Hiten Shah

creator of KissMetrics

Lean Startup poster-boy

Jul25'2011 talk

lots of failures
MVP: focus on testing assumption
daily.io
- daily site stats email
- put up Mini Sales Site
  - no dev
  - just a pitch (Splash Page), no screenshot or other specifics
- put up survey
- 50% said they only use free tools
  - killed this idea
KissMetrics
- took 3iterations (aka 2 Pivot-s) to get right
- first dashboard iteration
  - aiming for Social Application Developer persona
  - took 6 months
  - learnings
    - people want customized reports
    - SADs don't like to pay
      - so going to target "everyone"
- 2nd iteration
  - took 9 months (6 to build, 3 to run/test)
  - learned
    - people don't know what to measure
      - so customization is barrier
    - not all customers are profitable
    - customizability requires hand-holding
  - new target: marketers
    - focus on actionable metrics
    - want to improve conversion
    - willing to pay if it gets results
- 3rd iteration
  - took 1 month
    - they set that as constraint/requirement
    - initially focused on developers - background tool
KissInsights
- their new product, building with new process.... (see also Lean Canvas)
- start with problem hypothesis
  - (x) kind of people people have problem doing (y)
- wanted to learn
  - what doing now?
  - what are other tools leaving on the table
  - who is involved
  - how frequent/severe is the pain
- learning process: 3wks
  - 20 phone interviews
  - 3 in-person interviews with paper prototypes
  - 2 landing pages
  - few hours to build MVP
  - built a little more, tested with 8 alpha testers
- learned
  - people aren't doing customer research
  - they want private feedback
    - not like User Voice
  - need easy-to-understand reporting
- status
  - profitable, still running
  - but still mainly focused on KissMetrics
  - Jun'2012 update: bought by Sean Ellis' group
process learnings
- your customers have the answers
  - cold-call prospects to interview
  - start out focusing on the problem, not your product (see this and this)
  - Solution Selling book ISBN:978-0-786-30315-1 or ISBN:978-0-071-43539-0
  - What Customers Want book ISBN:0071408673
  - http://cindyAlvarez.com - their person, blogs on this a lot
- get everyone dealing with customers/market
  - gives them context
  - even if they're just listening in when you do interviews
- metrics
  - actionable: learn, make decisions
    - focus on funnel rates - AARRR
- 2 teams
  - Problem team
    - what are the most important problems to solve?
  - Solution team (engineers)
    - find the MVP for a given problem
  - loop as fast as possible
- the only path to perfection is iteration

Edited: 2012-06-18 00:00:00 | Tweet this! | Search Twitter for discussion

Bill Seitz