Market research is important. Need to think about it constantly
Steps
Step 1: Retention
- start with 10 users make them really really happy
measure based on retention and engagement metric
- find more people like them as make them really happy
Step 2: Monetization
- Build the buyer persona
- quantify the use cases by assessing how much users are willing to pay for each use case
- Focus on value perception standpoint versus usage standpoint
someone might use a feature a lot but that feature is not very important
- invoicing feature in accounting software highly used but less valuable that analytics
- Customer development need to happen on at least a quarterly cadence
- send out surveys since it’s really cheap to send out surveys
Collect user data to validate hypothesis
- experiment with price every 6 months
Acquisition
- work to figure out the acquisition channels as a startup
- larger companies really need to figure out how to monetize more existing companies
Further references
- Coelevate, Reforge growth series by Brian Balfour
- Book: Hacking Growth