Running Lean

The Concierge MVP

recommend defining your customer factory steps this way: Acquisition: Number of new leads (prospects) Activation: Number of demo calls booked Retention: Number of follow-ups post-demo (complex sale) Revenue: Number of people that accepted the offer Referrals: Number of leads that came through referrals

A good rule of thumb for prioritizing focus on optimizing your happy customer loop is implementing an 80/20 rule (Figure 13-4). This rule says that most of your time immediately after launch (80%) should be spent measuring and improving existing features, rather than chasing after new shiny features.

By the end of this first stage, you specifically need to: Have a clear understanding of your customers’ needs (and wants) Know the smallest thing you need to build to deliver value to your customers (your MVP) Have secured sufficient tangible commitments (e.g., advance payments, letters of intent) from customers

For the reasons I’ve already covered, avoid asking your customers about problems. You’ll often end up with only descriptions of surface problems, or the wrong list of problems. Instead, have your customers focus on how they use existing alternatives and look for points of friction. For example, if you had asked people about problems with taxis 15 y

Demand-Side Sales by Bob Moesta (Lioncrest)

It’s much more practical to set your target goal based on a shorter horizon rather than a longer horizon—think minimum success criteria (MSC) versus maximum upside potential. If, for instance, you had asked the founders of Airbnb, Google, or Facebook when they were first starting out whether they thought they would go on to build billion-dollar com

All business models have customers, and so it follows that traction metrics need to be customer-centric.

The key to crafting an effective UVP is connecting it to the number one problem you are solving for your customers. If that problem is indeed worth solving for them, you’re more than halfway there already.

When confronted with a business model that fails your viability test, there are only two possible solutions: review your goal or fix your business model. Since no one enjoys revising their goal downward, we’ll leave that as a last resort. Let’s first consider possible ways to fix your business model.