Digital Evolution

Category: Knowledge

What to read after reading the ‘Lean Startup’
I get sometimes asked for recommendation on what to read after the Lean Startup. Here are a few resources I found useful:
- The 4 Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank – or watch Steve Blank class on Udacity which covers some of those topics. Eric Ries followed Steve Blank class at Stanford and Lean Startup was inspired by some of Steve work. It introduces the notion of Customer Development. Put simply, it’s the exact opposite of what Jean de La Fontaine said wheh he said: “Never sell the bear’s skin before one has killed the beast”.
  Customer development is the exact opposite: Here you sell the skin first. This book is about how to customers before you even start building a product.
- Running Lean by Ash Maurya, is a very practical how to guide that will tell you, step by step how to validate / invalidate your business hypotheses. It intrudes the Lean Canvas explaining how to use with loads of examples – or get started with your own lean canvas and here is a great manual on how to do just that.
- Lean Analytics – by Alistair Croll and Ben Yoskovitz focus on the metrics and what to track and what stage, depending an your business model. I recommend would following their enlightening talk / class on Udemy. Very smart guys.
- How to conduct customer interviews, sound simple, but it’s actually very hard. This is a list of 20+ resources on how to find customers to interview and how to interview them and Customer Interview Templates and Resources from The Lean Startup Circle Wiki. Always useful.
But the best thing to done, once you have read the lean startup, is to find a project of yours, and apply everything you have read / learned. This is really the best way to ancor the knowledge. Putting it to practice. And when you do, please let me know, I would love to know what else you have learned.
January 14, 2014
Getting your first customers – simplified customer development
Sometimes startups come to me with this problem: we have created this great service, how can we get our first customers.

Those startups quite often need to put a hold on product development and focus customer development.

What they don’t actually know is:
– are they addressing a real, existing problem or a burning need ?
– does their service or product actually solve the problem – to the eyes of their target customers (or to their wallets should I say).

Answering those questions with genuine insight from real people is what customer development is.

Here is how to do it. It look and sound easy can be very tricky as it’s goes against a lot of expected cultural and social behaviours.

Find 10 potential customers from the target group and understand if the problem you are solving is a big pain or they dont really care.

For each customer understand where they stand:
1. Did they have the problem ?
2. Did they know they have the problem ?
3. Did they look for a solution ?
4. Did they hack a solution ?
5. Did they pay for a solution ?
Achtung! Don’t ask them those questions. Have a conversation – not an interview – about the problem you are trying to solve and understand how they are solving it today. At the end, categorize them into the buckets above.

Once this is clear, the question is, how do I find those 10 potential customers ?
Be creative, try different methods. Which ever method works best can later become one of you marketing / communication channel. Drop the one that dont work. If you can’t find those first 10 customers, how are going to find 100s of them ?

If your product solves the problem, the people that you identified as paying for a solution (the last bucket) are your potential customers. You can start selling it to them.
November 29, 2013
Which Canvas for My Project ?

So, RIP the business plan, long live the business model canvas. A new light and fresh tool that helps brings ideas into business. Now canvas and boards are popped up every where on the radar. This will help decide which one works best for your:

The Business Model Canvas
proposed by Alexander Osterwalder

Mother of them all, it’s the original canvas used the business model generation book. The canvas most widely used and documented.
To use this tools, describe your business on each of the 9 sections of the canvas (value proposition, customer segment, channels, customer relationship, key activities, key resources, partners, cost structure and revenue stream). You then treat what you have in each sections of the canvas as hypothesis. And those hypothesis might be true or false and your job is go out and learn from the field, with practical experiments which hypothesis are valid and which are not. With what you have learned, you will then change your canvas and do the same thing, until your business model is validated. Overtime, you end up with many different versions that you can overlay to see the evolution of your idea.

Download the Business Generation Canvas in PDF.

The Lean Canvas
proposed by Ash Maurya

The lean canvas is the cousin of the business model canvas coming from the ‘lean start-up’ business family. Compared to the business model canvas, it focused on the product and the market. It brings to the front the problems you are solving, the top 3 features and the key metrics you should track, leaving on the side the ‘how’ to deliver the solution. To use, this canvas, again, write down you best answer on each section, then test and iterate. This is a guide on how to create your lean canvas (pdf).

I have found this canvas is best suited for early stage business.

The Validation board
proposed by Lean Startup Machine

I found this one the most practical to quickly validate and iterate on your project idea. As the lean canvas, the problem / the customer approach and forces you to test systematically, report on results and iterate on the very same sheet and on different versions of a canvas.

The Validation Board helps you:
1. Formalise your customer segment and problem statement
2. Test assumptions one by one – starting with the riskiest one
3. Design your experiment (or MVP) and the success criteria (before you run the experiment)
4. Track the results of your experiments overtime
5. Focus only on the problem and customer segment at the beginning (later include the solution)

Here is how to use it:

Download the Validation Board in PDF.

The Happy Canvas
by Laurence McCahill

The happy canvas brings an interesting angle to the list. Like the others, it captures the problem, the solution, the early adopters and the value proposition.
What’s new is the Purpose & Vision, Value and Story. Ok, I can see how those are important for a startup business. Important to define and agree on with the other founders, but surely not something you want to iterate on every day or week.

Maybe I had a Happy Canvas in 2002 before starting RVR System, it would have saved lots of disagreement with the other co-founders. One of the reason startup fails is because of co-founder disagreement, and many be this ‘Happy Canvas’ help avoid that.

