The Lean Entrepreneur: How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets

“We put those people in a segment bucket. If they have gone through the download process and have been touched by the sales team more than two separate times—you know what? They love us, they love our content, but for whatever reason they are just not going to purchase, but we want them. We actually communicate with them more. We’ve found that those folks tend to be the ones most likely to share our content.”

At the idea stage, through interacting with customers and running experiments, you validate that you have the right customer profiles and understand the problems they face.
At the MVP stage, you iterate on the product, run experiments on functionality, perform usability testing, and try to nail the core value proposition for the market segment. You continue to interact with customers to test that you are building the right product, learning more about their problems and learning how you will market, sell, and deliver your value to them.
Product-market fit is a continuation of experimenting and growing the product to find early mainstream passion and to establish the correct positioning and messaging.
In the customer acquisition stage, you’re validating the conversion funnel, testing acquisition channels, and measuring return to ensure you have a functioning business model.
The final stage to scale is learning how to get out of the way. To scale, organizations must adapt. They must learn how to execute efficiently, while continuously learning and continuously improving.
But, of course, the devil is in the details.

Talk to entrepreneurs tackling a consumer problem and they’ll tell you how much easier lean is in business-to-business. Talk to business-to-business (B2B) and you’ll hear the opposite. Talk to business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) and you witness virtual self-immolation.

when you’re into the learning phase, use as many third-party technologies as you can, even if that third-party technology is going to be a core part of what you’re doing because what you’re trying to prove is whether the overall product offering you’ve built is attractive to the customer base and whether customers are willing to pay.

There are lots of excuses for not doing lean startup, but the remedy boils down to the same idea: “Launch product based on what’s between our ears.”

We’ve done all the paperwork on values, and such, but nothing comes out of it until you actually start essentially living the values and people start learning from what you are doing and I think that’s the biggest thing.

The real reason entrepreneurs don’t want to do lean startup is that it’s hard. Don’t talk to customers; it’s hard. Don’t involve customers in design; it’s hard. Don’t analyze data for actionable metrics; I’ll have to hire a business intelligence team. Don’t run experiments; it will take away engineering resources.

I think the confusing part, when you’re doing B2B with a field sales team, is filtering the noise from the signal, because you have people whose main job is to be out of the building, but their incentives might not be aligned with what’s right for the company. You then have to really understand what you need to build that will help you learn versus what you need to build just to close a deal.

So the biggest learning that we had, I think, was recognizing that one, the primary customer in the media space is actually 21-, 22-year-old new college grads who control millions of dollars in advertising budget. They’re the ones who, in the end, say yea or nay to working with your company. Oddly, or not surprisingly, they aren’t exactly motivated by what’s best for their brands, what’s best for their agency. They’re sometimes motivated by who gives the best drinks, who throws the best parties, who is the most fun to talk to and hang out with.

But when you have the mainstream acting the same way as an early evangelist, that’s product-market fit.