Lean Coffee: Git Money!

Some brief notes from this morning's "Git Money" Lean Coffee TO session at Big Bang:

• No, this was not about Git :)
• How do you validate whether someone will pay, before you even build the product?
• Example: Coffee Shop owners
• Biggest problem: How to get feedback from their customers
• Made up rough wireframes and brought them to coffee shops
• Asked for $20, promised working software by a certain date
• In return, they got $200 of service
• Reduced the discount rate as more customers signed up
• Social proof made it an easier sale
• Would this approach work for more expensive products?
• Potentially -- Companies sell unfinished software all the time
• Start with a discount, and reduce that discount over time
• What is the product is really complicated?
• Customers may ask to see more before handing over money
• In that case, you may need to look to a different type of "visionary" customer
• What if your product has an existing competitor?
• All products have some type of competition (ie. the "do nothing" alternative, or other channels that might not be "direct" competition)
• How much do you need?
• Depends on how good a sales person you are
• Might be able to see just based on a conversation
• Otherwise, might need wireframes, working prototype, etc.
• Future discussion topic: Customer Objections

Lean Coffee: Vizualize.Me Case Study

The summer has been busy, and I didn't think I'd be able to get back into Lean Coffee before September, but this session's topic was too good to pass up.

Eugene Woo from Vizualize.Me presented an amazing case study for the group.

Here are a some key notes from the discussion:

• Won StartupWeekend, 2000 signups on the first day
• Thousands of signups per day -- now over 100,000
• After a month, decided to pursue it full-time
• Did a "press push" about winning StatupWeekend, etc. but didn't really take
• Made an Ashton Kutcher sample and pushed to blogs
• Didn't really get much on the blogs
• But major press picked up on it somehow
• Led to articles on FastCompany and Mashable
• "You don't learn when you're building"
• No mockups, built a working prototype quickly
• Important for learning -- wouldn't learn the same things with a mockup
• Customer development can be depressing, but is also exciting
• Priorities are not clear, but at least you know the problems
• 1-3 months away from "true" MVP
• So far 100% equity, seeking a seed round
• 10 or so competitors have emerged
• So far they have a huge branding head start
• 50% conversion rate from signup list, 15-20% fill rate for Wufoo survey
• Lots of wrong assumptions and learning: eg. Thought people wouldn't need to edit inline
• At least 5 phone calls per week, lots of email and surveys
• Use MixPanel for data collection
• Started out collecting everything, but now focusing on a few key metrics at a time
• Biggest potential competition: If LinkedIn builds similar capability
• Jobs market is ripe for disruption
• Best source of leads/signups: LaunchRock, Twitter

Thanks again Eugene for sharing, and looking forward to see Vizualize.me continue to grow and evolve!

Lean Coffee: How to launch a product

This morning we chatted about how to launch a product the lean way. A few key observations:

• What's the definition of "launch" for Lean?
• Multiple "launches" during customer development
• You need to refocus you team from development to sales and support
• Infrastructure: As you move from beta, backup and failover systems become more important
• Looking for early adopters
• Do beta/soft launches first to smaller groups
• Don't see a lot of "big bang" launches anymore -- more "constant" betas
• However, "hard" launches are still common in enterprise (CDs, media, etc.)
• Slowly going away and moving to SAAS (software as a service)
• Product Lifecycle Curve (from Crossing the Chasm)
• Techniques:
• Target influential bloggers in the field
• LaunchRock (a bit spammy, but works)
• Need organic growth -- make it easy for people to do the marketing for you
• It's a different story launching something that people need to actually spend money on
• Difficult to cut through the noise and get people to pay attention
• The personal approach:
• "Bribe" early adopters and influencers and give a personal touch (example: Hashable)
• An email from the founder makes people feel important
• Personal connections can't be faked
• As you grow, build the personal connections into the culture ("customer development team")
• Big launch with press release, etc. less personal -- not as approachable
• Your current users are more valuable than new ones
• Are you launching a product, or launching a company (with a business model)?
• Don't assume it's going to "go viral" -- Design for if it doesn't
• Categories of influencers: How well do you know your customers?
• If you want to get coverage, have something truly interesting, novel to say (example Gmail "goggles")
• Key influencers (especially well-known ones) can make all the difference
• Frequent, iterative launches: Find "excuses" to get heard, and stay consistent
• It takes many times of people hearing something before they actually remember

This is great advice as I personally iterate towards progressively larger "launches" of our project management software, PMRobot.

These Lean Coffee sessions are always a great way to start the day and get thinking about "big picture" stuff that you might not otherwise.

Thanks to Jeremy for hosting, and everyone else for attending and contributing!

Lean Coffee: Customer Segments

Today's Lean Coffee was hosted by Mark at BNOTIONS.

