The Startup Chat on March 13, 2010
Getting early customers
Topics
Getting Early Customers, CrazyEgg, Daily.io, .com vs .others, Product with many features, Funding and revenue, TweetAlley, Deep engagement
Summary by @csabacsoma
Introductions
| Hiten S. | Let’s really start with introductions: Name / Company / Twitter Username / Finish this sentence: “Come talk to me if you want…” |
|---|---|
| Ashley | @beforeyouknowit 24F Vancouver |
| Chaba | @csabacsoma Silicon Valley / … if you want to chat about building software for enterprise or millions of users |
| Jeff B. | @Jeffbajayo |
| BenPixel | @benpixel |
| TweetAlley | @webthinker DC Jig Shah, 35M, TweetAlley – Come talk to me if you want to use twitter for business or want to manager your twitter business account |
| lori b. | @itdirector LA Lori Barfield / looking for my next startup / come talk to me if you need help growing your engineering effort up without killing your launch schedules |
| Chris | @chgriffin https://www.betable.com/ @betable – come talk to me if you want to discuss raising money or social betting |
| Jeff B. | @jeffbajayo New York – come talk to me if you think your startup deserves some media attention |
| Radu S. | @rspineanu Radu 25M Palo Alto (right now) 2Performant – Come talk to me if you want to chat about ad (cpa) networks and affiliate marketing |
| Kirill Z. | @zkirill 22M Palo Alto |
| Bryan T. | @bryanthompson 25M Lincoln,NE startup: radiowebservices.com |
| Rob S. | @robslifka Rob Slifka, 32M, Mountain View |
| HelloSherpa | @hellosherpa Ian Borders 28M Pai, Thailand Startup: hellosherpa.com @sproutingseed |
| Sneha | @snehamenon Sneha F22 Singapore – Come talk to me if you want to know about Asian startup landscape |
| Hiten S. | Hiten, KISSmetrics, hnshah, Come talk to me if you want to chat about your startup. |
| rosshill | 22/m/austin (normally melbourne) |
| Michael G. | 25 M connecticut |
| aaronf | @AaronSeattle Aaron Franklin Startup: LazyMeter.com |
| Mahipal | @mahipalr Mahipal – Come talk to me if you want a simple iPhone app made instantly |
| timothée d. | @timdl Tim/Social media consultant/Wizly tech – come talk to me if you want to talk about social media |
| rosshill | @rosshill Ross Hill / Coverhunt.com |
| omarjead | @omarjead Omar Ead |
| Lar | Lars, sfmobile.org, l1rs, come talk to me if you’re into networking with mobile start-ups |
| RichardInJapan | @richardInJapan Richard Roberts, RecMan Software – Talk to me if you need enterprise records management and compliance for Google Docs. I’m launching May 5th. It’s a B2B compliance app for Google Docs |
| Labsji | @labsji Balaji, 40, Chennai, India Sim-OnDemand – Talk to me if you want 3D virtual world(SecondLife like) servers for experimentation. |
| Neil S. | @neilsimon Neil / Onvoco / Come talk to me if you want to learn how to bootstrap a SaaS |
| Tim Y. | @timyoung Tim Young / Socialcast / Come talk to me if you want to know about selling to large enterprises. |
| Chetan C. | @conikeec Day Job: Principal Architect: Intuit Anaytics , Night Job: Stealth Mode Bootstrapping / Come talk to me if you want… NLP, Big Data, NOSQL |
| Saad M. | @saadmalik Saad Malik, HilalSpark, Come talk to me if you want to chat about internet marketing. |
| Matt M. | [@mmastrac] (http://twitter.com/mmastrac) Matt Mastracci / DotSpots / Talk to me if you want to get your content attached to large publisher sites |
| Jason P. | @blueberrycheers Jason Pierce / Blueberry Cheers / sell great kids toys |
| sam | Sam/M/51/Cupertino – Windows Desktop Productivity applications – dying breed Trying build mix-mode web/desktop/mobile company. |
| Gennady B. | @gboruk I’m Gennady, from NYC, working on a startup in the grocery space |
| Pete L. | @platshaw NYC |
| Mike S | @roadbud iphone running app |
| Sam H. | @samhuleatt Sam Huleatt working on a startup making a game out of link sharing |
| Paul H. | Paul, from Canada, working on an updated version of the venerable conference call service. |
| Jordan S. | @jordansatok I’m Jordan Satok, my startup is http://appoftheday.com, which features a daily community nominated iphone app |
Getting Early Customers
| Hiten S. | Ok, so today’s topic is “Getting Early Customers”. |
|---|---|
| Ashley | where do you usually start to look for new customers; friends, family, google, existing clients, or _? |
