Dropbox explainer video? You’re missing most of their Lean Startup story… March 21, 2016 by LaunchTomorrow 1 Comment Not launching can be painful, but not learning can be fatal – Drew Houstan, Founding CEO of Dropbox “Not launching can be painful, but not learning can be fatal.” That’s how Drew Houston, the founding CEO of Dropbox, describes his team’s approach. Dropbox, if you haven’t heard of them, does file-sharing in the cloud. And they’re famous for the Dropbox explainer video which got them lots of eyeballs on Hacker News, as the basis for explosive growth later. They give users access to the same files on all devices, regardless of where they are used. After interviewing their geeky friends in MIT dorm rooms, the Dropbox founders wanted “write once, read anywhere” file management to apply to all files. Not just a software developer’s source code. They started working on developing a working prototype to solve their own problem. When Dropbox launched, a number of cloud storage competitors with deep pockets already existed: Google Drive, iCloud, AWS, Carbonite, to name a few. To get their product off the ground, Dropbox had to be different. And simple to understand. Hypothesis: Latent demand for product concept X makes product development worthwhile Test type: Value Hypothesis Success Criteria: Able to get signups based on description Simplicity captures interest Traffic Source: social media and online communities If we build it, how will we acquire traffic?Who exactly will be interested?Are they interested enough to establish a relationship with us?What kind of conversion rates do we get? Result: Pass. The team was able to acquire traffic that converted based on a description on a landing page. At the same time, they were building prototypes to assess the technical viability of the product idea. As this initial market test proved that some pent up demand existed, the team dug further. Step Back: This test established baselines, which could then be used to explore the product presentation further. Also, it helped them reach out and establish contact with their market, independently of their immediate personal network, thus providing a slightly more unbiased signal. Also, using such a page potentially allowed them to test a path to market, to locate their most rabid fans. Hypothesis: Variation X meaningfully positions the product against customer alternatives As part of their application to YCombinator, Dropbox really wanted to get Paul Graham’s attention. So they created a video aimed at attracting early adopters. The goal was to explain the product concept as a story. The core differentiator (big idea as they call it) was “write once, read anywhere”. Make changes to any copy, and all copies are updated with the same changes. Test Type: Value or Growth hypothesis Success Criteria: signups > X or conversion rate > X% (established previously) — more accurately in Dropbox’s case it was to get accepted into the YCombinator accelerator program. Create an explainer video for your complicated new product. Make sure your audience understands it, without being overwhelmed by technical details. Contact Us or call us now at: US/Canada: +1 202 949 4478 UK: +44 773 952 7708 EU: +48 692 870 297 Traffic Source: HackerNews, link to landing page with demo video targeted at early adopters Result: Pass. Built list of around 5,000 interested prospects. The problem description resonated strongly with their targeted early adopter audience. Step Back: Moving to a video format helped get across the product’s story more effectively. This made it more accessible to everyone. In and of itself, an explainer video is just a change in format–similar to how a bestselling book is treated as a candidate to become a blockbuster movie. Ultimately, a landing page that tests demand much get across the story well. The medium for telling that story is secondary to the relevance and quality of that story to the target audience. As Dropbox’s initial target audience was quite technical, this explanation mapped to a number of tools and behaviors they already knew from software development. And they were more than happy to run with the write once, read anywhere concept. Arguably, this niche perceived other cloud storage as defective because it didn’t support this kind of functionality. As a result, they needed little convincing and persuasion to hop on board. Hypothesis: Paid search can be a profitable engine of growth for Dropbox Test Type: Growth hypothesis Success Criteria: Customer Value > Customer Acquisition Cost Traffic Source: Paid search engine marketing Dropbox experimented with using paid acquisition on a landing page. This is not an early-stage landing page MVP test. It’s an attempt to figure out what will grow the company, not whether the product idea is attractive. They hired an experienced search engine marketer, who went out and made landing pages. On those pages, they hid the free option, replacing it with a free time-limited trial. AdWords interface is showing incorrect campaign conversation numbers. Difference of numbers are computed here. [images:Dropbox] Total ad spend: approximately $3,000 in the image above In their words, here were the problems they faced: The most obvious keywords were expensive.Long-tail had low volume.Hiding the free option was shady, confusing and buggy.The conversion numbers on Google’s dashboard were inaccurate. Result: Fail. As their cost of acquisition at the time was at least $233 for a $99 product, the experiment to test paid acquisition as a profitable traffic source failed. Based on the economics of paid search, pay-per-click didn’t look like a viable growth strategy for Dropbox. Step back: Even though PPC as a source of traffic didn’t work for them, it solidified their confidence in their ability to retain customers. If people bought, their subscription retention rate was