pbWorks case study at #sllconf by David Weekly

Customer Development
Startup Lessons Learned Conference
David E. Weekly (@dweekly)
April 23, 2010

Quick Note
(good thing I like bowling!)

Success is Adaptation
Agile: use customer stories to guide product
Good: solving specific problems.
Bad: presumes specific uses.
Lean: okay to be surprised at uses / users.
It’s a continuous learning experience!
So pivot – adapt to new uses / users.
(you heard this earlier!)

Feedback: Breadth + Depth
Data
User Stories

Collecting User Feedback
Support email
Monthly sales pings
In-product TEXTAREAs
Phone calls
UserTesting.com
Onsite usability tests
In-person visits

Key Learning
Your experiments provide an oracle function.
Good for testing hypotheses.
But what hypotheses do you test?
Study your users for hypothesis + inspiration.

Science or Art?
From “What About Design” Panel…
Science is an art.
(Experiments rarely inform which hypotheses to test!)

Feature Pivot
Being rightand $1 gets you on the bus.
Make sure customers are empowered to succeed.
WYSIWYG: didn’t offer it on purpose!
WikiText: performant, robust, easy-to-learn.
…but kept people from spreading it.
(afraid their coworkers wouldn’t grok it!)
Didn’t learn this until talking with them.
So I ate my hat and delivered a WYSIWYG editor.

Demographic Pivot
Sometimes you’ll be surprised at who actually shows up. So ask who they are!
“We loved your presentation in Chicago!”
Hunch: 5% educators?
Interstitial => 45% educators. Jeebus.
Surprise! We had made an educational product.

Pricing Pivot
Duh = Align pricing with value.
Crappy renewal rates from $/wiki.
Accenture call, PeopleMaps interview
Whoops, wikis = projects & Projects < year.
Ok, so $/user and ∞ wikis = wiser.
Didn’t realize this until we talked w/people about why they weren’t renewing.
So we changed our pricing and design.

…and many other pivots!
Ads = only beer $. Oops.
“Wiki” = commodity. Oops.
Folders & networks to organize & permission!
Talk with your users.
What they’re doing and who they are may surprise you.

The Good News
Went from ASPs of $50 to $50,000+ by listening to customers and delivering value. We grew the product as customers grew their deploy – coevolution!
You can succeed by continuing to better understand your customer.  Go do it!

Customer Development
Startup Lessons Learned Conference
David E. Weekly (@dweekly)
April 23, 2010

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