| Hiten S. | For those of you who haven’t heard the world before, I’d refer to these customers as earlyvangelists – it is a term coined by Steve Blank he defines earlyvangelists as “a special breed of customers willing to take a risk on your startup’s product or service.” |
| JLindenReed | and by “early customers” do you mean paying customers or customers giving feedback? |
| Jeff B. | i would say it falls under both categories |
| Matt M. | treat your friends and family round like prototype customers, but don’t start the counter until you get someone outside that circle |
| Chetan C. | In terms of Getting Early Customer, 3 dimensions that come to my mind is to identify customers specific to target business domain, incentivize participation (not by spamming the customer based on inactivity) , build constant feedback loop via reputation systems, measure activity via analytics |
| Chaba | I think the first step out of beta is when you have at least 3 paying customers |
| tiago p. | i think it’s important to build up some authority by blogging/twitting/essaying about the subject you’re about to tackle when you launch the service/startup |
| Hiten S. | Ok, so let’s actually start with Steve’s definition |
| Jeff B. | Earlyvangelists = Early Adopter + Internal Evangelist / Earlyvangelists are a special breed of customers willing to take a risk on your startup’s product or service. They can actually envision its potential to solve a critical and immediate problem – and they have the budget to purchase it. Unfortunately, most customers don’t fit this profile. |
| Ashley | by “evangelist” that might also include, as Seth Godin describes, idea “sneezers” – people who go out of their way to spread your idea among their peers |
| Chris | before you can discover your earlyvangelists, you need customers |
| Chaba | You can give out free product codes / invites to bloggers. They like it (sounds exclusive) and you get their audience… |
| Kirill Z. | B2B: Make a corporate Twitter account. Follow your clients. Engage with them and people who they’re engaging with (their clients). When they see that they WILL check out what you’re about.  |
| Hiten S. | that’s exactly part of the strategy we used with KISSmetrics |
Story: CrazyEgg
| Hiten S. | I’ll just tell a story about our first SaaS product, CrazyEgg and some lessons learned so I’ll just start with a framework that I use to get early customers |
|---|---|
| Hiten S. | I am going to assume you already have an idea and have created a minimum viable product which might be just a landing page and a survey, or an actual product with a minimum feature set So in most circumstances you have some sort of idea of who your ideal customer is going to be and you have some assumptions about them such as: profession, age, likes / dislikes, hobbies, etc… |
| Hiten S. | market size isn’t as important here So, the first thing I’d do is try to identify where your customer hangs out the most |
| Chris | how do you know where your customer hangs out if you don’t have any customers? |
| Hiten S. | you have a product and it has to target someone you might not know everything about them but thats why you start with some assumptions, if you can force yourself to do this |
| Chris | right, so you test hypotheses on where they hang out |
| Hiten S. | our first product, Crazy Egg creates visual heatmaps for where people are clicking on a page |
| Hiten S. | and I should add, by “customer” and assumptions for that customer I would aim for targeting your assumptions around early adopters |
| Hiten S. | so I will refer to Crazy Egg as CE from now on – For CE we knew our customer was anyone with a website but our assumptions for early adopters revolved around “people who prefer consuming visual information over data” and this led us to target web designers initially |
| Hiten S. | at the time there was a strong web design community or two, so we started participating in that community, when our idea was just an idea, before we even had a product if you can’t participate in the communities where early adopters hang out, you can always buy an ad, or talk to the webmaster and do a special promotion or something I’ve had a lot of success approaching forums and getting inexpensive traffic |
| Khetarpal | Can you be more specific about web design community? Meetup / Online forum / ? |
| Hiten S. | online web design community |
| Radu S. | what about blogs/journalists? |
| Hiten S. | we didn’t focus on blogs for press or journalists initially. |
| RichardInJapan | I have been making a list of journalists to contact when I launch. They have been writing about the problem I solve. |
