Page 4 – Lean Analytics Book

Putting a Pause on the Lean Analytics Backchannel

When you run an experiment, as Alistair and I did with the Lean Analytics Backchannel, you have to be prepared for it to fail. In fact, if you run an experiment that can’t fail, it’s not really an experiment.

Alistair and I launched the Backchannel because we believe that there’s an opportunity to help people over time and consistently with Lean Analytics; the book is great (and we know it’s helped people), but not enough. It’s a reference guide to get you started, but everyone needs help once in awhile, so we came up with the Backchannel as a way of addressing that.

We also setup a pre-order page and decided to charge right away in an effort to de-risk things for us. Ultimately we didn’t get to our threshold of paying customers quickly enough, and so we’ve decided to put the Backchannel on pause and look to new opportunities.

One of the good things about launching experiments is that you’re going to learn something. We learned that there’s a market for Lean Analytics training/help/consulting/etc. (we’ve gotten an increase in speaking/consulting opportunities for example, and we did get quite a few customers pre-ordering) but that the form factor of the Backchannel isn’t the right fit. At least not without rethinking/rejigging it in some way. We also recognized that as a test it had issues. For example, the “product” (a “private community of sorts”) was somewhat vague, which honestly was on purpose because we weren’t 100% sure how the product would manifest itself. The price point was a bit of guesswork on our part, but partially calculated based on the number of customers we wanted signed up and the revenue we wanted to earn from the initiative. Our landing page also wasn’t fantastic. This was all feedback we got from people who signed up, and from people who didn’t. We interviewed and surveyed both groups.

So we learned a lot. And that in fact is the point of an experiment: to learn.

Alistair and I are now taking those learnings and figuring out what’s next. We believe we’ve validated the problem (people want more Lean Analytics information, practical guidance & support), but the solution was wrong. So we’re going to keep experimenting with new solutions. We have a few ideas–nothing we can share immediately–but you’re likely going to see more activity on this site in the near future as we look to find ways of helping people more.

To those of you that did pre-order I want to thank you very much for your support! And I look forward to connecting with you all so Alistair and I can keep learning what you want and how we can serve you.

Introducing the Lean Analytics Backchannel

Lean Analytics has been out for 3 years. It still amazes me how often people reach out to let us know that they’ve enjoyed the book. More importantly, people tell us that it’s helped them. And that’s awesome. Alistair and I wrote Lean Analytics to help people. We weren’t quite sure how good a job we would do, but I think it’s turned out fairly well.

Having said that, we’ve always felt like there’s more to this story than the book. We’ve done a lot of speaking engagements (and continue to do so!) and we’ve presented lots of material, but the world of analytics and Lean Startup continues to grow and evolve. A book isn’t a great medium for shifting ideas, new concepts, more exploration and so forth.

And that’s why Alistair and I are excited to launch the Lean Analytics Backchannel.

The Lean Analytics Backchannel is a private community of sorts (which we’re going to build initially off Slack and a few other tools) to bring together Lean Startup and Lean Analytics enthusiasts and practitioners. We want to go beyond the book and continue to explore how Lean Analytics can help startups and businesses of all sizes succeed using data.

The Lean Analytics Backchannel will be a direct line of communication to Alistair and myself. We’ll be actively participating, answering questions, creating new content and more. But we also believe a community will grow and people will share and help one another in amazing ways.

So what will be included in the Lean Analytics Backchannel?

On a regular basis, Alistair and I will:

Run Q&A events where we unpack startup case studies through live business model development.
Share new content, case studies, articles, and benchmarks
Interview best-in-class data scientists, analytics practitioners, investors, and growth engineers
Conduct weekly public consulting sessions in plain view of the community.

Members will also get:

Exclusive access to new slides, decks, diagrams, and more
Discounts to relevant startup events
A weekly newsletter summarizing the best in startup and analytics content
A shared table of the latest baselines and metrics from across the Web

Two more important things:

The Lean Analytics Backchannel costs $50/month (or $550 for the year)
We’re doing this in true Lean fashion as an experiment. We’ve launched a landing page to take pre-orders. If we hit our threshold of orders then we’ll launch the Backchannel. We’re aiming to launch by early April.

We’re excited about taking Lean Analytics to the next level. There’s so much more to do, learn and share, and we think the Backchannel is a great way of doing it. Along the way we’re going to experiment, learn and iterate–eating our own dog food and sharing our experiences throughout.

If you’re interested, please check out our Lean Analytics Backchannel Pre-order Page and sign-up today!

Seven onboarding mistakes you don’t want to make

Recently, Bayram Annakov of Appintheair wrote to us about how he’d used analytics and Lean approaches to improve his user onboarding, with some pretty dramatic results. He was kind enough to outline them here for all of us.

We build great apps, we solve critical problems, and we help our users achieve their goals. But you know what the real problem is? Despite all that, sometimes users simply don’t use our product—because we failed to get them on board. All that hard work goes to waste.

