Huge thanks to David Cancel and Performable for sponsoring the lunch!

———-

If you’re a startuper or marketer in Boston I’d like to invite you to join us this week at Performable’s 3rd Customer Development Lunch, this Tuesday (January 26th, 2010) at 12:30pm.

We’ll be welcoming serial entrepreneur and fellow marketing metrics geek Dan Martell to Boston. Dan is a canadian entrepreneur now residing in Silicon Valley; he is the co-founder of FlowTown a social email discovery platform.

Our first Customer Development Lunch featured our Advisor, Sean Ellis, and was graciously hosted and sponsored by Spark Capital. Our second lunch featured Jonathan Mendez and was hosted by our friends at Compete and sponsored by Charles River Ventures. This lunch with Dan Martell will be hosted by our friends at TechStars Boston and sponsored by Performable.

Please register on EventBrite if you can attend this Tuesday: Customer Development Lunch with Dan Martell.

———-

Originally posted at Making something from nothing by David Cancel

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As a startup advisor and angel investor, one of the first things I try and teach every entrepreneur, is the importance of keeping advisors and investors in the loop.  With that in mind, I’ve created an email template that you should consider using.

Benefits of sending update emails

• Have you’re advisers solve problems for you
• No surprises, surprises are bad
• Let your advisers celebrate your successes
• Good news will go farther [lets us promote you!]

Best format and frequency

• Put your most important challenges at the top
• Short and sweet
• Make it “Skimable” [bullets!]
• Every 3 weeks (or if there’s any major issues news).

Other Tips

• Share your Google Analytics
• Run semi-annual advisory dinners (Thx @msuster)

COPY/PASTE

===================================
+ Top 3 Challenges
+ Metrics
+ Whats New / In The News
===================================

> Top 3 Challenges
1. Getting Press
2. Hiring Biz Dev
3. Building Sales Team

> Metrics
1. Revenue / Target
2. Return Usage / Retention

> Whats New / In The News
1. [Source] - [Title] [Shortend URL]
2. Hired Rails Programmer (@username)
3. New Customer - Fortune 500 company

===================================

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I’m not a football “guy”.  Actually, the only thing I like about footballs are the inspirational movies, great quotes, and cheerleaders (yep, guilty). However, here’s a startup analogy involving football: having the ball, taking a hit, rolling [bouncing] (without touching your knee to the ground) and continuing your charge forward!  That’s the mental movie I see when I think about startups.

Run. Run. Hit. Run. Hit. Hit. Run -> End Zone!

We get hit - stuff doesn’t work out - yet we keep pushing forward.  The only time you stop is if you give up (i.e. knee touches the ground).

Note: Personal story about Flowtown below

Pivots

A product pivot is like taking a hit and changing directions.  The idea is better described here using a basketball analogy - but I think it’s more than that. To me, It’s the equivelent of taking a hit (no product traction) and spinning (product pivot) to find another path at the end-zone (product market fit).

Customers Development

Created by Steve Blank allows startups to follow a methodology that should, in essence, reduce the amounts of time “hits” you need to take, to reach the end-zone (touchdown! [insert dance]).

Different Types of “Pivots”

I believe 2 types of “pivots” exist. Customer Development (feedback) led pivots, and Vision (management) led pivots. Arguably, the vision led pivots may have started by customer feedback - but it’s not so obvious on the outside. [again, I have no proof, other then what I have read].

Here are some examples:

Customer Development Pivots

• YouTube: Video Dating Site -> Video Site (/w Embed Feature)
• Flickr: Massive Multiplayer Online Game -> Photos (USA Today Story)
• Rapleaf: Reputation Engine -> Customer Insight for Marketers
• Imeem:
• Nintendo: Trading cards -> Electronic games
• Spokeo.com (feed reader for your friend to people search) http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/spokeo/
• tailrank -> spinn3r (consumer media company to b2b service provider)

Vision Led Pivots

• PotBelly Sandwich Company (Antique shop -> Sandwiches)
• TwitVid.com (Read below)
• Wikipedia: Life begans as nupedia, and vison led pivot to wikipedia.
• Berkshire Hathaway: Cotton mills to investments
• Pixar: Pixar Image Computer -> Animation Studio
• Apple: macs -> ipods -> iphones -> itablets (? I liked it, not 100% sure)
• .. and many tech startups {You know who you are, yes I’m talking about you. It’s all good - but recognize}

If you still want more, read: Surprising first products of 14 famous companies

Story: www.OneRiot.com

Two years ago, they launched as Med.ium - a browser plugin to allow you to view what your friends where navigating online in realtime - which they eventually pivoted to a real time search engine.

Listen to Kimbal Musk (Founder) talk about the pivot (@kimbal)

Story: www.twitvid.com

Adil Lalani (Co-Founder) via email: “Pivoting is something we’ve been doing for quite some time (although we never called it a “pivot”). So one example is my company: EatLime.com switching to TwitVid.com. Here’s an article that briefly talks about our switch to twitvid: Twitter Hype Trickle-Down Provides Boost To TwitVid ( btw that valuation in the article is old. )”

Our Pivot: Flowtown.com

We thought we were listening to the market, but we realized there was a HUGE difference between what we thought people wanted, and what they were willing to $ pay for (= how we measure traction).  We had 700+ registered accounts, however, only a small percent converted to paid accounts (very small).

Long story short. We threw out 3.5 months of code (video), built a new solution www.flowtown.com and brought it to market (pivot).

The results: 11,063.35% increase in revenue in our first month. That should tell you how bad it was before ;-).

Conclusion

• Decide what traction means to you.
• Do Customer Development (CD) (or whatever you choose to call it)
• Don’t be afraid to change directions (a.k.a pivot)
• Don’t drop your knee [quit]. Ever!

P.S. For the record, doing a pivot doesn’t always work. Just saying.

P.P.S Thanks to the following peeps who provided insight to the examples above.

Jon Boutelle, Co-Founder of Slideshare.net

Jason Calacainis, Founder of Mahalo + ThisWeekInStartups.com

James Sherrett, Founder & CEO AdHack

Jon Bischke, Founder of EduFire

Marcus Nelson, Salesforce.com

Richard Mordini - Javaelin VP

Helen Zhu, Founder of Chictopia

Raj Gajwani

Christiaan Vorkink - True Ventures

Jonathan Abrams, Founder of Socializr, Friendster

John Anderson, CEO of GroupCard

Joshua Brewer, SocialCast.com

Steve Jang

Garry Tan, Co-Founder of Posterous

Arjun Dev Arora, Founder of ReTargeter

Rodney Carvalho, Founder of ScrumNinja

Julien Genestoux, Founder of SuperFeedr

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Here are my slides from the presentation I gave at Startonomics (Hawaii) event.  This was all part of the amazing [re]Think Hawaii conference.  Amazing people, ideas and yes - venue [pool side ;-)!

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