Courting Content, Not Controversy

This post co-written by Sarah Milstein and Eric Ries, co-hosts of The Lean Startup Conference. Our goal in hosting The Lean Startup Conference—which starts in just over two weeks—is to help entrepreneurs learn absolutely useful things from each other. For our participants to stay open to the unique ideas we’re presenting and to share the advice they each have, we need an environment that’s dynamic, professional and respectful. We believe most conference hosts aim to create a great atmosphere for learning. But as an endless number of conference episodes have shown, you can’t leave that to chance. Among the dozens of recent examples we’re aware of, here are just a few from 2013 alone that make the point: TechCrunch Disrupt kicked off with hackathon demos that…

via Start Up:

Courting Content, Not Controversy

This post co-written by Sarah Milstein and Eric Ries, co-hosts of The Lean Startup Conference.

Our goal in hosting The Lean Startup Conference—which starts in just over two weeks—is to help entrepreneurs learn absolutely useful things from each other. For our participants to stay open to the unique ideas we’re presenting and to share the advice they each have, we need an environment that’s dynamic, professional and respectful. We believe most conference hosts aim to create a great atmosphere for learning.

But as an endless number of conference episodes have shown, you can’t leave that to chance. Among the dozens of recent examples we’re aware of, here are just a few from 2013 alone that make the point:

• TechCrunch Disrupt kicked off with hackathon demos that included an app called “Titstare” and, separately, a guy on stage simulating masturbation. Whether intended as jokes, plenty of people saw them as far from funny.


• CES—the giant Consumer Electronics Show—was most noted for a booth in which four women were hired to appear in nothing but thongs, pasties and blue body paint. Thousands of attendees, men and women, tweeted and talked about why this and other, similar displays, made them uncomfortable.


• Rape jokes were directed at a woman on stage at a Microsoft’s E3 press conference.


• A woman was sexually assaulted by her boss during the drinking scene at a Ruby conference. (She detailed the event on her blog, and it was corroborated in posts by at least two witnesses. After receiving hundreds of rape and death threats in the comments on her post, she took it down. A small piece of the original post is quoted here.)


• We probably don’t need to remind you about Adria Richards’s experience at PyCon, where two men behind her during a keynote talk made sexual jokes. After reporting the incident via Twitter, she was subject not only to a tsunami of rape and death threats, but she was also fired and doxxed, which had additional ramifications. (We’re proud to have had hosted her as a speaker last year and a mentor this year.)

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Here’s a list from Courtney Stanton of other, similar episodes over the past few years. And here’s a “timeline of incidents” on the GeekFeminism Wiki dating back to 1973, plus a list of sexually objectifying presentations from the past decade. If you follow news around business conferences and those affiliated with the tech sector, you’ll know these examples are just the very tip of the iceberg.

We don’t want to be the conference hosts who have to write an apology after our event. We do want to do our best to actively support productive dialog among all conference participants. In line with our efforts toward transparency, and in hopes of encouraging other conference hosts to take pro-active measures to foster awesome professional spaces, here’s what we’re doing this year.

We’ve published our code of conduct, which lays out the conditions for participating in the conference for all us: speakers, sponsors, attendees, staff and volunteers. We invite you to take a look. As you’ll see, our code of conduct insists that conference participants think of ours as a professional event, and that everyone conducts themselves accordingly. That might mean that some of us have to think carefully before joking around, flirting with coworkers, taking pictures, etc. and err on the side of caution. We’re comfortable with that mild restriction. For the good of the community, we’re looking to create the most vibrant and thorough possible exchange of ideas, one in which a range of people are able to fully talk and listen.

Teresa Nielsen-Hayden—who is not only the foremost expert on managing online comments, but who also runs a blog with the best discussions perhaps on the whole internet—has pointed out that if you create an atmosphere in which anyone can say anything, you will necessarily give prominence to offensive comments and hateful behavior, because people who don’t like or can’t tolerate that sort of thing won’t participate. In other words, there’s a tradeoff when you have no rules. If there’s a tradeoff in having rules, and it’s that some of us will have to speak thoughtfully when in the public areas of events and, perhaps, apologize if we offend people, we’re all in favor of that exchange.