| Hiten S. | so we put up a landing page and basically showcased what I product was (just a screenshot of a heatmap in our case) |
| nilesh | I feel sheepish to ask this, but how should I find partners? I am expert in mathematical modeling but need horse power to convert ideas to software |
| Chaba | http://www.techcofounder.com/ |
| Hiten S. | we also discovered that web designers hung out at css galleries like http://unmatchedstyle.com |
| Hiten S. | at this stage you wouldn’t focus on PR I am specifically talking about a MVP, very early product and getting early customers, so PR, and other “growth” tactics are out of the question |
| Hiten S. | we actually bought ads on the CSS galleries and we also engaged in a few design communities today, I would probably add that I would have added a survey to our landing page and also solicited people to tweet and share with facebook (after they put in their email address on our landing page) |
| nilesh | Can you guys talk about MVP? MVP idea was an eye opener for me. I was planning to put a model that I built for my company (quite complex to solve supply chain related problems) online, realizing it may not be what cust. may be looking for… |
| Hiten S. | MVP chat |
| Hiten S. | if you want to see some MVPs with surveys, check out ones that we’ve created: http://sharefeed.com http://beta.survey.io http://daily.io http://kissmetrics.com |
| Pete L. | was your MVP just a landing page, or did you have a prototype |
| Hiten S. | our CE MVP was just a landing page with email collection we ended up collecting over 20,000 emails |
| (multiple) | wow |
| Ashley | that 20k number just made a lot of MVP converts and earlyvangelists here |
| Hiten S. | here are some additional tips from the guy that helped create Mint’s waiting list: Startup Tips: Getting to that first 10,000 |
| Hiten S. | http://daily.io and http://sharefeed.com were for waiting to see interest |
| Hiten S. | the CE one, beta.survey.io and our kissmetrics.com one is to collect a list of beta customers I gave some tips to Noah at Mint when he was creating the mailing list but at Mint they took it to another level with the early blogger outreach |
| Laura K. | Would your approach differ if you were looking for fewer customers willing to pay a much higher price vs lots of customers paying a small amount? |
| Hiten S. | I’d say I’d go more for following Steve Blank’s Four Steps to the Epiphany to if I were going for higher price, fewer customers |
| Jordan S. | Which do you think is more valuable, fewer survey responses or more emails? (as I would think the survey would lower rate at which people submit their emails) |
| Hiten S. | I talked more about the survey.io MVPs we put out that have led to a recent new product of ours. |
| Kurt | I gave people both options; about half who left email also went through the survey. |
| Hiten S. | thats a good idea we’ve opted for getting less emails and more qualified leads by putting the survey upfront, instead of the email submit first |
| Jordan S. | Of course – have you found the survey data to be helpful in making product decisions? Has it changed your initial plans at all? |
| Hiten S. | yes, in fact we chose not to pursue a product at all based on the responses to the daily.io survey |
| Yash | I’d say early emails is a way to get access to a targeted market – they’rea already interested, therefore, they can be potential customers. |
| Hiten S. | yup, exactly |
| Jeff B. | plus it reminds the customer about you and your service |
| Kirill Z. | Assuming you’re not trying to create a new market of course. Imagine Twitter surveying people if they want to send 140 character messages. |
| Hiten S. | in twitter’s case it just made more sense to throw something out there – that was twitter’s MVP |
| Hiten S. | this is what the homepage of twitter’s MVP looked like: Original twttr Homepage |
| Hiten S. | early sketch of twitter’s MVP |
| Hiten S. | Mint.com Pre-Launch Pitch Deck |
| Jeff B. | i think twitter is one of the best examples of how a startup with an idea that doesnt seem realistic or even plausible at all can be a smashing success |
| RichardInJapan | Twitter seems full of pivot  |
| Hiten S. | see slide #12, #13 and #14 |
| Mike S. | so all from engaging in social media/forums (repeatable by anyone)? |
| Hiten S. | we also bought ads on CSS galleries we teased them with a few words and a call-to action |
