After a couple weeks of learning lean startup methodologies, I’m left wondering about the value of comparing user first impressions to developed use (and doing so across customer archetypes) in order to discover and validate our customer base.
The business opportunity Pinyadda has recognized is the need for an information system that leverages an individual’s unique social graph to filter the firehose of news articles and blog posts published each day and deliver only the ones that would be most valuable. The Pinyadda team has built a base product that addresses this opportunity and which we believe solves several problems.
However, one of the first questions out of my mouth when I joined the team after using it almost every day for the 3 months prior was where the product fell on a spectrum from a tool (e.g. a better RSS reader) to a social network (e.g. a platform to see what others are reading and to recommend what I’m reading). Everyone seemed to have a similar answer: “We’re not entirely sure yet.” At first this made me a little anxious (“wait, we don’t know what we’re building?”). Then my wonderful colleagues introduced me to the lean startup—specifically the customer discovery and development aspect—and it all began coming together.
While admittedly new to these methodologies, it strikes me that there aren’t more discussions about the value of tracking customer use over time. I’m not totally convinced that you can ask a potential customer if they can or can’t live without a product after seeing a demo or using it just a couple of times. I think this is particularly the case for consumer-facing products and probably even more so for social products where the value to the individual grows as more and more people join.
After using Facebook for the first few times, for example, I would have never said “I can’t live without this.” Nor for Twitter. It took me a good month to “get” the networking value. When I was originally introduced to Pinyadda, the solution the platform offered that I initially locked onto was the ability to easily see/scan a feed of breaking news across a bunch of topics that interested me – no more going site by site to be the first to email news to my colleagues, no more newsletters, etc. After a couple weeks, though, I became totally addicted to using Pinyadda to see and discuss what other people were reading and to recommend the articles I found interesting. I can’t live without that aspect, but can without a feed of headlines.
The first impression is important but relatively unmeasurable unless compared to developed use. Why didn’t I recognize the value in Pinyadda that eventually made me a sticky user upon first visiting the site? And how can we ensure as we develop Pinyadda going forward that a given user “gets” on first impression the value that is going to make them sticky?
We’d like to explore this more so we’ve taken the core pillars of customer discovery and development and designed our own customer discovery initiative. We’re calling it the Visionary Members program and the end-goal is the same as outlined in lean startup; how we’re going about it, though, will layer on comparisons in first impressions about the product to developed use. If there are differences, we should understand why: because certain customer archetypes are inherently averse to changing their behavior, because a particular feature is more prominent, because of how the product flows, etc. The program will look like this:
(1) Intimately explore customer problems
(2) Study product use over an extended period of time (~30 days)
(3) Analyze results across archetypes
(4) Iterate on product accordingly
If we can understand the value Pinyadda offers after users have been using it at length, and understand why on first impression they perhaps used it/planned to use it differently, that’s great customer discovery and validation.
I’ll be working on a follow-up post that goes into the details of how we’re thinking about designing the Visionary Members program. For now, I’m wondering what you think about the value of comparing user first impressions to their developed use, and across customer archetypes, in order to discover and validate your customer. An obvious point of debate is that lean startup is fundamentally about being agile and moving quickly – a study over 3 or 4 weeks certainly isn’t continuous iteration. What about differences in importance of first impressions with social products vs. other products?
Tags: customer, Pinyadda, product/market fit