We train our staff, and we invite you to speak up. As far as we know, The Lean Startup Conference does not have a history of participants’ behaving in ways that would violate our code. But, frankly, we can’t be sure, because a common effect of harassment is that people feel they can’t or shouldn’t report it. We’re hoping to make it as easy as possible to speak up if you experience or see a problem. The code of conduct includes phone and email for our executive producer, who will contact the two of us immediately if she receives a report. In addition, we’re training our staff and volunteers on a straightforward procedure for responding to reports.

We review all speaker and sponsor materials for inappropriate imagery. The professional environment of the conference is established in no small part on the stage. To take in the material of the conference, attendees need to be able to feel open to what’s coming from the podium, not braced for potential shocks. So we’re aiming to ensure that any visual materials displayed on stage, or associated with the conference via sponsorship, fall within the range of what anyone would consider professionally appropriate. Lolcats: yes. Rape jokes: no.

Our speaker roster is diverse, setting a tone for the event. We’ve talked about this at some length recently, but to reiterate here, we have, through extensive outreach and a meritocratic application process, created a roster of speakers that is more than half women and people of color. We’ve also sought out new attendees by posting to a variety of mailing lists, and through partnerships with a number of organizations. We did not reach out to 4chan.

We’re limiting alcohol at onsite events. We want attendees to have fun, but this thing is not a frat party. And is should come as no surprise that many harassing, offensive actions at conferences take place at receptions and other events where alcohol has, by tradition, flowed freely. The Lean Startup Conference is addressing issues important to professionals, and that’s the tone we want to foster, including during social events. We’re thankful in particular to Pivotal Labs, which is sponsoring our reception on Monday, December 9 and is working with us to create networking opportunities that are effective, inviting, and work beautifully when you aren’t three drinks in.

By talking about our intentions, we hope to draw those of you who are eager to help us create a very lively scene at The Lean Startup Conference—one where you really can learn from each other and have an amazing time as your brain lights up. If you haven’t registered yet, please do so now. We want you to be part of this great event.

via Lessons Learned:

This post co-written by Sarah Milstein and Eric Ries, co-hosts of The Lean Startup Conference.Our goal in hosting The Lean Startup Conference—which starts in just over two weeks—is to help entrepreneurs learn absolutely useful things from each other. For our participants to stay open to the unique ideas we’re presenting and to share the advice they each have, we need an environment that’s dynamic, professional and respectful. We believe most conference hosts aim to create a great atmosphere for learning.But as an endless number of conference episodes have shown, you can’t leave that to chance. Among the dozens of recent examples we’re aware of, here are just a few from 2013 alone that make the point:TechCrunch Disrupt kicked off with hackathon demos that included an app called “Titstare” and, separately, a guy on stage simulating masturbation. Whether intended as jokes, plenty of people saw them as far from funny. CES—the giant Consumer Electronics Show—was most noted for a booth in which four women were hired to appear in nothing but thongs, pasties and blue body paint. Thousands of attendees, men and women, tweeted and talked about why this and other, similar displays, made them uncomfortable. Rape jokes were directed at a woman on stage at a Microsoft’s E3 press conference. A woman was sexually assaulted by her boss during the drinking scene at a Ruby conference. (She detailed the event on her blog, and it was corroborated in posts by at least two witnesses. …

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Courting Content, Not Controversy

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Wisdom from Hyper-growth Companies

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. Last week, we hosted a webcast conversation, Lean Startup for Growing Companies, with Eric Ries, Wyatt Jenkins of Shutterstock, and Ari Gesher of Palantir. The discussion focused on companies that have hit product-market fit and are growing fast—a topic for advanced entrepreneurs. But the information was critical for any early-stage company that hopes to reach that critical point and wants to be prepared when it comes. We’d like to share some highlights from the webcast and invite you to watch it in its entirety. There’s great information here about hiring, team structure, and best practices that will make you smarter. About Ari and Wyatt: Wyatt Jenkins is VP of Product at Shutterstock, a stock…

via Start Up:

Wisdom from Hyper-growth Companies

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.

