3. Me
• Boeing Engineer
• 7 years writing code
• Learned Japanese
manufacturing concepts Marketing Growth Development
Hacking
• Product Management
• Customer acquisition products
• A/B testing
4. Distribution
• Startups need technology,
product, and distribution
• Many fail on distribution
• Myth:
If you build it, they will come
• Fact:
The best distribution won
5. Unicorns & Viral Supernovas
• Most products do not have
a target market of everyone
• Nuclear chain reactions &
explosive virality are difficult to
achieve without concentration
• Virality should not be THE plan
6. Learn to Fail
• Most ideas will not work
• Don’t invest too much in
any one idea – no epic fails
• Planned failure - fast, cheap
7. Change – The Only Constant
Birth and death timeline instead?
• New media, channels, and platforms
come and go quickly
• Social, mobile, tablet, Pinterest, Groupon
• AOL, Yahoo, MySpace, Display, Palm Pre,
BlackBerry, Meebo, hotmail, del.icio.us . . .
• Tech know how and flexibility needed
to apply new sources, data, API’s
8. The Only Charts You Need
Acquisition Exponential Cohort Curves
Lifetime Value ($)
Customers
Month Months as Customer
9. The Growth Machine
• Test quick, cheap, and dirty
• Released vs polished
• Front end flexibility
• Standardize reporting
• Measure LTV
• Conversion is not good enough
• Model it from twitchy data
10. Feedback Loops
• Acquisition exponential
• Eyeballs
• Conversion Funnel
• Never stop what is working,
be incremental & relentless
11. Kanban Team
• Prioritize releasing
• Cadence - 2 / person week
• Drop things that don’t work
• Put more into things that do
• 2 Backlogs
• New eyeballs to product
• Conversion A/B testing
12. How much should I spend?
• 12 month break even Allowable
• Conservative
Lifetime Value ($)
• Estimating is ok
• Virality
• Model LTV for each channel or
even campaign
Months as Customer
13. A/B Testing - A Practical Guide
• Hypothesis Testing Equation
• Myth: A vs B, best one wins
• Reality: Look at distribution,
segmentation, learn about the
market, and dream up C
• Conversion = Desire - Friction
14. Desire
• Behavioral design: Read
Cialdini, Dan Ariely, Nir Ayal
• Examples
• Headlines
• An authentic solution
• Ask customer what they want
15. Friction
• UX testing useful for friction
• Minimize ambiguity through
good design
• Speed
• Call to action - placement,
color, shape
• Grouping, contrast, IA
16. Product as Designer Drug
• Get your market hooked
• Their fix = problem solved
• Eliminate all friction
• Test conversion to “fix”
• Qualitative methods
17. Cohorts
• Do not A/B test your core Test impact on LTV
repeat usage product
• UX testing to show problems
Lifetime Value ($)
• Offer beta - to a subpop
• Test newsletters, cross-sell/up-
sell messaging, tutorials, first
time user flows, etc
• Find twitchy measures of Months as Customer
success