Downloaded 261 times
![ Now go kick some ass! [email_address] twitter.com/dweekly](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/pbworksleanstartup-090916201601-phpapp02/75/How-PBworks-Used-Lean-Startup-Techniques-32-2048.jpg)
Uploaded byDavid E. Weekly
How PBworks Used Lean Startup Techniques
PBwiki started as a lean startup in 2002 with no funding and only one employee for the first two years. It rapidly iterated through many ideas and products before finding product-market fit with its wiki product. While data provided some guidance, the founder relied heavily on customer feedback, creativity, and gut feelings to guide decisions around pivots, features, pricing, and business model. This lean process of testing many ideas, dropping failures quickly, and evolving the successful concept based on customer input allowed PBwiki to grow organically over many years.
More Related Content
Similar to How PBworks Used Lean Startup Techniques
How PBworks Used Lean Startup Techniques
- 1. PBwiki was aLean Startup (but didn’t realize it) AKA: An engineer’s journey into the wild world of business and some lessons learned along the way Lean Startup Circle Talk, 9/16/2009 by “David E. Weekly” <[email protected]>
- 2. Executive Summary Startupsare tough and fast. You can’t just count on data. Use your gut. You’ll need to have a lot of bad ideas. The good ideas will often need to be dramatically reworked. … . $$$ PROFIT! $$$
- 3. Business Is NotSexy. (This is not you.)
- 4. (Lean) Startups Are Poor. We’re short on cash, people, and time.
- 5. (Lean) Startups Are Ignorant. We aren’t sure what to build or for whom.
- 6. (Lean) Startups Are Misguided. We don’t know which ideas are right. When ideas are right, we don’t know which parts.
- 7. (Lean) Startups Are Prone to Failure. Lots of experiments mean lots of mistakes.
- 8. But Why DoesIt Work? Humility w/Hubris Having confidence in the correctness of a general outcome versus making an idea your baby. Scientific Method Form reasonable hypotheses given what you know, test them, iterate. Low Bullshit Factor Ya gotta eat. Cash is king.
- 9. Don’t Go TabulaRasa… “ Blank site with just a UserVoice plugin” Not so helpful. First feature requests tend to be: more porn more dinosaurs
- 10. Minimum Viable ProductThere’s a stone in stone soup . Start with the simplest thing that could possibly be useful to anyone. PBwiki’s first motto: “Ghetto But Useful”
- 11. Hunches & CreativityThe market is an oracle but not a seer. Listen to customer problems more than customer-offered solutions. Then get creative about solving those problems.
- 12. So… Deliver alot of ideas. Count on most to fail. When you find one that is clearly not a failure, drop all the others . (Even though it hurts.) When the market takes the idea a new direction, roll with it.
- 13. Ideally… You canrapidly iterate on your ideas to make sure you’re building the right thing for the right market. (but….)
- 14. Data Can’t TellYou Everything.
- 15. A/B Testing Low-FrequencyEvents How About… 95% confidence of a >10% uplift for a 3x /day action (e.g. making a $10,000 sale) ?
- 16.
- 17. If the proposedchange is the only change tested against the baseline and it represents a 50% improvement over the baseline, you’ll still need over three months of data to be statistically sure it’s made at least a 10% improvement.
- 18.
- 19. It’s Time fora Fallacy! Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
- 20. Optimize Successful CorrelationsFind variables that correlate with success that occur at high frequency. Judge which are likely causal variables . Optimize for these variables. Don’t game yourself!
- 21. Human Judgment IsKey Your gut provides the ideas, strategy, and approach hypotheses. The analytics judge if you were right.
- 22. Started messing withprivate wikis (2002) Started Coceve, Inc. (2003) Got sick of setting them up by hand (2004) Decided to let people set themselves up (Drunken 1 st SHDH, May 27 th , 2005) Hired help (November 2005) Got financing + an office (September 2006) Got VC investment (February 2007) Hired a CEO (June 2008)
- 23. Was PBwiki aLean Startup? Went for first three years without a salary. Only employee for first two years. $60k of friends-and-family cash. LAMP + Danga Bought servers off Craigslist. Rapid-response Customer Forum “ Thanks for reporting this an hour ago; it’s fixed!”
- 24. The Products Hostedproject management (2003) IM Smarter (2004-2005) BotBlock (2005) SingleStat.us (2005) Thwapp (never launched) PBwiki (2005) PBworks Project Edition (2009), full circle!
- 25. PBworks Evolution Ad-supportedFree Wiki Consumer Freemium Wiki ($5/wiki/mo) Tiered Freemium Wiki ($10-100/wiki/mo) Paid Content (FAIL) Educational Wiki ($99+/wiki/year) Business SaaS Workspace ($8/user/mo) Enterprise Collaboration ($20/user/mo) Secret February 2010 Awesomeness
- 26. The Model Rapid-release(Agile method) Focus on being useful to users. What’s the simplest useful thing we can do? Ignore technical fanciness. Ignore competitors. Note: simplicity empowers scale. Ask your users what the heck they’re doing. They may periodically surprise the heck outta you.
- 27. Pivot Questions “You want to pay for an Internet service?” “ You heard about us in Chicago?” “ How big is the education market?” “ Am I passionate about enterprise sales and marketing?” “ What would this look like in a movie?”
- 28. Sci-Fi What wouldbe ideal for the user? Backtrack to what’s possible, build a roadmap. Write out the user story, share it! (we even made a short movie.)
- 29. Business Goals Don’tfocus on acquisitions: “ It’s hard to sell a company but easy to get bought.” Forget about IPOs for now. Acquisitions are real but rare. Create value, not lottery tickets. Craigslist, The Math Works, HotOrNot Focus on making money. This leaves the most options open!
- 30. Executive Summary Startupsare tough and fast. You can’t just count on data. Use your gut. You’ll need to have a lot of bad ideas. The good ideas will often need to be dramatically reworked. … . $$$ PROFIT! $$$
- 31.
- 32. Now go kick some ass! [email_address] twitter.com/dweekly