(2011-07-25) Hurricane Party Transitioning To Lean

Hurricane Party switched to a Lean Startup process to Pivot to their new Fore Cast tool.

• original product was for creating/sharing "parties" on the fly
• did big Product Launch work at SXSW, but lacked real strategy for what their goals were
• found almost nobody ever created more than 1 party
• "Why are non-party people making a party app?"
• Key assumption to challenge: "People are spontaneous" (e.g. don't have weekend plans set in advance)
• Used Beluga to test concept internally before building anything.
• Did ~15 Problem Interview-s, collecting data in GoogleDocs spreadsheet.
  • had 3 related problems, no clear winner/loser for primary problem
• for Solution Interview-s had customers click through Balsamiq Mockups
• did A-B Test to confirm users wanted multi-checkins. Though actual longer-running behavior data didn't show all that much usage(?)
• possibly too much time in closed-beta process (~60 users)? Too much refining/optimizing from bogus sample?
• now
  • using Gecko Board to display AARRR metrics
  • using Continuous Integration to deploy 3/day (Continuous Delivery)
  • capture Viral Loop details - user-specific stats through the funnel. Need to calculate Viral Coefficient
  • FourSquare seems to be letting them scrape friends' email data

People attending the talk gave strong push-back on whether they have any Unfair Advantage: esp vs FourSquare, Google (Google Calendar, Google Plus), FaceBook, PlanCast.