Last week, we hosted a webcast conversation, Lean Startup for Growing Companies, with Eric Ries, Wyatt Jenkins of Shutterstock, and Ari Gesher of Palantir. The discussion focused on companies that have hit product-market fit and are growing fast—a topic for advanced entrepreneurs. But the information was critical for any early-stage company that hopes to reach that critical point and wants to be prepared when it comes. We’d like to share some highlights from the webcast and invite you to watch it in its entirety. There’s great information here about hiring, team structure, and best practices that will make you smarter.

About Ari and Wyatt: Wyatt Jenkins is VP of Product at Shutterstock, a stock photo site founded in 2003 that now encompasses twelve cross-functional teams and is one of the world’s largest two-sided marketplaces. Ari Gesher is a senior engineer at Palantir Technologies, creating data-mining software for government and financial clients. Palantir, founded in 2004, had 15 employees when Ari started there; it now has 1,000 employees and $1B in contracts. Wyatt and Ari will both be speaking at The Lean Startup Conference in December.

The first topic that came up is one that people in younger companies will want to know about—what’s hyper-growth actually like? What would it help to know about it before it happens?

Ari: “Having been through hyper-growth or exponential growth, you hear about these other organizations that have been through that and you look at your Googles and your Facebooks and you sort of knew them when they were smaller, and you see them as these behemoths. And what you don’t realize is that there’s almost no graceful way to go through that kind of growth. It’s painful no matter what. We had a year where we doubled size from around 400 to 800, and so you end this year where you have half the company’s been there for less than a year. And all the old ways of doing things are busting at their seams…. It’s a good problem to have. It means that hiring’s working, the business is working – but when you’re going at that speed and that growth, I think it’s something humans just weren’t even built for…. It’s going to be painful. And if there’s one lesson to take away, I guess it’s, ‘Know that it’s going to be painful, and don’t be afraid that that means you’re doing something wrong.’”

Wyatt: “There’s a certain point at which all the things you didn’t want to have to do when you started a company, you now not only have to do, but you have to do them well. You have to really know how to run a meeting, to keep it efficient and keep people wanting to go and be productive. You have to get really good at onboarding practices and the things that when you started a company you thought, I don’t want to do any of that, I just want to build stuff. But now suddenly all those soft skills become the key to your organization.”

Another portion of the conversation centered on the role Lean Startup techniques usually associated with smaller companies can have in a scaling business— specifically, a Five Whys (a technique for discovering the root causes of a failure, which Eric explains in detail in the webcast) and testing.

Ari: “We started doing Five Whys when we were I’d say probably around 100 people. And at that point I might argue you maybe don’t even need it. But it’s important to get it to start being part of the culture, because the point at which you need it is when you’re bigger, when you have a lot of complexity in the way the organization interacts, and the whole point of asking ‘why’ five times is that you’re going to come up with some really surprising results that have to do with everybody doing what they thought was right, but because of the way information doesn’t really flow or process interlocks… the problem is actually four or five layers deeper than where you thought it was. And that only happens at scale.”

Wyatt: “I think testing culture is one of the most important parts of keeping yourself Lean as you scale. And the reason is that people have a direct connection to results without having to go up and down the chain of command. When I meet companies that are struggling a lot with hierarchy or struggling with bureaucracy, a lot of the time the data and results about things are trapped in pockets of the organization and other parts of the organization have to fight to get at it. But if you have a true testing culture, whenever somebody says something in a meeting like, ‘I think X,’ and someone else goes, ‘That’s a nice hypothesis. Let’s go try that out,’ I think that healthy level of testing keeps you lean, it keeps you close to the customer, and that’s one of the things that I think helps us a lot – testing.

Hiring, recruiting, and training (or perhaps fostering – the correct term to use was hard to settle on) played a big role in this conversation. Having more employees doesn’t mean that each hire is less important – it means that the processes around hiring need to develop to meet the company’s needs. But those are constantly changing. So what goes into acquiring and supporting the best employees?

Wyatt: “One thing I try to avoid is dogmatism. If somebody’s really into a process, like really, really into it, to where they’re inflexible, they’re probably not ready for a hyper-growth organization, because whatever it is you’re dogmatic about, it ain’t gonna work in another six months. So when I see that dogmatism I immediately recognize that, wow, this person’s going to have trouble when we’re a completely different company in a year. I always like to look back at my own job and say, you know, I’m doing a completely different job today than I was a year ago, and the year before that, and the year before that. That’s hyper-growth. And in hyper-growth, I promise you whatever you hold near and dear will be incorrect – soon.”

