Is My Baby Ugly? How to Figure out if it’s Time to Pivot
•Download as KEY, PDF•
1 like•869 views
Should you think about pivoting? I shared some thoughts and a frank view of how we arrived at a decision to pivot from SnapGoods to Knodes. This talk was given at the Hard Candy Shell & Fanfeedr Product Insights Conference on October 7th.
Recommended
More Related Content
Similar to Is My Baby Ugly? How to Figure out if it’s Time to Pivot
Similar to Is My Baby Ugly? How to Figure out if it’s Time to Pivot (20)
More from Ron J Williams
More from Ron J Williams (7)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Is My Baby Ugly? How to Figure out if it’s Time to Pivot
- 1. Is My Baby Ugly? How to Figure out if it’s Time to Pivot
- 2. I see solutions everywhere
- 3. In fact I once made a bolo
- 4. Great Idea ≠ Successful Product
- 5. Successful Product ≠ Great Idea
- 6. Every business is awesome... Ki+en Mi+ens! 60mm cats in US ALONE 3.8 paws per cat =$228mm market ...at scale
- 7. When do you reassess? FROM DAY 1 NEVER STOP
- 8. Are you on an ugly baby trajectory? Day 1 Not Long Really??
- 9. Identify your ‘Live or Die’ Metrics Check‐ins? Impressions? OR Downloads? Sales? Posts? Referrals?
- 10. For SnapGoods, it’s transactions NO TCH MA
- 11. So we started watching trends with intense “funnel vision” Your numbers mean nothing without ‘Live or Die’ trend context
- 12. Don’t be distracted by Vanity! We’re growing! 300+ new users/day Pages per visit are high! 7.5/visit Just featured in the Media...Again
- 13. Break it down! TransacYons come from Matching Supply & Demand which happens faster when...
- 14. ...you tell your users to post their needs/actions socially, RIGHT? But our Conversion as % of socially Shared Links SUCKED
- 15. Instead of ...Target specific peeps ...ShouYng based on social data to the crowd...
- 16. So we built Knodes (http://knod.es) Now your networks actually work when you need to know something.
- 17. But also found that other people wanted Knodes for themselves Who’s at the door??
- 18. So we got out of the building and started listening Customer development. Customer ValidaYon.
- 19. We decided to follow the money And lower fricYon And scalability And extensibility First group of paying pilot customers lined up
- 20. Sometimes Ugly is Relative
- 21. 1 Dig into your business’ data 2 Assess your timelines 3 Consider your trajectory 4 Analyze your points of leverage Follow me on TwiEer @ronjdub
Editor's Notes
- My name, company, success\nHere to talk about how you might consider taking a good hard look at your creation. your brainchild. your baby. and decide to chuck it or change it substantially.\n
- I wanted to borrow a bike and a friend didn’t have one, so I convinced a man on craigslist to lend me one. That was the basis for SnapGoods.com. The safest way to rent or borrow gear from anyone nearby.\n
- \n
- Microsoft bought WebTV for $450mm in cash and stock in 1997. It saw the writing on the wall that tv and web would converge. It just did a crappy job of making something consumers were excited about.\n
- In 1973, Dahl established Rock Bottom Productions, a company that sold the rocks for US$3.98 $13.00 in 2011 bucks\nIn first six months $15mm in sales = $60mm today\n\n
- or like, if you capture 100% of the market. But where are you at now? sub 1%? \n\nEasy to talk about what your business WILL look like. Are you tracking to achieve in a timeframe you can live with?\n
- You should be estanlishing a culture of data driven decision making from the first day. You will get some of the things that you should be watching wrong but that’s ok. You’ll learn as you go. We were pretty jazzed about time on site when we started until we realized you couldn’t pay rackspace with time on site metrics.\n
- or like, if you capture 100% of the market. But where are you at now? sub 1%? \n\n\n
- These are the things that your business ultimately must excel in to live and get to scale.\n\nFor us it was transactions. SnapGoods is ultimately a network of needs and haves\n
- That means matching supply and demand AND geographic proximity. No good if you have the surfboard I need in Honolulu and I’m trying to surf out at Rockaway Beach\n
- first derivative - what’s your current rate of change\nsecond derivative - Is this + or - or 0\nWe were positive on both but not enough to be anything like a gerber baby curve\n
- Ever heard of a company that reports it’s Earnings to Media coverage ratios? Exactly. The challenge is is you\n20K plus users about 25% of whom have activated and posted\nBut even though users are in the thousands, transactions are in the hundreds.\n
- understand your operating leverage. where can you gain unfair advantage?\n
- \n
- Maybe our assumptions are wrong about the efficacy of tweeting and facebook status updating blindly and broadly. let’s us the data.\n
- We take the data (conversations, pictures, profile data) that you have access to and give you insights about everything from expertise to referrals. When I need a motorcycle now, I jump on Knodes and it lets me know that 26 ppl to whom I’m connected can hook me up. We found a way to drive targeted requests. Better matches.\n
- 3rd party application makers across a couple of verticals looking for ways to extract more information from their users’ social graphs \n
- \n
- We can make customers of former competitors\nWe can open up new markets\nUnique opportunity to leave SnapGoods alone and still see it grow even while we focus 100 of our product engineer and partnership efforts on Knodes\n
- No absolut formula\nBy definition as an entrepreneur and/or creative thinker you’re pre-disposed not to listen \nDid the Wright Brothers ditch their flight project after their first few failed attempts? Did Jay Z give up on rap when no-one would sign him?\nYou and your team have to assess for yourselves\n
- No absolut formula\nBy definition as an entrepreneur and/or creative thinker you’re pre-disposed not to listen \nDid the Wright Brothers ditch their flight project after their first few failed attempts? Did Jay Z give up on rap when no-one would sign him?\nYou and your team have to assess for yourselves\n