Adora Cheung is an American software developer. She is the co-founder and CEO of housecleaning business Homejoy. She talked about how to go from zero users to many users.
When you start a startup you should have a lot of time on your hands to concentrate on the startup. You should have a lot of compressed time for idea and developing sollutions to the problem that you are trying to solve.
1.Most people don’t want to share their ideas with others in the early beginning, they only want to build their ideas and, in the end, launch it on TechCrunch or somewhere like it. The discussions with other people about your idea help to receive a useful feedback and develop the idea through it.
2.For understand the problem in detailed, must be involved in the related industry. It helps to start seeing things that can be exploiting and things that are really inefficient and may provide a huge overhead cost. The founder should become an expert in the industry. The entrepreneur should separate a list of competitors, similar types of companies, and Google searching them and read every single article from research result.
3. It is essential to identify customer segments. In the beginning, concentrate a certain part of the customer base (e.g. teenage girls, soccer moms, teachers etc.) and understand their needs.
4. Before creating a product, it is important to storyboard out the user experience of how it’s going to solve the problem. After this the founder should build a minimum viable product. Minimal viable product (MVP)pretty much means what is the smallest feature set that you should build to solve the problem.
5. The second important thing is to know how to attract the potential costumer’s attention. The techniques for presenting are different, however the one point is significant, the description of product would be containing a few sentences mentioned which problem solved and would be underline the emotional benefits and most attractive parts of it.
6. Keep in touch with your customers via call, mail etc. make it a conversation and get to know them and get them to feel comfortable, implement their feedback, which is going to teach what features you need to completely change or what features you need to build.
7. Another important thing is the customer retention. The number of people that came in the door today, the number of people who are coming back tomorrow, the next day and so forth. Sometimes there is a shortage of collecting data. So a good leading indicator is actually collecting reviews and ratings, collecting some notion of nps, which is net promoter score.
Occasionally, it is difficult to figure out the reliable feedback, because the large number of your feedback written by your relatives, friends. So, if you want to get the best feedback, you just make someone pay for it.
Before launching a product, the entrepreneur should be building the product fast and should be optimizing the growth. There is no need to automate everything, try to building it manually at first.
It is necessary to listen to user feedback but when someone tells you to build a feature you shouldn’t go build it right away. You should understand why the user give this suggestion and what is the principal key for it.
For getting a lot of users need to:
- Learn one channel at a time.
- Iterate working channels
- Revisit failed channels
So there are three types of growth.
- Sticky,
- Viral,
- Paid growth
Sticky growth is trying to get your existing users to come back and pay you more or use you more. Viral growth is when people talk about you and tell ten other friends, and they like it. And the third is paid growth. If you happen to have money in the bank you’re going to be able to use part of that money to buy growth.
For measuring the growth use CLV (customer’s lifetime) and retention cohort analysis. It is basically the net revenue that a customer brings in the door over a period of time.
Just a reminder that you should take all advice as directionally good guidance, but every business is different. It is vital to focus on work and to believe your idea. Do not be afraid to make a mistake, this is help to be more attentive.Recall that the temporary brokenness is much better than permanent paralysis.
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