Ari: “You can’t train people to have a different mindset…. The important thing to do as leaders is bring in priming, to give people permission to be uncomfortable. To say, hey, we’re gonna go through this, and some stuff’s gonna be broken, don’t freak out. It’s when they’re not ready for it, when they’re not aware that that doesn’t mean that there’s actually anything existentially wrong, [that you have a problem]….. The psychological effect of priming is really important. If you give people a framework on which to hang their experiences before they encounter them, it makes it much easier for them to digest them and understand them as they encounter [them].”

Though a company may expand from two to 2,000, Eric, Wyatt and Ari all agreed on the importance of maintaining a structure of small, cross-functional teams, rather than siloed divisions (for more on that, see our last webcast on Lean Startup in the Enterprise).

Wyatt: “We’re still in love with the ‘two-pizza team’…just in general if it takes more than two pizzas to feed the team, the team’s too big. We like our teams to be small, relatively autonomous, very autonomous in some cases, depending on the kind of work they’re doing. We treat the teams like startups, we like that ‘us against the world’ mentality of small, autonomous teams.” And, later: “I don’t think we can say that enough: Let the product team figure out what they’re building. If you’re trying to micro-manage that on a high level, across lots of teams, you’re not smart enough [to pull it off], I promise. You really have to point into a direction, have a few high-level metrics, and let your teams fill in the gaps, let them be autonomous. That was a big lesson for me, at least.”

Ari, on creating community while maintaining multiple teams: “We foster all kinds of extra-curricular activities, everything from people doing tabletop games to sponsoring a team in a basketball league to having video game rooms. A lot of these things exist here and they may look like perks…but they’re actually about building the non-obvious links, the non-formal links between teams to really start to create a community. And I think everything you can do to invest in making that place – a business – actually a community, where people live their lives and meet each other, and have a lot of trust – that goes a long way toward making the company feel smaller. And then you get people to be able to lean on those relationships. So maybe you have a team of five people that work close together, and you need something from another team, and one person, well they play Halo together after dinner. And so it’s easy to have that conversation, to break through that ‘stranger barrier’ you get at scale.”

Finally, some last words of wisdom from Eric on the basics of creating a culture of experimentation:

Eric: “People listening in, you’re hearing a lot of cultural and practical tips that are applicable to the stage of company that these guys are at now, and I’m trying to throw in my two cents every once in a while based on companies that I’ve seen. But if you just go and you say, ‘Ok, I’ve learned that we should have a culture of experimentation,’ and you put up posters in your office saying, ‘Ok, everybody, starting today we’re going to have a culture of experimentation!’ You’ll have absolutely no impact whatsoever. One of the things I really believe in is something called the Startup Way, which is just a diagram that helps me remember how to invest in change from the bottom up rather than mandating it from the top down. And it goes like this: Accountability; Process; Culture; People – in that order. It’s the foundation of how we hold people accountable; determines what kind of [experiments] we can and can’t use, what kind of process and infrastructure we will or won’t invest in – obviously if you hold people accountable only for quick, short-term results, then if there’s no long-term philosophy then there’s no point ever in investing in long-term infrastructure, for example. But if you don’t make those process investments, if you don’t have a system for testing hypotheses, you’re never going to get a culture of experimentation and hypothesis-driven development. And if you have an old, Dilbert-styled culture, you’re never really going to be able to retain the best people for the long term.

“So when people say, ‘The solution to having a high-growth company is to hire good people,’ that’s true. When people say, ‘You have to have a culture of experimentation,’ also true. ‘You need to really invest in infrastructure and tools,’ yup, that’s correct. And when they say, ‘You need to hold people accountable, not to vanity metrics, but to learning milestones,’ yup, that’s true. All four of those things are the one thing you have to do to have a high-growth, successful company. It’s just that there’s more than one number-one high-priority thing, because each of those is an interlocking part of the system. You can’t really do one without the other, or if you try, God help you.”

