“We see Lean Startup methodology being used inappropriately as an excuse to not take sales and marketing seriously,” he said. “Founders tell us that all that matters is product, and sales and market will happen automatically. The ‘if they build it it will come,’” mantra, which he noted is not always an acceptable approach for those looking to grow.
I can't help but wonder... who are these people and what in the world made them think that being a Lean Startup in any way obviates the need for sales and marketing? If you read one of the seminal books of the Lean Startup world, @sgblank's The Four Steps To The Epiphany you see that he makes it absolutely clear that sales and marketing matter. There's a lot of material in there about demand creation, channels, pricing, and other sales and marketing topics.
IMO, anybody who says "we don't need to worry about sales and marketing because we're a Lean Startup" is clueless and probably hasn't actually done any research on the whole Lean Startup approach, beyond reading headlines on HN and maybe a blog post or two.
I would completely agree. At the core of it, customer discovery and learning what product your customers want/will pay for (and thus you should build) is the core of subscribing to being a "lean startup." Product does matter, but what matters more is building something someone would pay for
Presenter here. This was actually the first presentation I'd ever given in my entire life which happened here at Amsterdam (1) to
help our batch-mates who currently do the program. (Disclosure: We're also part of Rockstart Accelerator)
Without the context, some points might look like unclear, but I'll soon write a blog post including all the knowledge & practical links around the topic.
If you're interested more in the topic, please don't hesitate to contact me (2) to discuss, or ask my help for your own cases. These techniques can be adjustable for whatever project you're working on, and it's always good to start early on.
Don’t blindly follow the MVP gospel, adapt it to your personality and projects. People won’t take your half finished app seriously if you are outside of the early adopters market… which happens most of the time.
People won’t take your half finished app seriously if you are outside of the early adopters market… which happens most of the time.
A point a lot of people seem to miss about MVPs and the whole Lean Startup approach (specifically the aspects taken from @sgblank's Customer Development Methodology) is that you start out focusing on early adopters. You aren't, with the initial cut, usually trying to sell to the mass market yet. You're trying to find out if there's any market for "the thing you're building".
This, to me, implies that if you're working with an MVP that is "half finished" or less than polished, you don't publicize it to the world and try to drive massive traffic to it right away (this is assuming some kind of webapp, SaaS thing). A closed, invite only, beta or trail program, just to get feedback, find out how customers interact with the thing, etc., should probably come first.
Of course, webapps are a slightly different model than what @sgblank wrote about in TFSTTE, and he revised some of his stuff in The Startup Owner's Manual to address that more specifically.
Have a landing page that actually says something about the product. The limk landing page is atrocious. How d you expect people to sign up to your service when the entry point to your system is this bad?
Worse, what there is was confusing, at least to me. I signed up after reading the article and checking Twitter accounts. I thought I was signing up for a deal finding site from what text I'd seen. It's actually more of an interesting content finding site.
I haven't seen any deals but think it is referring to occasional promos or discounts or something else to incentivize users - doesn't seem to actually be about shopping or getting deals of offers or anything. Example categories were humor, and there were stories about what girls find more attractive, etc..
Thanks for your interest, and sorry for your confusion, but we decided to do this alpha phase only to run our experiments to see by using which ones of them we can fuel our growth with steadily once we release our core features which you probably haven't seen, or used yet.
Thanks for taking your time, orangethirty, and pointing out what you exactly don't like about it.
The thing is we'd most probably keep using the teasing approach, as it mostly converts better than whatever we tried. You can still keep informing your users as the activation process is still happening. At least that was what we learned from our experiences, but the results might differ on each different case.
Teasing only works for prostitutes and strippers. The reason it converts better for you is because your other pages were worse. I do landing pages for startups, and yours can't be working that well. I have no problem with your product, or you, but the landing page is seriously holding you back. Anyhow, good luck. No harm intended.
Yep, agreed on the last slide that lean startup only works 1 out of 10 times
As opposed to?
Seriously, I'm not trying to be snarky. "Lean" is a way of thinking, a set of principles, etc. that should increase the odds of success of most startups. So if we say "using this only works 1 in 10 times" then how often do startups succeed who don't use them? And if one were to advocate for a "something else" model then what, exactly, is the "something else"?
Or I guess another way of wording what I'm asking is "Is there actually any counter-indication to doing things like getting to know your customers and understand their pains, achieving product / market fit before doing a big-bang PR launch, and waiting to try and massively scale sales and marketing until you know there is a market for what you're building"?
It's not that we actually don't like & use lean techniques, but it's just I wanted to address that actually 'fetish of failure' might not be a good thing in the long term.
Thanks aresant, already replied you privately, but for the public knowledge; you can accomplish this with Intercom but only with emails & in-app notifications.
We're currently studying all these features to build similar ones to accomplish the same from the servers that we own in future. We've already built an app to do exactly the same for Twitter mentions. I'll consider open-sourcing this, once it gets better & more stable.
Great post, would like to hear more about some of the strategies and thoughts behind slide 15, specifically grouping and evaluating users. Also what is the 7-time rule?
Thanks, tyndierock. We've just started the entire process earlier this week, and the early results are already promising.
Speaking of the 7-time rule: (*)
"The Rule of Seven is an old marketing adage. It says that a prospect needs to see or hear your marketing message at least seven times before they take action and buy from you."
We re-imagined it, and changed if we're not getting any activation & usage from a user after 7-times of trying, then we're grouping them as 'lost users' which we might win back them again with some other techniques.
Glad that you liked it, daviedR. We've also just started the process earlier in this week, but it's already getting some results. And I'd be more than glad to help you.
Its means to create valuable content for your market, and then share the content through links. From tweeting the link, to posting on a social network, to posting to web forums, to posting as a blog comment. But always stay in context. Don't post a link to post a link.
This works very well and has a long term impact. Plus it improves your search rankings.
Link building can often be bad like you imply. I think the right way to do it is to find the right places to share content with the right people so it spreads organically. I am not sure I would agree that creating new accounts on lots of platforms and creating links is a good or sustainable practice these days...
A MVP is a solution validation (which usually suck btw). Not a rollout technique.
[ps: Ah damn. Now I am defend Lean on HN on a friday afternoon]