over 75%. In short, they had a great product their community loved, and they had product market fit. In Drew Houston’s words, this meant that “product-market fit cures the many sins of management.” After this idea failed, Dropbox created a famous explainer video which went viral, thus proving that a viral engine of growth was better for them. Hypothesis: A simple value proposition resonates more with the target audience than a complex one Test Type: Value hypothesis Success Criteria: Conversion rate > initial conversion rate Traffic Source: Paid search engine marketing Simpler the better! Result: Pass. Simple and concise converts better, as does having a clear call-to-action for the next step. Step back: This test type is taken out of the traditional toolbox of conversion rate optimization (CRO). The idea is clear to the founders. They want to communicate it as concisely and effectively as possible to their target audience. Even if they move to a different traffic source later (as Dropbox did), a clear and powerful value proposition ensures a high conversion rate for all further marketing efforts, including free traffic sources. Moving too early into this kind of testing can be a type of premature optimization. The Takeaways The key tactic Dropbox used was to to test both market and technical viability simultaneously. In addition, they did a number of smaller tests. Each test checked a much smaller piece of the bigger puzzle. This required them to break down the overall vision into discrete tests which they built and ran. Build -> Measure -> Learn By running a series of experiments, Dropbox stayed with the ethos of MVP=experiment. Each cycle around the Build, Measure, Learn loop gave them greater insight. Each step they took tested something new about their target market and their product. As a result the product evolved very quickly, because the team gathered actionable yet counter-intuitive data. This helped them build a strong USP (unique selling proposition) in a crowded marketplace using technology that was theoretically possible but unproven. There is a lot more to a minimum viable product than just a beta software release. This post aims to make that clearer. << Help Yo' Friends Mapping customer development to stories on your landing page March 8, 2016 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment Riemer on Story Structure from Tara Loomis on Vimeo. << Help Yo' Friends 9 cringeworthy landing pages of multi-billion dollar tech giants March 3, 2016 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment March 3, 2016 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment Prototype before Google Here are a few homepages of today’s tech giants from their early days. The homepages serve as a poignant reminder of the fact that it’s better to launch as quickly as possible when you are in a good market, rather than honing the perfect look and design. If you cut across the technology industry, the whole idea of a “minimum love-able product” just doesn’t hold up to the backstories of the major players in the sector. Every major tech company below had quite humble beginnings, where they focused on learning, iterating, and building a viable business around a product idea. Once they knew they were viable, they went back and optimized product design. Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market. These homepages serve as a good reminder of what Field Marshall Helmuth Graf von Moltke said, “No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy”. You could easily argue that that the real test of a business is whether it survives its first major pivot. Yet in order to pivot using a Lean Startup approach, you gather data to confirm your intuitions. Also, if the founders had not explicitly formulated an experiment around their landing page, the below are not really landing page MVPs. They’re just homepages. To find out more about building your own landing page MVP experiment, check out Launch Tomorrow. Google Before Alphabet there was Google, and before Google there was…Backrub. This was a prototype of the search service that took over the online world. Initial days of Google! In the early days of Google, the designers would occasionally get an email from a strange fan containing just one number. That was it. Every few months or so, they got another one of these emails and they were confused why this oddball was emailing them numbers. Eventually, they realized that the email always came the day after the changed their main homepage design. The number referred to the number of characters visible on the main screen. Their email stalker was helping them stay true to their minimalist style. [image: Mark Chen] Twitter Paper prototype, basis for the homepage of Twitter This picture is from Jack Dorsey’s notebook, before the twitter guys actually put up their first version of their homepage. Paper prototypes are good sources of discussion, and they are useful for communicating the value proposition–which in Twitr’s case at the time was their biggest challenge. After all, who would even want to write 140 character long blog posts? [image:medium.com] keeping tabs on friends, good early days of Twitter! This early homepage stresses twitter’s function of serving as a way to keep tabs on friends. The value proposition was that you will know what others are doing. [image:onemonthrails.com] Amazon Consistently low prices and greater chances of availability of books at Amazon. Founder Jeff Bezos claimed, “one million titles, consistently low prices”–a claim physical bookstores couldn’t really make, as detailed in Launch Tomorrow. As a result, Amazon became the go-to place for consumers who were browsing slightly less popular books in the “long tail”, knowing that there would be a much greater chance that the book would be available. [image: Mark Chen] Facebook the first look! This is