Download the Happy Canvas in PDF.

July 19, 2013
Build it and they will come

This is an insightful point from Steve Blanks’ The four steps to the epiphany: successful strategies for products that win
He says that a customer development process (which he explain is his book) is not needed for businesses where customer acceptance and market adoption is not an issue.
Those businesses don’t need a formal process to figure out there will be high end user demand for their solution. A company looking for a cure to cancer or researching a cheaper energy source know there is a demand for their solution. Their problem is more about providing the solution than selling it.

For those business the saying from the 90’s ‘build it and they will come’ is actually true.

For the rest, it will be wise to refer back to the book.

May 14, 2013
Lean Startup Machine experience

I recently attended the Lean Startup Machine workshop in London.

WOW. What an experience. 2.5 days of immersion to develop an idea into a viable and meaningful product, searching potential customers and refining the idea. A lot more excitement than what many of us get in our day job.

This workshop provides an opportunity to work on a real case, in the safety of the sandbox, guided by very helpful and insightful mentors. In teams, we practice the running experiments, building MVP, invalidation assumptions, pivoting, and ultimately doing customer development.

If you have read the Lean Startup book, this workshop is very much in the continuity and applying the theory to a practical business idea. Definitely recommend for anyone who has enjoyed the book.

Here are photo photos of the event:

Rafael explaining why you get out of the building and talk to people.

Tim and the mentors

My team (Public Democracy concept) with Luca and Stuart and our Validation board.

April 23, 2013
Kano framework, classification of user needs
As part of the design course by Karl T. Ulrich (pictured) that I follow on coursera.org (great site btw, which is changing access to knowledge in a very significant way), I came across the Kano framework to classify the user need. Vertically is the user satisfaction (if the user is satisfied or not) and horizontally is if the need is addressed or not (or can be partly adressed). Here is the framework:

User needs can be plotted in 4 curves which are:
- Don’t care: either it’s here or not, but not all users care: for instance on a search engine it could be the need to search for images.
- Linear: the better it’s done, the more satisfaction the user for the search engine it could be to find an answer to the query, this is provided by the relevance of the search results.
- Must have: If it’s not there, the user is un happy. For search engine, it could a way to enter the search query (search box).
- Latent: Little things, un-expected that create delight. For instance the ‘see from cache’ or ‘translate page’.
February 28, 2013
Digital Marketing Overview

It’s been a year since I first presented to Paris X university students a Digital Marketing overview. Today I had the chance to refine and enhance that presentation in from of the European Business School students. Here are the slides from this session with a few links to videos.

November 21, 2012
Crisis communication (1/4) – examples

As as part of Marketing lectures I am giving to the students about crisis communication, I have gather a set of real life examples that illustrates the best practices to follow. This is the first post a series where I share those examples and best practices.

January 2010, an article in the New York Times advances that H&M destroys its unsold clothes in order to prevent steal and deterioration of the brand image.
Quickly, a link to the article is published to the 1,4 million fans of the H&M Facebook page.
The story is picked and amplified by the Huffington Post.
H&M response: What they did was post a message on Facebook (followed by two similar ones) on the same day and the day after followed by a press release.

One of H&M’s missions is to take responsibilities as regards the way our methods affect people and the environment. Our policy is to give damaged and used clothes to humanitarian organizations. We investigate why our 34th avenue store throw out unsold clothes. The US head office donates every year thousands of clothes through the NGO Gifts in Kid International.

In 2009, two Domino’s Pizza employees published this video.

Domino’s Pizza responded with this video from Patrick Doyle, president of Domino’s USA.

Clear, concerned, impact full…

November 13, 2012
Integrated marketing communication

Integrated marketing communication really resonated with my consumer centric mindset.

Wikipedia defines IMC as:

This is an approach to brand communications where the different modes work together to create a seamless experience for the customer and are presented with a similar tone and style that reinforces the brand’s core message.

The seamless experience for the customer is a concern shared with the customer centric product development approach.

This Brand touch point matrix perfectly symbolise this approach.

The consumer have different touch points with your brand. Your job as a marketer is simple: you need to increase those touch points and make sure that each touch points helps the consumer to move forward into the conversion funnel. If your touch points are not taking the consumer into the same directions then your marketing is not as effective as it could be.

Going a bit deeper, integrated marketing communication redefines the 4 P’s with 4 C’s:
Not PRODUCT, but CONSUMER – understand the consumers problem and respond to that.
Not PRICE, but COST – understand the consumer’s cost to satisfy the need. Price is just one part of the cost.
Not PLACE, but CONVENIENCE – specially true in the digital age: convenience of the buying, convenience of the delivery, convenience of access, convenience of availability…
Not PROMOTION, but COMMUNICATION – mediums working together to present a unified message with a feedback mechanism to make the communication two-way.

Read more on comprehensive overview on integrated marketing communication from MultimediaMarketing.com – or this story with loads of examples.

November 6, 2012
Marketing budgets: 2 good and short reads
While doing research, I found those two pieces very insightful on how to define your marketing budget:
- The marketing budget and how to define it:
  - build your budget around your goal,
  - focus on ROI
  - and favor measurable medias.
  From blogtrepreneur.
- 4 ways to decide your marketing budget:
  - take a percentage of your sales
  - decide it arbitrarily
  - match the competitor budget
  - or built it on your marketing objectives (growth).
  From LegalZoom.
October 29, 2012