If you missed last Monday night’s meet up with Ryan Hatch of Dynamis talking about lean startup principles and how you apply them to your business you definitely missed out.
Ryan talked about his 4 to 5 years of failure and how it taught him to develop customers first rather than a product. This flips the traditional business and growth model on its head by focusing on what your customers want first, then build your scalable business around that.
In addition to flipping the traditional business model on its head, lean startup principals also flip customer acquisition and development on their head as well. As a lean startup you have to be creative and use all different kinds of tests to validate your idea to a point where you can scale it.
When the site first came out Zappos was processing orders manually so that when a customer placed an order, they first purchased the order items from their distributor and then ship them out to the customer.
Another great example of putting customer development first would be the success of Dropbox’s landing page and video approach. Without ever creating a line of code or designing the platform, they made a really simple solution video that explain the process of how you upload your files and how they’re available across all devices. This page had a capture form for the user’s name and email and they were able to garner 70,000 customer sign-ups and gauge how many people were interested before they built anything.
The faster you fail the faster you can get to success. Remember the 3 steps in the lean startup cycle: Build. Measure. Learn.
You can view Ryan’s presentation from last Monday below.
A big thank you to Ryan for sharing his knowledge and experiences! Make sure you go follow him on Twitter @rdkhatch!
