NOTE: These recaps are a bit more for me than you. I’ll skip over stuff, include asides that are more personal notes to me, etc. Your mileage may vary.

Speaker: Hiten Shah

Start

  • Find the pain.
  • Pain + Product = Fit
  • Personal pain: Hitting your head against the wall
  • Lean startup: A lot of miscommunication. Lean != cheap or less money. But very good way to find pain
  • Customer Development: Don’t tell people, get stories out of people
  • Sales Safari: Go online, find what pain people have. Sometimes you only have find pain expressed digitally
  • Jobs to be done (switch method): People are hiring your software to do a job. Identify via situational analysis. What situation in when hiring your product.
  • Charge people early. To verify if there is pain
  • Size does matter: the market size is important. If you can’t get customers to come to you, you might have to invest in sales staff. Note: 3-6 month ramp up for sales staff. Why so slow? What can be made to get them to quota faster. Are stats similar with recruiters? I’m guessing so.

Scale

  • A million things to do
  • System + Optimization = Repeatable. Get to repeatable as soon as possible
  • Can’t drive blindly: Don’t ignore data, use it to inform direction. What gets measured, gets managed
  • Optimize for learning: Why did you make more money this month?
  • You are a reflection of your company. What you say. Who you are. How you treat others.

Grow

  • Don’t limit your growth.
  • Traffic + Iteration = Growth: Phase focuses on traffic. When you focus on the top of the funnel, everything below it gets better. AB testing goes faster. Traffic = grow word of mouth, content, ads
  • Growth comes from obsessing about your customers
  • Time is your scarcest resource. The one thing you always have against you. Don’t do things worth doing.
  • Continuously make improvements.

Q&A

  • Pricing: If you tier, focus on how your customer buys. What do they currently buy? How do they buy? “Strategies of pricing and tactics”, really think book kinda expensive. Most thorough read on pricing. People get scared about changing pricing on their customers. Don’t be scared.
  • How to start measuring/what to measure: If you’re not logging things transactional, start doing so. Every log in of a user, for instance. What is the one system that’s the most important system you need to make repeatable, measure that first.
  • How to focus on most ideal customer: google problem hypothesis. Be very specific in hypothesis.
  • Charging early for enterprise: Even more important.
  • Don’t go heavy on quantitative metrics early on. More talking to people and finding the pain. What problem do they have? Do I hit a nerve, is there a pattern in the conversation. No sense measuring if you have a product that doesn’t matter.