Daily.io
| Hiten S. | Is anyone interested in hearing how we built http://daily.io ? |
|---|---|
| (multiple) | sure |
| Hiten S. | it took about 2 hours and we collected 100+ responses in 1 week |
| Hiten S. | Well we have Derek from our KISSmetrics team in the chat derekpcollins: can you describe the tools and process we used for building the http://daily.io landing page with wufoo? |
| derekpcollins | sure, like HIten said we created a dead-simple landing page with some teaser text and clear call to action |
| Hiten S. | I came up with the copy for the landing page based on our assumptions for the product our assumption was that: People would pay to have daily emails of their analytics so it took longer to come up with the copy than to actually create the landing page + survey and also to create the survey questions because you have to ask intelligent survey questions |
| derekpcollins | we decided to use a Wufoo form to create the survey (this was presurvey. io), which allowed to get something up fast |
| derekpcollins | we have also used google docs and some behind-the-scenes magic to put out really quick surveys |
| Matt M. | +1 to a Google Docs form. You can create your own styled |
| derekpcollins | we have it submit to a hidden iframe |
| Jordan S. | From what I’ve seen with these types of surveys, the questions are usually: How do you do it now, What features are most important, How much would you pay… Does that sound about right? |
| Hiten S. | yes that is correct |
| Jeff B. | heres a golden question, do ppl actually take the surveys? |
| Hiten S. | because they are interested in what you say on your landing page you’d be surprised and we’re talking only needing anywhere from 30 – 100 responses |
| Jeff B. | ah i see your point now |
| Hiten S. | as a startup putting out an idea, MVP-style you are really just desperate to get answers |
| Jeff B. | 20,000 emails, at least 30 ppl out of that will take the survey |
| Hiten S. | I’d rather have 2000 survey responses |
| Mike S. | wish I learned this a few weeks ago |
| Jordan S. | Did the kiss team do any dev work on daily.io before you put the survey up, or did you come up with the idea, and put the survey up right away before doing any dev work? |
| Hiten S. | unfortunely we did dev work on daily.io prior to the survey, but in hindsight I would NOT have done that for future MVPs, we’d put up the landing page and survey first, before ANY dev work |
| derekpcollins | We had started doing a little dev before we put the survey up, but I think now we would put the survey up sooner |
| Jordan S. | Thanks. I totally think that will change the paradigm for startup ideas for me. Any further thoughts on landing page before dev work? |
| Hiten S. | awesome! – always got more ideas, you know me |
| derekpcollins | if you want to know what types of questions we ask in these surveys, just take a look at http://kissmetrics.com or http://sharefeed.com |
| Hiten S. | If you guys feel like it, please take this survey about the chat: http://beta.survey.io/4469cf5 (I would LOVE the feedback) |
.com vs .others
| Jordan S. | Another question for you based on daily.io and survey.io. You’ve gone with a non .com. Did you do that with daily/survey.io because the target is technical people who understand TLDs (or enough to at least properly type the address)..? |
|---|---|
| Hiten S. | we don’t like .io’s anymore it was a mistake, in my opinion (in hindsight) Jordan Satok: and I can easily say it was a mistake, cause it was my stupid idea |
| EricPiclyf | That’s why rebranded and moved launch a month |
| Hiten S. | exactly except for the “moved launch a month” part |
| Chaba | So just .com ? |
| Hiten S. | ya, I think .com is what most people will gravitate towards I’d recommend going with a .com in almost all cases |
| Chaba | .net is also bad idea? |
| Hiten S. | yes, I think anything except .com is a mistake |
Product with many features
| sam | Question: How do you bring early adopters to complicated products with lot of features? |
|---|---|
| Hiten S. | I have a 3 word pitch, 140 character pitch and 3 sentence pitch. I also stalk my clients. and usually if you are doing something complicated with lots of features you have a competitor that you can leverage |
| derekpcollins | “complicated products with lots of features” doesn’t sound like MVP to me |