how Facebook looked, when Mark Zuckerburg decided to create an electronic form of the Freshman Facebook, arguably as a way to gain notoriety on campus at the time. Seems quite far from the billion dollar advertising juggernaut it is today. [image:waybackmachine.org] Here’s how the user profile looked after login [image:onemonthrails.com] Apple Who can believe this is Apple Computer? Yes the same Apple from today. While clearly not a landing page, as the Internet didn’t exist at the time, Steve Jobs and Woz arranged to sell 50 assembled computers to the Byte Shop (a computer store in Mountain View, California) at $500 each, despite not having the parts. To fulfill the $25,000 order, they obtained $20,000 in parts at 30 days net and delivered the finished product in 10 days. This was in a day when home computers were assembled from scratch by wide-eyed hobbyists. A classic pre-sell MVP lies at the beginning of the Apple empire. [image:Wikipedia.org] YouTube “Tune in Hook Up” to 100 million videos daily on myriad subjects Youtube had its roots as a dating site before focusing specifically on video. YouTube fizzled in an early version, namely a dating site called “Tune In Hook Up”. The founders later developed the current site, now broadcasting 100 million short videos daily on myriad subjects. [image:waybackmachine.org] PayPal Uniqueness of Idea that sending money to someone using their email address, we call it PayPal. Before Peter Thiel became “The Peter Thiel”, he ran around doing customer development trying to convince people to beam money between PalmPilots. Over infrared. It was only when they realized that people really latched on to the idea that sending money to someone using their email address, did they have a value proposition that actually worked. [image:waybackmachine.org] Yahoo First directory of links of the world wide web Yahoo was originally the first directory of links of the world wide web, before search engines even existed. The founders manually curated links and organized them into a tree structure to make them easy to find and use. [image:onemonthrails.com] AirBnB An idea that counts, renting mattresses opened way to progress. The idea for AirBnb came from the founders’ need to get cash for their other startup ideas. They offered to rent out an air mattress to ISDA conference (a design conference) attendees. When they found that surprisingly easy, they continued to do so, only to realize later…that this was their big idea. [image: YC/Jessica Livingston] And the takeaway is… Design remains quite important, particularly for consumer technology companies. But over-designing a product before proving demand exists is just an elaborate form of waste. Premature optimization, even. A minimum loveable product is a great idea. As a principle, I myself find it quite alluring to only show your absolute best to the world. From a business point of view in the tech sector, though, it may be a trap. So go figure out what you need to prove and write your first experiment! Grab my book Launch Tomorrow, and set up your first landing page! << Help Yo' Friends Empty pocket testing by Buffer March 2, 2016 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment March 2, 2016 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment Tweet or Posts on a social media at a pre-defined schedule The following are a number of Lean Startup validation case studies. Some will already be well known; some will be completely unknown. A lot of landing page testing has happened since The Lean Startup was being pieced together by Eric Reis. These are retrospective reconstructions of what happened using landing pages as vehicles for minimum viable products. For example, Buffer did empty pocket testing with a landing page before building their product. Just for your context, Buffer is a social media sharing tool, allowing you to publish tweets or social media posts on a pre-defined schedule. While you may have heard of some of the lean landing page case studies before, there is a lot of nuance in exactly what each test actually tested. They are typically not “traditional” A/B split tests, where they were testing whether a new variation of an ad or landing page beat the old one. Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market. In order to help make it more explicit, I’ve tried reformatting the experiments to be lightweight. Lean Startup experiments are generally not about testing the landing page or the product, but the business ideas they represent. Hypothesis: The target audience wants this product Test Type: Value hypothesis, confirm the problem exists and people want a “hands off” way to tweet Success Criteria: Emails gathered > 0 Traffic Source: Social media, word of mouth [image:Buffer] Result: Pass. A few people used it to give founder Joel Gascoigne their email. He used these to get some useful feedback and initiate a conversation with prospects. Step back: Potential users had left their email address at a random web page promising them help with this particular problem. This meant the idea itself was valuable, and there was potentially unmet demand for this particular idea. I would be careful to use only # of emails gathered as the primary metric in all cases. For a consumer facing product, this is probably good enough, assuming you have enough traffic. It would be better to also include some kind of a target number of sessions, to make sure that you have enough “attempts to convert” to make your metric meaningful. Hypothesis: The target audience is willing to pay for the product Test Type: Value hypothesis, confirm declared willingness to pay for “a way to automate their tweeting” Success Criteria: People would click-through the additional pricing page, and still leave their email. Traffic Source: Social media, word of mouth Pricing packages of this social media tool [image:Buffer] Result: