How to get traction/usage for your product
oguz.me
oguz.me
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]
“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.
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.
(1) Rockstart Accelerator - http://rockstart.com/accelerator/ (2) oguz@limk.com / Skype: fcbosa
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?
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..
To get to know better about Limk, please take a look at here: https://angel.co/limk, or watch the reveal video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3lw-H6liLY
I've already segmented the users we got from Hackernews today to reach them later on, but all these feedbacks were actually quite useful.
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.
Anyways, good feedback here, and thanks again.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
Ping me: oguz@limk.com
This works very well and has a long term impact. Plus it improves your search rankings.
How specifically are you segmenting out new users by Twitter follower / Klout score and then firing actions to those segments?
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.