founders, VC's, mentors and startup experts.
So, should you require a Credit Card to get started in your SaaS Free Trial? TL:DR - By asking for a Credit Card up front, you will get fewer prospects into your Free Trial with no guarantee of converting more paying customers. Now, if you'd like to know why that is, read on ...
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Via: SaaS Marketing
I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu |
When companies talk about their new product or service, they talk about what it does. Features, bullet points, checkboxes. Maybe, if they're particularly enlightened, they'll shift a bit and talk about what problems it will solve. What normal people tell their friends about a product or service, they talk about what it replaces ...
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Via: Cindy Alvarez
Making people more awesome through building better software. |
I've recently traded a series of interesting emails on the evolution of social products and how the things that worked years ago- importing addressbooks and blasting out invites, no longer work today. A friend of mine, Sangeet, wrote up a longer analysis on the topic and I wanted to share that with you today. Enjoy! ...
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Via: Andrew Chen Blog
Exploring the disruption caused by online and mobile platfor |
Sometimes your customers know that you provide a feature they want, but for some reason, they don't use it. Why... Read more... You're reading Price is what you pay, Value is what you get. ...
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Via: The Intercom Blog
COO at @Intercom. I speak & write about UX, Customer Acquisi |
When you're building a new product, you're often thinking about all the new things people are going to be able to do with it. Now they can do this, now they can do that. Exciting! But there's a better question to ask: What are people going to stop doing once they start using your product? What does your product replace? What are they switching from? How did they do the job ...
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Founder of 37signals. Co-author of REWORK. Credo: It's simpl |
A startup CEO sent me a pained email the other day. The gist was that a competitor (loosely defined) had just released a great new feature to their product. That feature had been on the drawing board for this CEO for months, and they even had a prototype built. But they hadn't finished. ...
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Via: Nabeel Hyatt
entrepreneur, investor, geek, product guy. vc @ spark. |
It's risky to try to improve any part of a product without understanding the job that it does for customers, and what their success criteria are. ...
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Via: The Intercom Blog
COO at @Intercom. I speak & write about UX, Customer Acquisi |
Instagram: Bought for $1 billion, over 100 million users Dropbox: Worth $4 billion, over 100 million users Foursquare: Worth $760 million, 25 million users Twitter: Worth $8 billion, more than 500 million users What do all of these products have in common? Outside of being wildly successful, they are simple and have a small feature set. ...
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I work with @KISSmetrics. Likes: @TheRyanAdams, reading prod |
By now we all know that successful startups focus on learning about their users -- figuring out what features, branding, and messaging resonate and perform best. Smart teams invest valuable time designing, building, testing, and iterating their own designs and prototypes based on learning from analytics and user studies.But don't forget to test your competitors' products too! ...
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Via: Design Staff
User Experience Designer, Prototyper, Storyteller. Partner a |
Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer at Netflix, wrote a good answer on Quora to the question Why doesn't Netflix offer "Advanced Search" on their site? It's a great Product Management lesson: Nothing is purely additive unless everyone uses it. ...
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User experience design & strategy at @flow_sa. Contributor t |
Some people get excited about building something new that the world has never seen. Others get excited about making something more beautiful than it was before. Others like making things faster. And some others get off on making something less expensive. To differing degrees, these are all personal driving factors of mine as well. But the one that stands out above all the others is. ...
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Founder of 37signals. Co-author of REWORK. Credo: It's simpl |
Wait what? INCREASED support requests? Isn't our goal at startups to reduce the support requests? After all, support requests means time taken away from developing code right? ...
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Via: Phil's Blawg
Startup guy, Founder of BudgetSimple, Soccer player, beer dr |
One of the seminal moments in the early days of the Web 2.0 era, was a simple default setting. At launch, a new photo service called Flickr set the default on images shared to "public". This was a stark contrast to the rest of their competitors at the time who all defaulted to private. This default to "public" had such a powerful effect on unlocking the network effects of this new service, and era ...
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Via: Bryce DOT VC
VC, Dad |
The Swiss Army knife is a remarkable product. By combining many products of low utility, it becomes a product of some utility. This is one of the rare occasions where a core product gets better by adding mediocre features. ...
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Via: The Intercom Blog
COO at @Intercom. I speak & write about UX, Customer Acquisi |
Recently I was with my friend Jeff Patton, one of the pioneers in applying Agile to product organizations, and he told that he has been advocating the term "Opportunity Backlog" as an alternative to the product roadmap. I have written earlier about the problems with old-style product roadmaps, so I immediately liked this and wanted to do my part to try to spread this concept. ...
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I'm a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, specializing |
"People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole," an HBS professor named Theodore Levitt famously told his students. Too often, marketers get wrapped up in the features and functions of their products, rather than solving the actual problems of the consumer. That leads to a lot of one-upmanship versus competition and over-bundled products ...
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Via: Tom FishBurne
Marketoonist and Founder of Marketoon Studios (http://market |
The one common startup mistake that I see many people, not only habitually making but bragging about, involves over complicating your product. For most first time and seasoned tech entrepreneurs, the natural desires to make your product a Swiss Army knife of useless crap can be hard to resist. ...
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Via: VooDoo Anthology
Former special operations combat veteran turned writer and e |
One of the most defensible positions for a startup is if you can achieve the network effect. The network effect is so strong that it has kept large companies in business for a long time, despite bad products and numerous competitors. Craigslist is a perfect example. ...
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Via: brianbalfour
Founder of Boundless Learning, Viximo, PopSignal |
I recently ran across yet another situation where an entrepreneur was reluctant to launch early. He had two urges. He wanted to continue polishing the UX to make it more mainstream-ready. He also wanted to add more features and options to appeal to a broader range of customers. Here was my advice: ...
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Via: Giff Constable
MD at Neo in New York; maker, designer, entrepreneur, and ag |
You've got your vision of what you want to build. You've also got a ton of unknowns and uncertainty. You know you can't just go build it and hope they will come. You have to do it iteratively. Put a little bit out there, see how people react, figure out what to do next. But where do you start? How much is enough to start getting feedback? ...
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Via: Hacker Chick
Hacker Chick ~ startup guardian angel ~ awesomely eclectic |
We live in a fast-paced, time-strapped, multi-tasking world. Most Web users are lazy; they want instant gratification with minimal effort. For startups, it is a challenging landscape because they may only get a single, short-lived shot to attract a potential user. Even if your product is useful, interesting or valuable, it also has to be immediately captivating. ...
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Via: Mark Evans Tech
Startup marketer, conference organizer, hockey player, dad, |
Once in a while I find myself in a product or strategy or biz dev discussion at a startup which goes something like: "we are doing xyz to defend against". My reaction is to ask whether xyz is also part of what the startup was trying to build in the first place. If the answer is no, then I will argue strongly that they shouldn't do it at all. ...
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Via: Continuations
VC at http://usv.com |
If you want your start-up to become the next big thing, it's not good enough to just build a great product. Unless you can afford to buy users, you'll have to grow virally. The difference between getting one of your new users to convince one friend to sign up and that person getting two new ...
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Co-Founder and CEO of @Yipit. Sharing lessons learned as a f |
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