Pass. People were still clicking through this additional step. Joel was able to gather useful information about the suggested pricing plans, in order to figure out pricing. Step back: Potential users weren’t put off by the blatant pitch, and still kept leaving an email address at the far end. What Joel hadn’t tested was whether people would actually buy; however, he was able to complete a functional prototype within seven weeks, and tested this hypothesis with a functional system. He actually got his first paying customer 4 days after the “rough-around-the-edges” product launch. I just wanted to thank Joel for contributing this fantastic case study to the Lean Startup community. It’s quite a well known one. As a result, I really wanted to cover it as an example of a line of thinking that’s worth following. Empty Pocket Testing At the core, the Buffer landing page MVP test was meant to address a major question for founders: will “they” buy it, if I create it? Before getting caught up in theoretical debates about what is and isn’t an MVP, Buffer just did an experiment. It just happened to be using a landing page to address a major risk factor for a new product business. In this particular case, checking for whether early adopters had the budget and were willing to spend it de-risked spending more time and money on the solution significantly. Even though they were asking theoretically, this helped to validate their sense that their target early adopters would be willing to pay. People are willing to pay out of their pockets for this tool. [image:Dan Moyle] If you’d like to see a number of case studies like the above, grab Launch Tomorrow. I’m updating it in an upcoming version with a lot of in-depth experiments that have been run. << Help Yo' Friends
Mapping customer development to stories on your landing page March 8, 2016 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment Riemer on Story Structure from Tara Loomis on Vimeo. << Help Yo' Friends
9 cringeworthy landing pages of multi-billion dollar tech giants March 3, 2016 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment March 3, 2016 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment Prototype before Google Here are a few homepages of today’s tech giants from their early days. The homepages serve as a poignant reminder of the fact that it’s better to launch as quickly as possible when you are in a good market, rather than honing the perfect look and design. If you cut across the technology industry, the whole idea of a “minimum love-able product” just doesn’t hold up to the backstories of the major players in the sector. Every major tech company below had quite humble beginnings, where they focused on learning, iterating, and building a viable business around a product idea. Once they knew they were viable, they went back and optimized product design. Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market. These homepages serve as a good reminder of what Field Marshall Helmuth Graf von Moltke said, “No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy”. You could easily argue that that the real test of a business is whether it survives its first major pivot. Yet in order to pivot using a Lean Startup approach, you gather data to confirm your intuitions. Also, if the founders had not explicitly formulated an experiment around their landing page, the below are not really landing page MVPs. They’re just homepages. To find out more about building your own landing page MVP experiment, check out Launch Tomorrow. Google Before Alphabet there was Google, and before Google there was…Backrub. This was a prototype of the search service that took over the online world. Initial days of Google! In the early days of Google, the designers would occasionally get an email from a strange fan containing just one number. That was it. Every few months or so, they got another one of these emails and they were confused why this oddball was emailing them numbers. Eventually, they realized that the email always came the day after the changed their main homepage design. The number referred to the number of characters visible on the main screen. Their email stalker was helping them stay true to their minimalist style. [image: Mark Chen] Twitter Paper prototype, basis for the homepage of Twitter This picture is from Jack Dorsey’s notebook, before the twitter guys actually put up their first version of their homepage. Paper prototypes are good sources of discussion, and they are useful for communicating the value proposition–which in Twitr’s case at the time was their biggest challenge. After all, who would even want to write 140 character long blog posts? [image:medium.com] keeping tabs on friends, good early days of Twitter! This early homepage stresses twitter’s function of serving as a way to keep tabs on friends. The value proposition was that you will know what others are doing. [image:onemonthrails.com] Amazon Consistently low prices and greater chances of availability of books at Amazon. Founder Jeff Bezos claimed, “one million titles, consistently low prices”–a claim physical bookstores couldn’t really make, as detailed in Launch Tomorrow. As a result, Amazon became the go-to place for consumers who were browsing slightly less popular books in the “long tail”, knowing that there would be a much greater chance that the book would be available. [image: Mark Chen] Facebook the first look! This is how Facebook looked, when Mark Zuckerburg decided to create an electronic form of the Freshman Facebook, arguably as a way to gain notoriety on campus at the time. Seems quite far from the billion dollar advertising juggernaut it is today. [image:waybackmachine.org] Here’s how the user profile looked after login [image:onemonthrails.com] Apple Who can believe this is Apple Computer? Yes the same Apple from today. While clearly not a landing