Nsrcel lean startup case study

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PIVOTING IN PRACTICE
LESSON LEARNT FROM AN MVP
ARVI KRISHNASWAMY
Entrepreneur and Tech Executive
@twitortat
www.arg0s.in

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Hello, I’m Arvi
Hands on Entrepreneur and Tech Executive
Now - VP Products @ CloudCherry
Love helping foster innovation and
experimentation. Mentor and Coach.
Past - Multiple Startups. One Valley IPO. One Exit
Published Author. Patent Holder.
@twitortat

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WHAT WE’LL COVER - A POPULAR CASE STUDY

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Agenda
•Lean Startup = Business Model Canvas + Customer
Development + Agile Development
•Case Study
•Vision, Problem, Target Audience
•Big IFs - Hypothesis development
•Experiments
•Surprises Learnt
•Pivoting in Practice

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Lean Startup Methodology
Business Model
Canvas
Customer
Development
Agile Development
Lean is about efficiency.
Lean Startup is about translating vision to product.

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Business Model Canvas
Think of this as a business plan you can‘test’.

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Customer Development
•Avoid surveys
•Talk to real people to
learn the“why”
•GET OUT OF THE
BUILDING!
•Related but different
from Design
Thinking

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How Lean Startups Build Products
The focus is on‘learning’and not‘validation’.

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What is an experiment?

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What is an experiment?
A series of tests that help answer
a question

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CASE STUDY
Experiments run between Nov 2013 - Feb 2014 at Levitum

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A fun place where people make new
friends online.VISION
Teens, College kids, Yuppies, Casual
gamers.TARGET
PROBLEM
People online lack fun options for
meeting new people around the world.
SOLUTION
Online community where people play
charades over live video via web and
mobile.

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Millions play Pictionary Online.
Would people play Charades?

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Where do we begin?

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The Big IFs
If people are interested in playing charades online,
and
if they are comfortable turning on video, and
if they like the concept enough to invite friends or
join a public game room, and
if they enjoy the playing experience with others in
the room, and
if they enjoy this enough to keep coming back, and
if they will invite other people, we had a shot at
something

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MVP* Wireframes
* Remember - an MVP is often more minimal than
you think it needs to be!

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Users turning video on in public - Invalidated!

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Offline Validation

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Offline and Online Validation

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Public Rooms
•Important to get early
critical mass of‘core’
active users
•Then expand to grow
DAU/MAU numbers
•Family & friends
audience (larger
category) not
comfortable being on
video with strangers
Private Rooms
•Higher risk of‘ghost
town’challenges ala
Google Wave
•Real time game posed
scheduling issues
•Async game viable via
an mobile flow, but
experience issues
cause friction - who
holds the phone?

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Surprises Learnt
•Charades is played quite differently in India - it’s
more technical, geeky and competitive compared
to the simpler, family oriented version in the US
(popular over the holidays)
•There was potential for tools to enable an‘offline’
version of Charades.
•We didn’t pursue this, but another popular app did!
•There’s interest in charades. It’s not a weak signal,
but it’s not a particularly strong signal either.

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What we did well
•Capture our thought
process and assumptions,
laying out the hypotheses
that had to be true for us to
succeed
•Identified small batches
that could be proven (or
disproven) with minimum
cost, rapidly built and
iterated through the
batches.
•Stayed honest and
objective, tracked metrics
and cohorts well.
What we didn’t do well
•Qualitative feedback was
from subcontinent users,
since reaching a global
audience was not easy.
However, these were not
representative of the target
audience.
•We pivoted away from our
original vision although
other solutions may have
emerged.
•Included more inline
surveys early on enough to
have better insights.

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Why LeanStartup is hard in practice
•Experiment design is hard for beginners. Crafting a
hypothesis and finding your leap of faith needs discipline.
•Managing control variables across several experiment
batches requires rigor and persistence.
•Sampling sizes need to be large enough to hold
significance.
•Our understanding of cognitive psychology is still limited.
•Miss commercial opportunities that may not emerge from
clear problems.
•Easy to get caught in local maxima and pivot away.
•Tricky balance of bias towards action vs bias towards
reflection.

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Need help applying lean startup to a new idea?
@twitortat
Hands on Entrepreneur and Tech
Executive
Now - VP Products, CloudCherry
Ask for help via AMA on my blog
or via Twitter @twitortat