Start-Up Marketing School: Class 5- Measuring Success and Adapting Your Plans
How to establish measurements and KPI’s for YOUR business.
When should you know it’s time to pivot?
What may be the next wave of models for NY?
Chris Kincade, Exec Chair / Co-Founder at OpenTopic & Founder/CEO at Designbuggy
Product, Market, and Assumptions (P,M, and A)- 3 things that need to drive your business strategy
PMA needs to be measured on a 90 day schedule
once you have Proof of Concept (POC) then you can stop tweaking and go to market
PMA = Brand
need to have a clear view of all three, but one can be compromised to support the other
when is it time to pivot?
- when one of three (P, Mor A) needs adjusting
need to be completely flexible and continuously go back and reanalyze product, market, assumption
- for OpenTopic, it was based on one key metric- newspaper of today- people want to see more of a platform; want their info to come from different sources
- metrics viewed- entire business built on engagement; news app built by and for news people
failure analysis
- becomes a collaborative tool
search is getting replaced by social filters
different type of editor now: curator, commentator, community organizer
changed the market and the product, assumption stayed the same
return usage
- do people come back?
viral usage
- do people tell their friends?
viral usage is the result of satisfaction
metrics- see who read a piece vs. see who shared it
discovered they had too much customization needed to narrow down to a few topics
branding and mission statement did not change until they moved into the enterprise space
- (foundational) team is as important as brand
viral is all about product
- “the only marketing that is truly cost effective is viral marketing” -Seth Godin
OpenTopic is about bundling Twitter feeds
- follow trending hashtags
- on Twitter, the signal to noise ratio is high
Twitter is the poster child for fragmentation of the web
Twitter is about speed and having little pieces broken up and then reaggravated
- also, its real time
Doesn’t matter how many Twitter followers you have, it matters how you engage with them
How much does the mission give way to the product?
How much does the mission change when you have a product pivot?
Look at your mission statement as a vision statement
professional user testing
- should do it in person
- with people you trust
- most valuable info is anecdotal
pick your critics wisely
input= good, consensus= bad
- it’s still your product so ultimately your decision
Apple broke apart albums to sell single songs- the rise of the playlist. Thinks news will become that with articles
microblogging- tweeting and posting
People need to be able to trust you and your product
