Quotes About Customers

At any time, the company could invest its energy in finding new customers, servicing existing customers better, improving overall quality, or driving down costs. In

Build-Measure-Learn. The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop.

The irony is that it is often easier to raise money or acquire other resources when you have zero revenue, zero customers, and zero traction than when you have a small amount. Zero invites imagination, but small numbers invite questions about whether large numbers will ever materialize.

Wealthy consumers cost more to reach because they tend to become more profitable customers.

As was mentioned earlier, this is not the way the Lean Startup model works, because customers often don't know what they want. Our goal in building products is to be able to run experiments that will help us learn how to build a sustainable business. Thus, the right way to think about the product development process in a Lean Startup is that it is responding to pull requests in the form of experiments that need to be run.

All this time, David was learning and gaining feedback from his potential customers, but he was in an unsustainable situation. You can't pay staff with what you've learned,

Yet if the fundamental goal of entrepreneurship is to engage in organization building under conditions of extreme uncertainty, its most vital function is learning. We must learn the truth about which elements of our strategy are working to realize our vision and which are just crazy. We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want. We must discover whether we are on a path that will lead to growing a sustainable business.

lazy registration is considered one of the design best practices for online services. In this system, customers do not have to register for the service up front. Instead, they immediately begin using the service and are asked to register only after they have had a chance to experience the service's benefit.

There were three differences in year three: • Teams were involved in creating new technologies, processes, and systems. • Cross-functional teams were formed around new great ideas. • Customers were involved from the inception of each feature concept.

For example, in one early experiment, we changed our entire website, home page, and product registration flow to replace "avatar chat" with "3D instant messaging." New customers were split automatically between these two versions of the site; half saw one, and half saw the other. We were able to measure the difference in behavior between the two groups.

Yes, MVPs sometimes are perceived as low-quality by customers. If so, we should use this as an opportunity to learn what attributes customers care about. This is infinitely better than mere speculation or whiteboard strategizing, because it provides a solid empirical foundation on which to build future products.

methodology Customer Development,

It's also important that the word innovation be understood broadly. Startups use many kinds of innovation: novel scientific discoveries, repurposing an existing technology for a new use, devising a new business model that unlocks value that was hidden, or simply bringing a product or service to a new location or a previously underserved set of customers. In all these cases, innovation is at the heart of the company's success.

The rate of growth depends primarily on three things: the profitability of each customer, the cost of acquiring new customers, and the repeat purchase rate of existing customers. The higher these values are, the faster the company will grow and the more profitable it will be. These are the drivers of the company's growth model.

Most tools from general management are not designed to flourish in the harsh soil of extreme uncertainty in which startups thrive. The future is unpredictable, customers face a growing array of alternatives, and the pace of change is ever increasing. Yet most startups—in garages and enterprises alike—still are managed by using standard forecasts, product milestones, and detailed business plans.

As startups grow, entrepreneurs can build organizations that learn how to balance the needs of existing customers with the challenges of finding new customers to serve, managing existing lines of business, and exploring new business models—all at the same time. And,

The viral coefficient measures how many new customers will use a product as a consequence of each new customer who signs up. Put

We really did have customers in those early days—true visionary early adopters—and we often talked to them and asked for their feedback. But we emphatically did not do what they said. We viewed their input as only one source of information about our product and overall vision. In fact, we were much more likely to run experiments on our customers than we were to cater to their whims.

This is the kind of storytelling that takes place at most startup board meetings. Most milestones are built the same way: hit a certain product milestone, maybe talk to a few customers, and see if the numbers go up. Unfortunately, this is not a good indicator of whether a startup is making progress. How do we know that the changes we've made are related to the results we're seeing? More important, how do we know that we are drawing the right lessons from those changes?

Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn't matter much if they do it on time and on budget. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build—the thing customers want and will pay for—as quickly as possible.

I've come to believe that learning is the essential unit of progress for startups. The effort that is not absolutely necessary for learning what customers want can be eliminated. I call this validated learning because it is always demonstrated by positive improvements in the startup's core metrics.

To demonstrate validated learning, the design changes must improve the activation rate of new customers. If they do not, the new design should be judged a failure.

The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop.

Startups use many kinds of innovation: novel scientific discoveries, repurposing an existing technology for a new use, devising a new business model that unlocks value that was hidden, or simply bringing a product or service to a new location or a previously underserved set of customers.