The Lean Startup - Eric Ries [16]
As launch day approached, our fears escalated. In our situation, many entrepreneurial teams give in to fear and postpone the launch date. Although I understand this impulse, I am glad we persevered, since delay prevents many startups from getting the feedback they need. Our previous failures made us more afraid of another, even worse, outcome than shipping a bad product: building something that nobody wants. And so, teeth clenched and apologies at the ready, we released our product to the public.
Launch
And then—nothing happened! It turned out that our fears were unfounded, because nobody even tried our product. At first I was relieved because at least nobody was finding out how bad the product was, but soon that gave way to serious frustration. After all the hours we had spent arguing about which features to include and which bugs to fix, our value proposition was so far off that customers weren’t getting far enough into the experience to find out how bad our design choices were. Customers wouldn’t even download our product.
Over the ensuing weeks and months, we labored to make the product better. We brought in a steady flow of customers through our online registration and download process. We treated each day’s customers as a brand-new report card to let us know how we were doing. We eventually learned how to change the product’s positioning so that customers at least would download it. We were making improvements to the underlying product continuously, shipping bug fixes and new changes daily. However, despite our best efforts, we were able to persuade only a pathetically small number of people to buy the product.
In retrospect, one good decision we made was to set clear revenue targets for those early days. In the first month we intended to make $300 in total revenue, and we did—barely. Many friends and family members were asked (okay, begged). Each month our small revenue targets increased, first to $350 and then to $400. As they rose, our struggles increased. We soon ran out of friends and family; our frustration escalated. We were making the product better every day, yet our customers’ behavior remained unchanged: they still wouldn’t use it.
Our failure to move the numbers prodded us to accelerate our efforts to bring customers into our office for in-person interviews and usability tests. The quantitative targets created the motivation to engage in qualitative inquiry and guided us in the questions we asked; this is a pattern we’ll see throughout this book.
I wish I could say that I was the one to realize our mistake and suggest the solution, but in truth, I was the last to admit the problem. In short, our entire strategic analysis of the market was utterly wrong. We figured this out empirically, through experimentation, rather than through focus groups or market research. Customers could not tell us what they wanted; most, after all, had never heard of 3D avatars. Instead, they revealed the truth through their action or inaction as we struggled to make the product better.
Talking to Customers
Out of desperation, we decided to talk to some potential customers. We brought them into our office, and said, “Try this new product; it’s IMVU.” If the person was a teenager, a heavy user of IM, or a tech early adopter, he or she would engage with us. In constrast, if it was a mainstream person, the response was, “Right. So exactly what would you like me to do?” We’d get nowhere with the mainstream group; they thought IMVU was too weird.
Imagine a seventeen-year-old girl sitting down with us to look at this product. She chooses her avatar and says, “Oh, this is really fun.” She’s customizing the avatar, deciding how she’s going to look. Then we say,