1.
The Lean Startup

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Who I am

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case study of lean startup at work

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qeryz

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I started qeryz april 2014

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It was fully bootstrapped

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I didn’t really have a lot of money to burn in
the runway

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I only had 1 year to build a profitable software
company

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So we started with the leap-of-faith
assumption

10.
People are willing to pay for a microsurvey but
not at the existing price

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Our main competitor was charging $79/mo
with a 3-month minimum lock-in

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There was no alternative during the time

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Our value hypothesis

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if we get the pricing model to become value-
for-money, we can be profitable in a year

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This is our initial pricing model

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The main difference is that we have a free
forever plan and our most expensive plan is
$79/mo

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Granted, we did not have a lot of integrations
and features but it did one thing right

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Gather customer feedback

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Our growth hypothesis

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We have a natural engine of growth so long as
users are running our product

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This is how our product looks like

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Notice how we have a ‘powered by qeryz’ link
at the bottom part of the microsurvey

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That’s our main source of traffic and user
acquisition

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After we set our leap-of-faith assumptions in
stone

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we went ahead and built the mvp

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This is how it looked like

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During the time we had minimal traffic

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We would have mostly 0 – 1 signups per day

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Most of them were not able to use the product
and reap the benefit

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But for those who did, they were able to let us
know their experience

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They told us the difficulty of signing up

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The difficulty of getting the software to work

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And a lot more

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From what we learned, we set measurements

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We measured signups per day so we can
measure successful users

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Successful users are people who were able to
activate the benefit of the software for
themselves

37.
Based on those measurements, We learned
how to increase the success rate of our users

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we made tweaks based on the things we
learned

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We added an explainer video

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That increased our visitors-to-users signup rate
by 84.95%

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We added a signup form in the homepage

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That increased our visitors-to-users signup rate
by 21.02%

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We added a 4-step user onboarding process

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That increased our user success rate by over
600% in 4 months

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We reduced all friction in our user onboarding
process

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We did a lot more experiments using the build-
measure-learn loop

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Here is how our homepages have changed

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And it will change again

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We started making money 8 months after
starting - dec 2014

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It’s a slow climb but you could see the gradual
improvement in our MRR

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In our first year, we missed turning profitable

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Our value hypothesis was mistaken

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So we made a pivot

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we cut expenses, changed our pricing model
and introduced an annual subscription plan

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We introduced behavioral email triggers to
encourage people to upgrade

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We lowered the free forever plan’s monthly
responses from 200 to just 50

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We re-prioritized feature development and put
bug squishing as top priority

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We improved our growth model to include
viral display ad re-targeting

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Qeryz turned 2 on april 2016

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Because of our lean operation and continuous
learning

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we have already reached profitability

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We were a 6-man startup company

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We are still a 6-man startup company

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The point is: we are as lean as possible but we
are serving thousands of users

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I’ve burned a considerable sum in the runway

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But I learned a lot and we’ve built a solid
product

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My contact details

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Thank you very much!