page, as the Internet didn’t exist at the time, Steve Jobs and Woz arranged to sell 50 assembled computers to the Byte Shop (a computer store in Mountain View, California) at $500 each, despite not having the parts. To fulfill the $25,000 order, they obtained $20,000 in parts at 30 days net and delivered the finished product in 10 days. This was in a day when home computers were assembled from scratch by wide-eyed hobbyists. A classic pre-sell MVP lies at the beginning of the Apple empire. [image:Wikipedia.org] YouTube “Tune in Hook Up” to 100 million videos daily on myriad subjects Youtube had its roots as a dating site before focusing specifically on video. YouTube fizzled in an early version, namely a dating site called “Tune In Hook Up”. The founders later developed the current site, now broadcasting 100 million short videos daily on myriad subjects. [image:waybackmachine.org] PayPal Uniqueness of Idea that sending money to someone using their email address, we call it PayPal. Before Peter Thiel became “The Peter Thiel”, he ran around doing customer development trying to convince people to beam money between PalmPilots. Over infrared. It was only when they realized that people really latched on to the idea that sending money to someone using their email address, did they have a value proposition that actually worked. [image:waybackmachine.org] Yahoo First directory of links of the world wide web Yahoo was originally the first directory of links of the world wide web, before search engines even existed. The founders manually curated links and organized them into a tree structure to make them easy to find and use. [image:onemonthrails.com] AirBnB An idea that counts, renting mattresses opened way to progress. The idea for AirBnb came from the founders’ need to get cash for their other startup ideas. They offered to rent out an air mattress to ISDA conference (a design conference) attendees. When they found that surprisingly easy, they continued to do so, only to realize later…that this was their big idea. [image: YC/Jessica Livingston] And the takeaway is… Design remains quite important, particularly for consumer technology companies. But over-designing a product before proving demand exists is just an elaborate form of waste. Premature optimization, even. A minimum loveable product is a great idea. As a principle, I myself find it quite alluring to only show your absolute best to the world. From a business point of view in the tech sector, though, it may be a trap. So go figure out what you need to prove and write your first experiment! Grab my book Launch Tomorrow, and set up your first landing page! << Help Yo' Friends Empty pocket testing by Buffer March 2, 2016 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment March 2, 2016 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment Tweet or Posts on a social media at a pre-defined schedule The following are a number of Lean Startup validation case studies. Some will already be well known; some will be completely unknown. A lot of landing page testing has happened since The Lean Startup was being pieced together by Eric Reis. These are retrospective reconstructions of what happened using landing pages as vehicles for minimum viable products. For example, Buffer did empty pocket testing with a landing page before building their product. Just for your context, Buffer is a social media sharing tool, allowing you to publish tweets or social media posts on a pre-defined schedule. While you may have heard of some of the lean landing page case studies before, there is a lot of nuance in exactly what each test actually tested. They are typically not “traditional” A/B split tests, where they were testing whether a new variation of an ad or landing page beat the old one. Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market. In order to help make it more explicit, I’ve tried reformatting the experiments to be lightweight. Lean Startup experiments are generally not about testing the landing page or the product, but the business ideas they represent. Hypothesis: The target audience wants this product Test Type: Value hypothesis, confirm the problem exists and people want a “hands off” way to tweet Success Criteria: Emails gathered > 0 Traffic Source: Social media, word of mouth [image:Buffer] Result: Pass. A few people used it to give founder Joel Gascoigne their email. He used these to get some useful feedback and initiate a conversation with prospects. Step back: Potential users had left their email address at a random web page promising them help with this particular problem. This meant the idea itself was valuable, and there was potentially unmet demand for this particular idea. I would be careful to use only # of emails gathered as the primary metric in all cases. For a consumer facing product, this is probably good enough, assuming you have enough traffic. It would be better to also include some kind of a target number of sessions, to make sure that you have enough “attempts to convert” to make your metric meaningful. Hypothesis: The target audience is willing to pay for the product Test Type: Value hypothesis, confirm declared willingness to pay for “a way to automate their tweeting” Success Criteria: People would click-through the additional pricing page, and still leave their email. Traffic Source: Social media, word of mouth Pricing packages of this social media tool [image:Buffer] Result: Pass. People were still clicking through this additional step. Joel was able to gather useful information about the suggested pricing plans, in order to figure out pricing. Step back: Potential users weren’t put off by the blatant pitch, and still kept leaving an email address at the far end. What Joel hadn’t tested was whether people would actually buy; however, he was able to complete a functional prototype within seven weeks, and tested