Running Lean

At any given point, there are only a few key actions that stand to have the biggest impact on your business model. Your job is to focus on those key actions and ignore the rest. This is the essence of the right action, right time mindset.

Defining a UVP forces you to answer the question: why is your product different and worth paying attention to?

Reduce scope to the first 90 days of usage An effective way of limiting scope is only building for the first 90 days of usage. Three months is typically enough time for a customer to make a hire or fire decision on any product. Look for other opportunities to defer non-core features to later.

Here’s a much better version: Writing a blog post will drive >100 sign-ups. Now you have a way of running this experiment and clearly measuring whether it passes or fails. Remember that this 100 sign-ups number isn’t simply pulled out of thin air—it needs to be derived from your traction roadmap and customer factory model. The

Use your referral assumptions to lessen the burden of customer acquisition The referral loop in the customer factory utilizes existing customers to grow your business model, thereby lessening the burden of customer acquisition. Start by estimating a reasonable customer referral rate for your type of product.

Consider a different customer segment You can find every product from bottled water to cars offered on a wide spectrum of prices. The type of customer who buys a $25,000 car is very different from one who buys a $250,000 car. Pricing is not only a part of your product, it defines your customer segment.

The roadster was a high-price, low-volume car. They only sold 500 cars a year for a few years and then stopped production.”

Continuous Innovation,

you can describe your customers’ problems better than they can, there is an automatic transfer of expertise—your customers start believing that you must also have the right solution for them. Marketer Jay Abraham calls this phenomenon the “Strategy of Preeminence.”