| Chaba | I’m working on a product that was built in 10 years by 100s of developers, still it can be explained in the elevator pitch if you can explain your product easily, the survey will work. |
| sam | would you break the product into small enough feature set and release little at time or the whole thing |
| Chaba | I would go for basics at first, with 2-3 customers. Then add features and grow, but don’t miss scaling – it will be important sooner than you think. MVP again |
| sam | I am in enterprise space i.e mfg space and scm space. Kind of hard to break things |
| Chaba | you will have to break things into smaller pieces anyway, sooner or later. It’s really hard to survive without interop. You have to link to accounting, erp, billing and others. |
Funding and revenue
| Jeff B. | if you dont mine me asking whats a ball park number in your opinion an average person can make from a startup like kissmetrics or survey.io |
|---|---|
| Hiten S. | KISSmetrics is venture funded. But Crazy Egg (which is independent, no venture funding or anything) is able to support 3 households with the profits from it. |
TweetAlley
| TweetAlley | tweetalley.com not allowing open registration..still at prototype stage Anyone interested in sharing emails to help me with TweetAlley ‘s future steps? feedback? etc |
|---|---|
| (many) | (e-mail address) |
| Jeff B. | tweetally is like a feature packed twitter dashboard for a company or person |
| TweetAlley | Tweetalley is service which will allow business to manage their twitter account and will allow brand monitoring |
| Tom C. | Will TweetAlley be a competitor with CoTweet? |
| TweetAlley | yes with some other flavors too.. also hoping that my low cost will help me to quit my day job – at least |
| Jordan S. | I’m also quite interested. Have some ideas/feedback for you. (e-mail) |
| Hiten S. | I’ve used MANY products that claim to solve the problem you are trying to. Feel free to email me if you want to chat about it. I’ll warn you right now too, I’ll be pretty critical  (the problem you are trying to solve is actually a very difficult one) |
| TweetAlley | I will stick with it ‘till i solve it. |
| Tom C. | I would concentrate on a holistic social CRM solution rather than an already crowded Market of tweet backs aka engagement |
| sam | Need to bring social media directly into existing CRM system. |
| TweetAlley | Yep i have that kind of thoughts.. |
Deep engagement
| Rob S. | Do you ever work with survey respondents individually? I’m considering using the survey as a screen for deeper individual engagement (design research). |
|---|---|
| Hiten S. | yes we do all the time, this is why we ask questions like this: http://img.skitch.com/20100314-e97d2cf9uqx… |
| Rob S. | Perfect! What rough % would you say you engage with? |
| Hiten S. | as many as needed |
| Rob S. | rather, what % of respondents volunteer to be contacted for followup? |
| Hiten S. | checking for u |
| Hiten S. | Rob Slifka: here is actual data from another survey of ours: http://img.skitch.com/20100314-fb3tqb5327r |
| Chaba | 1783 of “yes” People do like to give opinion |
| Rob S. | Wow! Do you mind if I use that pic to… persuade others? |
| Hiten S. | sure |
| derekpcollins | and questions like this: http://img.skitch.com/20100314-pisw9ruxpu4 |
| Rob S. | brilliant. In this way I think we can use this for CD and also some more in-depth research we’re doing… still struggling with mixing “design” with “customer development” |
| Hiten S. | can you elaborate what you mean by “design” with CD? |
| Rob S. | We’re using Cooper’s goal directed design for pure design; answering different questions than one might answer with CD |
| Hiten S. | gotcha, I think goal directed design comes into play after initial CD we’re doing a lot of “Traditional” user research to help direct product development and design, but we have found ways to weave CD into it. You might want to check out our Head of Product’s blog: http://cindyalvarez.com if you haven’t already |
| Rob S. | Perfect! That’s right where we are With enterprise though, there’s the concern that with such a limited audience you don’t “burn” contacts on research versus CD |
(more discussion about specific projects removed)
Links and resources
- http://threadbox.com/
- Countdown timer: http://bit.ly/9QhekX
- The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank
- Getting real, free book: http://gettingreal.37signals.com/toc.php
- About User Experience http://www.designingsocialinterfaces.com/
- Recommended Twitter hash tag: #StartupChat