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By Patrick Vlaskovits, March 4, 2010 5:29 pm

I attended the most recent Startup2Startup event and after the presentation, the discussion turned to how one might define Product-Market Fit and what might serve as a proxy for Product-Market Fit, given various types of business models.

The Sean Ellis 40% rule-of-thumb was quickly invoked as were other ideas.  However, I thought it worthwhile to share one insight that came from an experienced start-up entrepreneur at the table.  While we were talking about triangulating on the various signals available to an entrepreneur as to what constitutes Product-Market Fit, he recounted a story — really an accidental natural experiment — on how he unequivocally learned his start-up hadn’t achieved Product-Market Fit.

To wit, his site had gone down for a few hours, and he hadn’t known about it.  In the interim, there had been nothing but silence.  None of his users had squawked or had made it publicly known that the site was down and they were angry/frustrated/furious/going to switch providers/fed-up-with-this etc., etc.

This lack of frustration/noise is a data-point.  In this case, it meant his start-up had a ways to go on iterating to finding Product-Market Fit.

As a contrast, we might choose to look at what happens when Twitter goes down.

So, for the more intrepid of you out there, perhaps try “accidentally unplugging” your servers and see what happens.  (Clearly, this has significant risks such as alienating users, but it may be a useful signal to know when you don’ t have Product-Market Fit, if you were wondering.)

BTW, I believe Dave McClure has advocated a very similar idea with regard to features.  If I recall correctly, he suggests removing features from a web app and waiting to hear if users complain loudly.  The intensity of the complaint is likely correlated with the usefulness of the feature.

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By Patrick Vlaskovits, January 3, 2010 9:12 am

Success and Cognitive Bias

One thing that often strikes me about conversations regarding start-up success is the pervasiveness of the narrative fallacy and hindsight bias.

We can go to Wikipedia’s entry on Taleb for a definition:

Narrative fallacy: creating a story post-hoc so that an event will seem to have an identifiable cause.

Allow me to illustrate.  What caused YouTube to grow at phenomenal rates in 2005/2006, eventually leading to a $1.65 billion acquisition by Google in 2006?

Was the cause:
Continue reading 'Cognitive Biases, Positive Black Swan Events and Startups'»

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By Patrick Vlaskovits, December 22, 2009 10:38 am

Hi everyone!

Thank you for your participation in the survey, especially if you were kind enough to tweet about it.  (While the raffle is over, if you haven’t responded, the survey is still open.) The purpose of the survey was two-fold.

First, we thought it would be interesting to see a little detail about who is involved with Customer Development. You can see those results here.

While the survey results add a bit of color to who is implementing Customer Development methodologies or thinking about doing Customer Development, I wouldn’t draw any hard conclusions from the data.  BTW for the those who read 4 Steps to the Epiphany, n ≈ 33.  For those who didn’t read 4 Steps to the Epiphany, n ≈ 28.

Second, we are thinking about tools, templates, and other resources to help people understand and implement Customer Development in their business ventures. Stay tuned, for in the coming months, we plan to make some of these resources available to you.

Almost forgot!  Our two winners of the random raffle are: Dave Concannon and Kevin Donaldson.

Thanks again to everyone.  Happy holidays!

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By Patrick Vlaskovits, December 15, 2009 1:27 pm

Note: One of the more difficult aspects of customer development is understanding when to listen to customers/prospects and when not to. When should you rely on intuition and when is the customer right, if not always? Steve Blank’s oft quoted clarion call to “get out of the building” demands that you listen to customers, but not that you necessarily heed what they say! You may have the wrong customer for your business. You may have the right customer who emphasizes the wrong root cause to a problem. As I tweeted the other day:

maybe your product focus should be what your current customers don’t ask for or what your lost customers wanted.

I invited “CustDevGuy,” author of the “Fake Screenshot/LOI” customer development case study, to write up a continuation of that story, which illustrates an easy trap to fall into when interacting with potential customers. Here’s his story:

——————————————————–

Hi there.

This guest-post is a follow-up to my original Case Study posted at the Lean Startup Circle.  (Thanks Brant for lending me your digital soapbox.)  I wanted to further flesh out an important insight that came out of conversations about my ongoing Customer Development experiences as well as address a common fallacy that keeps popping up in conversations and email threads with regards to what Customer Development is and isn’t.  The fallacy being that customers will simply hand over the Holy Grail (read: Product/Market Fit) if you go and chat a bit with them.
Continue reading 'Seller Beware: Customers Have Their Own Agenda'»