–

Watch the rest of the webcast—and register for The Lean Startup Conference—for more specific information on all these topics. We sell conference tickets in blocks; when one block sells out, the price goes up. Register today for the best price possible.

via Lessons Learned:

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.Last week, we hosted a webcast conversation, Lean Startup for Growing Companies, with Eric Ries, Wyatt Jenkins of Shutterstock, and Ari Gesher of Palantir. The discussion focused on companies that have hit product-market fit and are growing fast—a topic for advanced entrepreneurs. But the information was critical for any early-stage company that hopes to reach that critical point and wants to be prepared when it comes. We’d like to share some highlights from the webcast and invite you to watch it in its entirety. There’s great information here about hiring, team structure, and best practices that will make you smarter.About Ari and Wyatt: Wyatt Jenkins is VP of Product at Shutterstock, a stock photo site founded in 2003 that now encompasses twelve cross-functional teams and is one of the world’s largest two-sided marketplaces. Ari Gesher is a senior engineer at Palantir Technologies, creating data-mining software for government and financial clients. Palantir, founded in 2004, had 15 employees when Ari started there; it now has 1,000 employees and $1B in contracts. Wyatt and Ari will both be speaking at The Lean Startup Conference in December.The first topic that came up is one that people in younger companies will want to know about—what’s hyper-growth actually like? What would it help to know about it before it happens?Ari: “Having been through hyper-growth or exponential growth, you hear about these other organizations that have been through that and you look at your Googles and your Facebooks and you sort of knew them when they were smaller, and you see them as these behemoths. And what you don’t realize is that there’s almost no graceful way to go through that kind of growth. …

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Wisdom from Hyper-growth Companies

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Rapid Iteration for Mobile App Development

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. As we’ve mentioned before, this year’s Lean Startup Conference features a lot of speakers who have incredible expertise to share but are new to our event. Mariya Yao is one such speaker. She’s the founder and Creative Director at Xanadu, a mobile strategy and design consultancy helping to guide app developers to success in a rapidly-changing, often chaotic mobile ecosystem. We asked her a few questions about how mobile developers can measure and address their product’s performance in an environment that is both incredibly competitive and rapidly changing. She provided some basic answers for us here and will go into more depth at the conference. LSC: You’ve spoken before about strategic failures–where people build the…

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Rapid Iteration for Mobile App Development

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.

As we’ve mentioned before, this year’s Lean Startup Conference features a lot of speakers who have incredible expertise to share but are new to our event. Mariya Yao is one such speaker. She’s the founder and Creative Director at Xanadu, a mobile strategy and design consultancy helping to guide app developers to success in a rapidly-changing, often chaotic mobile ecosystem.

We asked her a few questions about how mobile developers can measure and address their product’s performance in an environment that is both incredibly competitive and rapidly changing. She provided some basic answers for us here and will go into more depth at the conference.

LSC: You’ve spoken before about strategic failures–where people build the wrong product–versus tactical fails, where people build the product wrong. This is a great distinction; so how can a mobile app developer know which of these is their particular problem? In other words, are there dead giveaways that the problem with an app is strategic rather than tactical?

Mariya: A strategic failure occurs when–as Paul Graham is fond of saying–you build a product no one wants. This means that you can’t easily get users through the door despite solid marketing efforts, they aren’t proactively inviting their friends and colleagues, or no one is paying for your product. A tactical failure occurs when you do grow quickly or easily attract passionate users, but see major drop-offs at key points in product usage due to poor implementation and user experience.

When you build a product that is clearly performing poorly from the get-go and you’ve ruled out basic technical, marketing, or executive issues, it’s very likely the product is a strategic fail. However, what often happens is a startup builds a product people like but don’t love. They’ll typically appear to do well early on, but won’t have enough of a passionate following to achieve meaningful growth or revenues.

There are two questions that I recommend startups use to differentiate between being liked versus being loved. First is the question Sean Ellis popularized, where you ask your users, “How disappointed would you be if you could no longer use our product?” and have them answer with either, “Very Disappointed,” “Somewhat Disappointed,” “Not Disappointed,” or “I no longer use the product.” Sean did research across hundreds of startups and discovered that companies that had fewer than 40% of their users answer “Very Disappointed” tended to struggle with building a successful and sustainable business.

