Lean
What to read, use, and learn to achieve product/market fit
Peter Brand: It’s about getting things down to one number. Using the stats the way we read them, we’ll find value in players that no one else can see. People are overlooked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws. Age, appearance, personality. Bill James and mathematics cut straight through that. Billy, of the 20,000 notable players for us to consider, I believe that there is a championship team of twenty-five people that we can afford, because everyone else in baseball undervalues them.
Moneyball
The Lean Startup is a great place to start for founders and entrepreneurs trying to understand how to build something with the least resources possible. In the Lean Startup series, Eric Ries has curated some other great works: Lean Analytics and Lean UX (User Experience). As discussed in Raise, a lean startup focuses on achieving product/market fit for the least amount of resources possible. [1] Marc Andreesen, who wrote for years under his twitter handle @pmarca, helped popularize the term product/market fit for the latest generation of startup founders, so before we dive into why it’s so important to achieve, let’s understand what it is. Marc, of course, was summarizing terms first published by Steve Blank, author of the guide “Four Steps to the Epiphany,” a must read for founders, designers, and product leaders. [2] The post is so good, you really should read the whole thing, but what follows is an excerpt that calls attention to the critical importance of product/market fit.
When you are BPMF, focus obsessively on getting to product/market fit.
Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don’t want to, telling customers yes when you don’t want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital — whatever is required.
When you get right down to it, you can ignore almost everything else.
I’m not suggesting that you do ignore everything else — just that judging from what I’ve seen in successful startups, you can.
Whenever you see a successful startup, you see one that has reached product/market fit — and usually along the way screwed up all kinds of other things, from channel model to pipeline development strategy to marketing plan to press relations to compensation policies to the CEO sleeping with the venture capitalist. And the startup is still successful.
Conversely, you see a surprising number of really well-run startups that have all aspects of operations completely buttoned down, HR policies in place, great sales model, thoroughly thought-through marketing plan, great interview processes, outstanding catered food, 30" monitors for all the programmers, top tier VCs on the board — heading straight off a cliff due to not ever finding product/market fit.
Sean Ellis of Growth Hackers, who led early marketing efforts at Xobni, Dropbox, and other companies, shared this resources from his Startup Pyramid blog.
There are a number of tools that can help you understand how your product is doing; Lean UX and Lean analytics go into depth on this.
1. survey.io to gain insights into customer development. It’ll help you determine your net promoter score, which is a useful metric that all companies, big and small, use in order to achieve product/market fit.[3] The key metric is over 40% of your users saying they would be “very disappointed” without your product.
2. the five-person feedback method to gain insights into the problems eighty percent of users will face with your user experience. [4]
3. watchsend is a qualitative tool to see how people are using your app or service. Watchsend records video of your users interacting with your app. This is an invaluable tool for product designers and founders to understand how customers actually use their service or mobile application.
4. a tool like usabilityhub allows you to get productfeedback on your design and what customers may think about it before you launch.
If you’re building for mobile, you can also consider tips for rapid mobile app development, such as building and testing on Android without the restrictions that iOS and Apple’s app store have, or getting the product out to some users.
These are just a few tools that can help you understand your customers. Corporations may not be people, but you do need to have empathy for the people you profess to love, and empathy is created through solidarity, and solidarity is created by spending time with your customers, asking them questions, and learning from them.
Don’t skip out on this.
[1] If you are a student of the “Lean Startup”methodology, you would be familiar with the term “Minimum Viable Product.” Put simply, it’s the smallest version of an idea or product you need in order to be successful. Tim Ferris did it with a landing page and adwords, [1] Paul Graham calls it “release early, release often,” Drew Houston made a video; the idea is to build a sustainable business, and if you’re raising capital, the best time to raise is “when you can” and not “when you need it,” because likely, by the time that you need it, you won’t be able to in time.
[2] In his book, Steve outlines four stages to the customer development process as iteration loops with the following success end goals:
- Customer Discovery — Achieve Problem/Solution Fit
- Customer Validation — Achieve Product/Market Fit
- Customer Creation — Drive Demand
- Company Building — Scale the Company
[3] According to Sean Ellis, for startups, this survey is an ideal way for you to determine if you should begin the final preparations before aggressively scaling customer acquisition. The most important question for determining how well your product is resonating with early users is question 2:
How would you feel if you could no longer use [product]?
- Very disappointed
- Somewhat disappointed
- Not disappointed (it isn’t really that useful)
- N/A — I no longer use [product]
If however, you find that over 40% of your users are saying that they would be “very disappointed” without your product, there is a great chance you can build a successful business on this “must have” product. This is the time to reallocate some development resources to optimizing your funnel and messaging as described in this blog post on the Startup Pyramid.
[4] Read these other great posts by Jakob Nielsen
As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again. There is no real need to keep observing the same thing multiple times, and you will be very motivated to go back to the drawing board and redesign the site to eliminate the usability problems.
After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new.
