Bullet points concerning the lean start-up strategy

 

 

• Launch the minimum viable product and start immediately charging for premium accounts.

• apply the build-measure-learn cycle. Test certain features with the audience instead of asking them

• Observe your audience

• “We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.” - Ries, E. (n.d.). The lean startup. 1st ed. p.38.

• Set clear revenue targets in the early days.

• "We figured this out empirically, through experimentation, rather than through focus groups or market research. Customers could not tell us what they wanted; most, after all, never had heard of 3D avatars. Instead, they revealed the truth through their action or interaction as we struggled to make the product better."

• This is true startup productivity: systematically figuring out the right things to build.

• The more pertinent questions are "Should this product be built?" and "Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?"

• If you cannot learn, you cannot fail. (experiment related)

• The goal of every startup experiment is to discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision.

• Value hypothesis & growth hypothesis.

• The point is not to find the average customer but to find early adopters.

• Planning is a tool that only works in the presence of a long and stable operation history.

• The products a startup builds are really experiments; the learnings about how to build a sustainable business is the outcome of those experiments. (p75 scheme)

• MVP: that version of the product that enables full turn of the build-measure-learn loop with a minimum amount of effort & least amount of development time.

• Although we write build-measure-learn since the activities happen in that order, the planning works in reverse order.

• Leap-of-faith questions

• Genchi gembutsu (go see for yourself)

• The goal of an MVP is to test fundamental business hypotheses.

• The video MVP is also a possibility to validate leap-of-faith assumptions

• The concierge MVP where the customers get a personal treatment

• Wizard of oz testing; where the customer thinks he is testing an actual product, but in real life, they are interacting with human beings on the other side.

• Low- quality MVP reveals what customers really care about

• Innovation accounting

  • How do we know the changes we've made are related to the results we're seeing? And how do we know we're drawing the right lessons of it?

  • Turn the leap-of-faith into a quantitive financial model.

  • The rate of growth depends on 3 things: profitability of each customer, cost of acquiring new ones and repeat purchase rate of existing customers.

  • Three main steps in innovation accounting;
    1. Use MVP to establish data on where the business is right now (smoke test)
    2. Attempt to tune the engine from baseline to ideal
    3.  Pivot or perverse

  • ESTABLISH BASELINE, TUNE ENGINE, PIVOT OR PERVERSE.

• When choosing to test an assumption of the business plan, first test the riskiest ones.

• A good design= changes customer behaviour for the better.

• Funnel metrics: behaviours that were critical to our engine of growth.

• Cohort analysis (123-125) includes interesting pivot (and explains how to see if it was a successful one or not).

• Actionable metrics vs vanity metrics

• Cohorts & split tests

• Metrics: Actionable, Accessible, Auditable

• A catalogue of pivots (172-176)

• Small batchesDrive sustainable growth through word of mouth, as side effect of product usage, funded advertisement, repeated purchase/use.

• The sticky, the viral and the paid engine of growth. They determine market growth/fit

• The 5 why's

• Startup teams need 3 structural attributes: scarce but secure resources, independent authority to develop their business and a personal stake in the outcome.

• Creating an innovation sandbox (split-testing idea's) p261

• 1.Build an ideal model of the desired disruption based on customer archetypes
  2. Build MVP as baseline
  3. Tune engine to get it closer toideal

• switching to validated learning feels worse before it feels better ( 271)​

 

 

Bullet points concerning behavioural strategy

 

http://www.behaviouralstrategy.com/how-to-make-your-prices-appear-smaller/

• Don't lower your prices to compete

• Use visual tools

  • price in a smaller font and bright contrast colour

  • if it's a reduced price, put the original one on the left of the new one in a bigger font

  • if the reduction is 1000+, write the amount, otherwise, write the percentage

  • write the reduction in round numbers

  • 99,- rule stays considered as useful