this hypothesis with a functional system. He actually got his first paying customer 4 days after the “rough-around-the-edges” product launch. I just wanted to thank Joel for contributing this fantastic case study to the Lean Startup community. It’s quite a well known one. As a result, I really wanted to cover it as an example of a line of thinking that’s worth following. Empty Pocket Testing At the core, the Buffer landing page MVP test was meant to address a major question for founders: will “they” buy it, if I create it? Before getting caught up in theoretical debates about what is and isn’t an MVP, Buffer just did an experiment. It just happened to be using a landing page to address a major risk factor for a new product business. In this particular case, checking for whether early adopters had the budget and were willing to spend it de-risked spending more time and money on the solution significantly. Even though they were asking theoretically, this helped to validate their sense that their target early adopters would be willing to pay. People are willing to pay out of their pockets for this tool. [image:Dan Moyle] If you’d like to see a number of case studies like the above, grab Launch Tomorrow. I’m updating it in an upcoming version with a lot of in-depth experiments that have been run. << Help Yo' Friends
Empty pocket testing by Buffer March 2, 2016 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment March 2, 2016 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment Tweet or Posts on a social media at a pre-defined schedule The following are a number of Lean Startup validation case studies. Some will already be well known; some will be completely unknown. A lot of landing page testing has happened since The Lean Startup was being pieced together by Eric Reis. These are retrospective reconstructions of what happened using landing pages as vehicles for minimum viable products. For example, Buffer did empty pocket testing with a landing page before building their product. Just for your context, Buffer is a social media sharing tool, allowing you to publish tweets or social media posts on a pre-defined schedule. While you may have heard of some of the lean landing page case studies before, there is a lot of nuance in exactly what each test actually tested. They are typically not “traditional” A/B split tests, where they were testing whether a new variation of an ad or landing page beat the old one. Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market. In order to help make it more explicit, I’ve tried reformatting the experiments to be lightweight. Lean Startup experiments are generally not about testing the landing page or the product, but the business ideas they represent. Hypothesis: The target audience wants this product Test Type: Value hypothesis, confirm the problem exists and people want a “hands off” way to tweet Success Criteria: Emails gathered > 0 Traffic Source: Social media, word of mouth [image:Buffer] Result: Pass. A few people used it to give founder Joel Gascoigne their email. He used these to get some useful feedback and initiate a conversation with prospects. Step back: Potential users had left their email address at a random web page promising them help with this particular problem. This meant the idea itself was valuable, and there was potentially unmet demand for this particular idea. I would be careful to use only # of emails gathered as the primary metric in all cases. For a consumer facing product, this is probably good enough, assuming you have enough traffic. It would be better to also include some kind of a target number of sessions, to make sure that you have enough “attempts to convert” to make your metric meaningful. Hypothesis: The target audience is willing to pay for the product Test Type: Value hypothesis, confirm declared willingness to pay for “a way to automate their tweeting” Success Criteria: People would click-through the additional pricing page, and still leave their email. Traffic Source: Social media, word of mouth Pricing packages of this social media tool [image:Buffer] Result: Pass. People were still clicking through this additional step. Joel was able to gather useful information about the suggested pricing plans, in order to figure out pricing. Step back: Potential users weren’t put off by the blatant pitch, and still kept leaving an email address at the far end. What Joel hadn’t tested was whether people would actually buy; however, he was able to complete a functional prototype within seven weeks, and tested this hypothesis with a functional system. He actually got his first paying customer 4 days after the “rough-around-the-edges” product launch. I just wanted to thank Joel for contributing this fantastic case study to the Lean Startup community. It’s quite a well known one. As a result, I really wanted to cover it as an example of a line of thinking that’s worth following. Empty Pocket Testing At the core, the Buffer landing page MVP test was meant to address a major question for founders: will “they” buy it, if I create it? Before getting caught up in theoretical debates about what is and isn’t an MVP, Buffer just did an experiment. It just happened to be using a landing page to address a major risk factor for a new product business. In this particular case, checking for whether early adopters had the budget and were willing to spend it de-risked spending more time and money on the solution significantly. Even though they were asking theoretically, this helped to validate their sense that their target early adopters would be willing to pay. People are willing to pay out of their pockets for this tool. [image:Dan Moyle] If you’d like to see a number of case studies like the above, grab Launch Tomorrow. I’m updating it in an upcoming version with a lot of in-depth experiments that have been run. << Help Yo' Friends
