At Lean Startup Meetup Karlsruhe I gave a presentation about my first insights reading Ben Yoskovitz and Alistair Croll’s new book “Lean Analytics“. I think this book is a great addition to available startup literature, since it not only provides theoretical insights about metrics for startups, but also clear numbers founders in a given business and stage can look up to see how they are doing.
Watch the presentation here:
What do you think? Have you already read Lean Analytics?
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We all want to be read, heard, we all want as much people as possible to engage with our content. That’s easier said than done: In a world with decreasing attention spans on the one side, and millions of marketers and brands wooing potential customers on the other side, it can be really hard to find people who actually care about what you are doing. High-quality content alone isn’t a proven recipe for success – it’s just a requirement.
But how do we get the people to read (and engage with) our content? I analyzed highly successful posts of a facebook page I have been running until February and found an interesting pattern that I want to share with you. At the end of this post I will show you how I crafted a post with this pattern that reached way above average results.
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I know, we are all tired of lean startup evangelism. We all know its principles, its benefits, and its problems. As I am running the monthly lean startup meetups in Karlsruhe since April 2012 I should really be aware of the importance of applying those methods. I read all the books, tons of blog posts, talked about it with likeminded people over hours, conducted presentations – I can barely guess how much time I spent soaking in those principles for a better understanding of how good products can be built. And it was worth it. I thought.
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Movember is a phenomenon. Started as a funny idea by Adam Garone and his brother in 2003 it rapidly grew into a great community since then. With positive effects: In 2011 there have been 124 million $ donated for prostate cancer research causes. I tried it out last November and it has been quite an overwhelming experience from a marketing but also a self improvement perspective. For me as a marketing guy it is very interesting how and why a simple idea like “Let’s grow a mustache in November” could evolve like this and become a worldwide movement. In my opinion Movember is a great example for a sticky idea, a great community by accident, and built-in virality. A case study.
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While reading Lukas Fittl‘s great post about the ideation switch I found that there are a lot of similarities between the transformation from ideation into execution and the transformation from a macro-learning culture before problem/solution fit into a product improvement culture when product/market fit is tried to be reached (and beyond). In the following I will describe my thoughts about this second switch founders have to push, regarding the local maxima problem.
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This is not about the AAA’s of Metrics – Actionable, Auditable, Accessible, which in my opinion is basic knowledge for everyone who wants to drive successful data-driven decisions. In this post I want to dive deeper into what metrics really are designed for and how they can be used. There is a lot more than just being actionable - or let’s say a metric needs to fulfill a lot more than just being a ratio until it finally can be called actionable.
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I am currently working on my bachelor’s thesis about “Metrics Design for SaaS Startups”. While interviewing a lot of founders I found out that almost everyone thinks metrics are really important for product management decisions. Then again, I still have the strong feeling that a lot of founders just scratch the surface now and then and lack a systematic and regular approach to use metrics for decision making.
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The sixth Lean Startup Meetup in Karlsruhe took place at Monday, the 24th of September. There seems to be a high interest in Design Thinking out there – with more than 30 participants it was by far the largest meetup until now! Let’s see how retention will be at the next events.
Rui Nogueira, Daniel Markwig and Michael Kögel gave a great intro into the philosophy of Design Thinking. Their modified definition of the methodology: “Design Thinking is finding and resolving problems.” They talked about the three pillars viability (business), feasibility (technology) and desirability (people) and showed how important it is to find solutions which the users are understanding. There was also a discussion about the right methodology: ”There is no one solution. Lean Startup, Customer Development, Design Thinking – the focus is on the user. We see Design Thinking as a toolkit. You have to try it out to see if it works for you.”
Google+After my six months internship at fotograf.de, a German startup, I started organizing monthly Lean Startup Meetups here in Karlsruhe, Germany. Returning to my studies (Economics and Business Engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), I really missed the responsibility and independency working at a startup – I will share some thoughts about being intern at an early stage startup in one of my next posts. I used the meetups to “keep in touch” with the topic, but although I prepared some talks, read articles, tweeted stuff, it was really hard diving deeply into the product management world without working on something “real”.
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