Some great points on customer segments:

• Reference: Geoffrey Moore - Crossing the chasm
• Get your early adopters to become evangelists, help you cross the gap
• They give feedback and a slightly different perspective
• Invest in retention more than acquisition --> referrals
• Early majority requires training/support/documentation than early adopter
• Early adopter term applies across many fields -- projects, organizations, etc.
• Influencer -- Applies to music, cars, etc.
• Identify people that have an active need, ask them questions
• When they have a clearly identified problem, and the pain is high enough, they're much more open to new stuff
• Segment your customers by talking to them and identifying similarities
• How do you identify evangelists?
• If they're supporting other users or otherwise being vocal (in a positive way)
• Stats: Who is the most effective at bringing in users? Often the same people that use it the most
• When you identify evangelists, give them stuff, help them help you
• The biggest skeptics can become the biggest evangelists
• Personal touch helps engagement -- send a note, give a phone call

That's it for today! What were your takeaways from the session?

Inside The Lean Startup

This evening I attended a great panel discussion event at the MaRS Discovery District entitled "Inside The Lean Startup".

There were some great points brought up by the panel of @ashmaurya, @skanwar, @leilaboujnane, and @davidcrow of StartupNorth etc.

My takeaways:

• What do people misunderstand about Lean?
• not a step-by-step guide -- it's a set of philosophies
• not "cheap" or "bootstrapping" -- process efficiency
• Potential mistakes:
• Relying on the wrong set of tactics for the stage they're at
• Over complication in systems (ie. continuous integration)
• Should be about changing behaviour -- getting out and talking to customers
• All about efficiency -- get the most for the least
• Key Metric: Money -- Are people paying you for your product?
• Key Question: How disappointed would you be if this product would be taken away tomorrow? 
• 40%+ indicates not a fluke
• Key Points:
• Reduce assumptions
• Identify riskiest parts first and evaluate
• Don't afraid to be embarased
• Find the shortest route to get in front of customer and get feedback
• Lean applies to: unknown problems / unknown solutions
• Hypothesis test: pull the plug and see if anyone cares!
• When do you start charging? From day 1. ("free" is a customer acquisition tactic, not a business model)
• Starting out: Is this a problem worth solving?
• Make sure a hypothesis is falsifiable -- the scientific method
• "Life is too short to build products nobody cares about." -- Ash
• Adding features:
• Unused features are waste
• Creates technical debt
• Start with "no"
• How do you get feedback?
• Initial hypothesis: pain is so great that they want to be involved in the process
• Find your early adopters -- as visionary as you are (rare breed, hard to find)
• People are always open to telling you about their problems ("tell me about your pain")
• If you're not getting feedback, find out why -- not reachable? don't like forms, method of communication, type of question

And some miscellaneous notes:

• Key Resources:
• 4 steps to the epiphany
• http://www.custdev.com/
• Startup Metrics for Pirates
• Upcoming: http://runningleanhq.com/

• Toronto Events:
• http://to.hackdays.ca/
• http://democamp.com/
• http://www.meetup.com/leancoffeeto/

Valuable stuff. Looking forward to more events like this one!

Lean Marketing

I attended the brand shiny new Tuesday session of Lean Coffee Toronto today at the awesome BNOTIONS headquarters at Yonge and Bloor.

My summary follows:

• Thursday's session of "How to spend $5,000" apparently wasn't the right approach to the discussion
• (good thing we got a second try :)
• Different parts: Researching vs. Positioning vs. Building Demand
• Can you describe the product in a few short sentences? (ie. the length of a Google Ad)
• Very important to have consistent messaging
• Creating the UVP (unique value proposition) is the hardest part.
• Technique: "It's like X for Y"
• Example: It's like Dropbox for Development Environments
• Pros: You can use all of the marketing efforts from X for free!
• Cons: Helps describe the What, but not necessarily the Why
• 6 steps: (iterative)
• Problem
• Values
• Market
• Ideal consumer
• Competition
• Positioning (USP)
• Technique: 3rd-party re-explanation:
• Explain to someone, then have that person explain it to someone else new
• Tip: Don't try to deliver too many different concepts in your message
• How far along do you need to get to get proper feedback? Idea? Mockups? Prototype?
• Answer: All of the above. Start with an idea and move up from there as you get validation
• Pivoting: Do you change the market or the product? (or both?)

And some Meetup-related stuff:

• Next meetup: Same topic both days again
• Perhaps some attempt to:
• Post reading material prior to meetup (and have people actually read it)
• Keep the discussion on topic via the moderator (a difficult task, to be sure)
• Look at the San Fran Group for topic ideas and literature
• Check out http://dooo.sh/it/ from Big Bang (blog post)

Please comment on this post or email any corrections, additions or updates.

Until next time!