Thread by @TimKipchumba

Startup Goal:

Learn what to Build to meet customer needs

How:
-Generate ideas
-Build ideas into products.
-Turn products into engine of growth.

- @ericries

Most important Questions when building a startup

- What do we BUILD that offers validated value?
-How do other customers get to know?

Most important activity early on:

-Get out and speak to customers!

Brutally Measure where you are NOW.

&

Keep experimenting to know how to move that metric to where you need to be.

An MVP, minimum viable product is the cheapest, easiest way to get a client to pay for the solution that solves the problem.

MVP should help test value for the customer and how to grow

Avoid vanity metrics. Totals or cumulative metrics rarely show much.

-profit/customer
-cost of acquiring a customer
-repeat purchase rate
-%conversion rates
-customer lifetime value

Focus on metics that move the needle on Value and Growth.

Use them to create milestone

At some point , if you can see that customers find value and you can grow in a way that is sustainable (profit is generated to be reinvested), you are good to go. If not, the 2 primary questions will still be important for decide whether to persevere or pivot.

Pivots are change of strategy decisions and not necessarily change of product. Change of product is more feature oriented. And tools like
- Split testing or A/B testing make it easy to see customer behavior change from a feature change.

Pivots on the other hand may mean:
Changing customer.
Changing growth model.
Changing market /use altogether

Here it something else starts to matter:

Runway. No of months or pivots you can still make before running out of cash

According to @ericries if you had clear Learning Milestones and Hypothesis: you will be ready to make a pivot. And they can take the form of

Zoom-in Pivot; feature becomes product
Zoom-out Pivot; features added
Customer segment pivot; changing the customer we serve

Customer Need PiVot: we change problem we are solving
Platform Pivot; change from app to a platform (app for other apps /clients)
Business architecture pivot: high margin, low volume or low margin, high volume
Value capture pivot; changing how company makes $ /monetizes.

More and more ways to PIVOt exit. But even more important is to be able to tell when to pivot. That requires a clear experiment designed before