depends on where you’re at.

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

ConversionXL

APRIL 30, 2014

To implement the User-ID feature you must provide your own customer or User-ID value – this is typically done with a Client Relationship Management system. When used intelligently, this can be used on every level of your marketing strategy from acquisition to retention to referrals. An Example – Image-O.

Analytics 97

Analytics eCommerce Software Review Campaign 97

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Sometimes, testing with existing customers is more complicated than with new customers. Existing customers already have an expectation about how your product works, and its important to take this into consideration when adding or changing features. On the other hand, existing customers can be a testing benefit.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

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. It’s not enough to just launch a feature and see if your revenue increases.

Software Review 40

Software Review Agile San Francisco Metrics 40

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

In most applications, most of the time, customers return to use the application not in response to a notification or event, but under their own volition. These decisions are critical to the success of any high-engagement product, and they take place entirely inside the minds of customers.

Metrics 88

Metrics San Francisco Lean Viral 88

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 26, 2013

Customers disliked this two-step process in early testing, and so Carol’s team built a version of the app that ran entirely on mobile, and was a one-stop-shop for tax preparation. Carol: “We heard from all those other customers — customers in other states, and customers with more complex returns. Look into the future.

Lean 166

Lean Leadership California Retention 166

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. Synthetic notifications. Organic notifications.

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 didn’t need them. We’re ready,”.

Lean 311

Lean Cleveland Ohio Business Model 311