Here’s my hit-list of top mistakes that app developers make in onboarding:

Requiring that users register too early

Don’t force the user to register. Delay until it is absolutely necessary, or you risk losing them entirely. Allow them to skip registration, but ask for it when user takes some action. For example, iTunes invites you to register when you click “Buy.”

And when you do ask them, be sure to explain the benefits of registration, such as backing up their data or syncing between their devices.

Explaining the obvious

Get out of the user’s way. Literally. Don’t force them to watch ten slides just to explain how to use a calculator! Instead, show the interface and make it intuitive.

Grabbing for push notification or address book permission

I know getting permission to contact users is very important for retention. I know you want to spam notify users to make them come back to your app. But hey—if you really want the user to give you their permission, don’t ask them on the app’s first screen. Explain why you need it using a custom dialogue (iOS does not allow customizing permission text—that’s why you need to implement your own screen).

Or better yet, make the user perform an action that signals her desire to give you permission. Banking apps are a great example of this: You really want to get notified when any transaction is done with your credit card, so they likely have a very high notification permission acceptance rate at this stage.

This is what we do in App in the Air: we ask for push notification permission only after a user demonstrates his/her desire to receive flight status alerts.

Look how Snapchat prepares the user for address book permission. First, they explain why they need access:

Then, with this context, they hand things over to iOS to get the authorization:

Displaying all instructions at once

Some apps have a bad habit of displaying all their instructions and hints on a single, overwhelming screen. It’s far too much information, so the user remembers none of it—and gets the impression that the app is complex or hard to use. Instead, reveal yourself as they use the app. Teach one thing at a time and let the user learn by doing.

Bayram-pic1

Above is an example of how one feature-rich task management application achieves this.

Not giving them an option to skip

Users sometimes re-install the app, whether they’re purchasing a new gold iPhone 6, or just recovering from a backup. Whatever the case, you want to avoid annoying an expert user with your hundred-page tutorial. Let them skip. Save them time and they’ll thank you.

Displaying empty screens

Please don’t ever display empty screens to the user. Josh Elman, former product lead for growth at Twitter, calls this the the “totally awesome blank screen of death.” Provide instructions, test thoroughly with edge cases, and make sure you avoid the kinds of empty screens that alienate and frustrate users.

Not measuring onboarding

This is perhaps the most important step, and the one most closely tied to Lean Analytics. It’s not enough to measure clickthroughs, or calls to action, or downloads. Your job isn’t done until your user has reached a point in their engagement process where they’re using the application as you intended.

Measure the number of users who successfully pass onboarding. Investigate why users drop, and tirelessly optimize the experience as much as possible. Remember, if your user can’t make it through onboarding, she won’t understand the power and functionality of your application. She definitely won’t use it, and you’ll miss the key leverage in growing your app to millions of users.

Our experience

For AppInTheAir, fixing these mistakes helped us move the bottom of our funnel—onboarding conversion rate—from 50% to roughly 95%.

Josh Elman agrees—he thinks Twitter’s new onboarding process, which he covers in this video, is the secret behind Twitter’s growth from 10M users to 100M+ daily users: They taught users how to use Twitter without annoying or alienating them along the way.

Here’s some extra homework: check out this great compilation to see how popular web and mobile apps handle their sign-up experiences. Snapchat, in particular, works hard to make signing up not just smooth, but fun.

Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“To reiterate, the biggest mistake startups make when trying to get traction is failing to pursue traction in parallel with product development.”

That’s a great quote from a new book called Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. It emphasizes something we talk a lot about in Lean Analytics–you can’t just build a product in a vacuum without early and frequent customer feedback/engagement. Early traction in Lean Analytics is about proving whether you’ve found a problem worth solving. It’s what we call “Empathy” in the book. And it goes from there through Stickiness, Virality, Revenue and Scale.

In Lean Analytics we went into some of the tactics for acquiring and engaging users/customers, but that wasn’t our full focus. In the book Traction, you’ll get all of the practical how-tos for finding the right customer acquisition (or traction) channels and frameworks for how to discover the best channels, prioritize growth and traction strategies and more.

The authors interviewed 40+ very successful entrepreneurs, marketers, investors and executives to learn the best practices on building traction for your startup.

Traction doesn’t happen by accident. Sure there’s some luck involved in everything, but in my experience it involves a lot of experimentation, iteration and grinding (read: hard work). You could throw a few things on social media, email a couple bloggers and try to get on TechCrunch…*yawn*…and the tumbleweeds will still roll on by. No one will care. The folks that win at growth are those that dig deep, try new things, learn from others, measure things (let’s not forget the analytics!) and work crazy hard. Traction, the book, will be a good guide for anyone that wants to work hard at growth.

To get you started, Gabriel and Justin sent me the first three chapters that you can download for free. Get the first 3 chapters of Traction

Or just go ahead and buy the book directly: Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers