If you are founding a start up you should definitely read Start up Marketing, Sean Ellis' blog. Here is an amazing crystal clear presentation by Sean for a Berkeley MBA class.
Here are the things I liked in those slides. For each point I tried to share BetKlub's specific situation :
- Slide 1 : "Traction is tough" -> That's so true. Even with the perfect product (which nobody has) and an identified niche, traction is very tough !
- Slide 1 : "Most early marketing effort wasted" -> Most, not ALL ! Anyway we have to do those marketing effort. That's all we have !
- Slide 3 : "Focus on right metrics and optimize" -> That's exactly what we're trying to do and it works (at some point...).
- Slides 6 to 11 : Product/Market fit -> Both the hardest and most crucial step. "Life of a startup can be devided into two parts : Before P/M fit and after P/M fit" (founder of Netscape)
Message to investors : Interesting to note that PayPal spent almost $5m dollars to find its P/M fit !
- Slide 7 : "P/M fit is when 1/ people want/need your product 2/ your product is differentiated 3/ Users will pay for your product" -> It's hard to have the 2 first conditions, it's even harder to get to the third one !
On this long road to customer development I think BetKlub is slowly getting out of the "P/M fit" phase. Some people already want our social betting product. I think the latter is differentiated from alternatives and we are working on getting users to pay for it.
- Slide 12 to final : "Transition to growth and growth". We are looking forward to reaching those stages ! ;-)
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