The second question is known as the Net Promoter Score, where you ask your users, “On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend us to your friends?” You mark those who answer 0-6 as Detractors, 9-10 as Promoters, and 7-8 as Neutral. Your Net Promoter score is the percent of Promoters minus your percentage of Detractors, which should be a number between -100 and +100. The world’s most successful companies typically score around +50, and top performing tech companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon regularly score over +70.

LSC: You’ve also spoken before about the fact that mobile apps suffer a major dropoff in engagement between opening the app and registering it. When that happens, what has a developer typically failed to validate before this step? How can they test for this in the app development?

Mariya: The drop-off between opening the app and registering tends to occur because an app developer doesn’t clearly communicate the value of their app before demanding that a user put in work to register an account. This is a violation of the “give before you take” principle that governs social interactions.

For example, you’ll often see apps where the very first screen is a Facebook-only login screen. Most of the time, all you see here is the title of the app, some vague background image or tagline, and this big Facebook Connect button. While social registration can be easier than regular registration, you’re also asking users to give you access to their social data before you’ve clearly shown them WHAT your app does and communicated clearly WHY they should hand over sensitive information.

Imagine if a random stranger comes up to, someone you know nothing about, and immediately demands to know your birthday, your relationship status, and all your friend’s email addresses. Obviously that’d be wildly off-putting and you’d refuse his request. That behavior is socially awkward for people AND socially awkward for apps, and the numbers show this. The typical drop-off rate at these kinds of Facebook-only login screens is about 30% and I’ve even seen cases where it is over 50%.

My advice for developers who want to combat this immediate drop-off is to test different kinds of onboarding flows for brand new users and try to delay registration until user data is absolutely needed. There are many apps that deliver plenty of utility and value without mandating that a user create an account up front. Great examples include Yelp and Flipboard. Others like Airbnb allow you to browse listings to your heart’s content and only require registration when you are at the last step of completing a booking. That said, there will always be categories of apps — such as social networks or messaging apps — that require a user’s identity in order to deliver value. In those cases, I’d recommend testing very short “Learn more” overviews prior to registration and optimizing your social invite flows, as they will often be the most compelling ways to get new users over the registration hurdle.

If a developer has a live product with sufficient usage already in the market, I’d recommend running several split tests with delayed registration if he or she hasn’t already. For developers who are still in early ideation phases and are building utility apps that don’t require user identification, one quick way to get early feedback is to create a multitude of paper prototypes on index cards that test different opening flows and show them to potential users in the app’s intended context. For apps that are social or require a user’s identity to be useful, a prototype needs to be more fully fleshed out to give meaningful test results. Here I’d recommend developers build as minimal as possible of an HTML5 app, hook up all the requisite analytics, and test as early as possible for retention on the core action loop they want their users to take. For less technical developers, I’ll be covering some methods and tools to get functional prototypes built with less dependency on engineering know-how.

LSC: You do a lot of work in helping app developers create longterm engagement. Do you have examples of app-specific measures that developers really should pay attention to (and maybe generally don’t) in order to validate customers’ engagement?

Mariya: Compared to desktop usage patterns, mobile apps tend to see more frequent sessions but significantly lower session lengths. For example, a product that has both a desktop and a mobile presence might see desktop users visit 10-20 times a month for session lengths of over 10 minutes on average, whereas on mobile they might see users visit 30-50 times a month for less than 60 seconds at a time.

Another difference you’ll see is that people will visit hundreds of websites in a month on desktop, but their bandwidth for apps is much more limited. On mobile, despite the fact that there are millions of offerings in the app stores, the average consumer only uses about 15-20 different apps per week on a regular basis. There’s a limit on both the real estate on a mobile user’s home screen and their capacity for adopting new apps for habitual use.

Thus for many types of mobile apps, the holy grail is to become a daily habit for users. For your app category, you want to be the “go-to” app that users depend on. Aim to get your users to come back every day, maybe even multiple times a day, in order to have a shot at broad long-term retention. A popular metric for measuring retention in the mobile games industry is DAU / MAU, or daily active users divided by monthly active users, and I highly recommend that consumer-facing mobile app developers keep track of that metric as well.

LSC: How can app developers, particularly those working in a cross-platform environment, quickly test and validate new features and processes?


Mariya: Moving quickly across multiple platforms is tough because development and testing are both so much slower and more bug-prone than on desktop or a single platform. Generally speaking, I’d advise developers to focus on nailing the product experience on a single platform first before becoming too ambitious on the cross-platform front, but occasionally you come across apps whose value comes from being ubiquitous.

Regardless of what app or feature you want to test, I’d recommend you first follow Eric’s advice in The Lean Startup and clearly identify your hypotheses and unanswered questions. Then you should decide effective ways to test your assumptions and pre-determine what your metrics of success should be in order for you to make a go or no-go decision to build. Much of this is the same whether you are building for mobile or web, though on mobile there are some specific tactics and tools you can use to prototype aspects of your new products or features quickly that I’ll share in my talk at the Lean Startup Conference. I shamelessly encourage all of you to attend my session on “Rapid Iteration on Mobile” if you’d like to learn more.

LSC: Let’s say an app has 2,000 monthly active users and a simple function those people like—but the developer has done some testing and thinks there’s a much bigger market in a related but different product. How would you recommend that the developer pivot to the new idea without losing all of the existing customers?

Mariya: My advice would heavily depend on the resources–time, money, and engineering prowess–that the app developer has available and what the growth metrics and business model look like for this existing app with 2,000 MAU. For the vast majority of social games or consumer-facing mobile products, 2,000 MAU is probably too low of a user base to sustain a real business model as typically only 1%-5% of your users will convert to paying customers and advertisers aren’t usually enticed into partnerships unless your numbers are well into the millions. If there aren’t real drivers of long-term growth behind this app, it may be the right (albeit incredibly tough) strategic decision to pursue a higher potential market even if it means abandoning some early wins.

That said, there are many ways to test new products and markets relatively cheaply so any major pivoting decision can and should be vetted thoroughly. If the new app idea is closely related to the existing one, the app developer should try cross-promoting the new product to his existing user base. 2,000 MAU is a ripe field for recruiting potential users and conducting user research and usability studies. He or she may even choose to launch the product in parallel with the existing one if the company can manage to do this without sacrificing too much momentum or morale. By comparing the live performance of both products in the market, you’ll get the most accurate data to inform your strategic product decisions.

For an existing product on mobile, there are many ways to segment your audience to test new features. One of the most popular is to release an app in a limited number of countries, such as Canada or New Zealand, prior to a global launch. Another is to “white-label” your app and release parallel apps in the same market that test different value propositions. Yet another is to test with mobile web apps or Android apps first prior to officially launching. For example, pushing new changes out on Android is typically much faster than with iOS so it’s popular, especially with mobile game developers, to fine-tune apps on Android rather than starting with iOS.

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Learn more at The Lean Startup Conference, December 9 – 11 in San Francisco. Register today.

via Lessons Learned:

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.As we’ve mentioned before, this year’s Lean Startup Conference features a lot of speakers who have incredible expertise to share but are new to our event. Mariya Yao is one such speaker. She’s the founder and Creative Director at Xanadu, a mobile strategy and design consultancy helping to guide app developers to success in a rapidly-changing, often chaotic mobile ecosystem.We asked her a few questions about how mobile developers can measure and address their product’s performance in an environment that is both incredibly competitive and rapidly changing. She provided some basic answers for us here and will go into more depth at the conference.LSC: You’ve spoken before about strategic failures–where people build the wrong product–versus tactical fails, where people build the product wrong. This is a great distinction; so how can a mobile app developer know which of these is their particular problem? In other words, are there dead giveaways that the problem with an app is strategic rather than tactical?Mariya: A strategic failure occurs when–as Paul Graham is fond of saying–you build a product no one wants. This means that you can’t easily get users through the door despite solid marketing efforts, they aren’t proactively inviting their friends and colleagues, or no one is paying for your product. A tactical failure occurs when you do grow quickly or easily attract passionate users, but see major drop-offs at key points in product usage due to poor implementation and user experience.When you build a product that is clearly performing poorly from the get-go and you’ve ruled out basic technical, marketing, or executive issues, it’s very likely the product is a strategic fail. However, what often happens is a startup builds a product people like but don’t love. They’ll typically appear to do well early on, but won’t have enough of a passionate following to achieve meaningful growth or revenues.There are two questions that I recommend startups use to differentiate between being liked versus being loved. …

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Rapid Iteration for Mobile App Development

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