Startup Marketing Blog – By Sean Ellis

Milestones to Startup Success

Update added to end of post

When your startup accepts outside money (such as venture capital), you are obligated to focus on maximizing long-term shareholder value.  For most startups this is directly based on your ability to grow (customers, revenue and eventually profit).  Most entrepreneurs understand the importance of growth; the common mistake is trying to force growth prematurely.  This is frustrating, expensive and unsustainable – killing many startups with otherwise strong potential. 

Most successful entrepreneurs have a good balance of execution intuition and luck.  This was definitely the case at the two startups where I ran marketing from launch through NASDAQ IPO filings.  While we didn’t follow a specific methodology, our CEO was intuitive enough to know the right time to “hit the gas pedal.”  We didn’t accelerate until verifying that the team had created a great product that met real customer needs and we could generate sufficient user revenue to support sustainable customer acquisition programs.  It’s taken years for me to realize that our growth was less a function of clever marketing tactics than beginning with something that customers truly needed.  Some growth would have been automatic; the marketing team simply accelerated this growth.

Several startups later I have a much better understanding of the key milestones needed for a startup to reach its full growth potential.  These are based more on observing universal truths than inventing some type of methodology.  Reaching the full growth potential of your startup requires focus, specifically focusing on what matters when it matters.  In my post on the startup growth pyramid I talk about the high level milestones you must achieve in order to unlock sustainable growth.  This post looks at it on a more granular level with links to several of my previous blog posts and other resources that provide additional details.

Day 1: Validate Need for Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Before any coding begins it is important to validate that the problem/need you are trying to solve actually exists, is worth solving, and the proposed minimum feature set solves it.  This can best be achieved by meeting with the prospects most likely to need your solution.  Steve Blank published a great post on this today.

Eric Ries offers more details on the minimum viable product concept in this post/video. 

Where’s the Love?

Vinod Khosla, one of the most successful Silicon Valley VCs in history, once suggested to me that startups should think of their early users as a flock of sheep.  He explained “the flock always finds the best grass.” 

For you this means you should start looking for a signal about who loves your product and why as soon as you release your MVP.  Most products have at least a few people that truly consider it a must have.  These people hold the keys to the kingdom.  Learn everything you can about them including their specific use cases and demographic characteristics.  Try to get more of these types of people.

A good place to start collecting this information is the survey I’ve made freely available on Survey.io (a KISSmetrics product).    You can read more about this product/market fit survey in this blog post. 

If you’re lucky you’ll be able to use this early signal to find the product/market fit.

Expose the Core Gratifying Experience

The majority of our project focus at 12in6 recently has been helping startups find their core user perceived value and exposing it in messaging optimized for response.  Your objective should be to remove complexity from the initial user experience and messaging in order to highlight this core user perceived value.  Often this means burying or even completely eliminating features that don’t relate to this gratifying experience.

Metrics

Metrics don’t matter until you achieve product/market fit – then they are critical to your success.  Dave McClure has a great video on startup metrics that matter (relevant part is at about minute 2:20). 

Most of the tools out there provide way too many irrelevant metrics and miss the essential few.  Both Dave McClure and I are advising KISSmetrics on a solution to this problem.

Start Charging

Another key step before growing your business is to implement a business model.  The ideal timing for implementing your business model is discussed in this blog post . 

I’ve often heard the argument that startups are focused on user growth and prefer to delay revenue in the short term.  I believe the fastest way to grow is with a business model and explain why in this blog post.

Extreme Customer Support

Now that you have a business model in place, your first marketing expense should be to expand the customer support team.  Anyone that cares enough about your solution to contact customer support is a great source of insight about your target market.  Also, customer support will uncover issues that will help you grow faster without spending.  And fixing these issues will make it much easier to grow when you do start spending. 

If your customer support team is overwhelmed now, I don’t recommend trying to grow until you address the issues driving most support calls. Once you’ve addressed these issues you’ll have fewer barriers to adoption and will be able to grow without overwhelming customer support. 

This will enable customer support to go above and beyond expectations, which is an important way to drive customer loyalty and enhance word of mouth.  This approach pays more dividends today than ever before – as I explain in this post on Social Media. 

Update: See comments for additional thoughts on extreme customer support.

Brand Experience Over Brand Awareness

Back in the “Dotcom Bubble” days billions were wasted on brand awareness campaigns for startups.  Today most entrepreneurs understand that brand awareness campaigns are a waste of money for startups.

Instead, it’s much cheaper and more effective for startups to focus on creating a fantastic brand experience.  While startups often realize the importance of brand experience, they focus on it too early, fine tuning things that customers don’t care about.  Instead, wait until you understand why certain customers love your product; then obsess over every element of this customer experience. 

Apple is probably the best tech company out there on coordinating a perfect brand experience for its target users. I cover more on brand experience in this blog post. 

Driving Growth

Once you’ve achieved all of the previous milestones, then you can focus on driving growth.  CEOs must take an active role in driving customer growth whether or not they have an interest in marketing. Nearly all of the risk and upside in a startup is in your ability to gain customer traction and then drive scalable customer growth. The CEO should not abdicate this responsibility to the marketer.

It’s important to stay aggressive and take all slack out of the market (make it completely uninteresting to pursue the market for any other competitor).  Your early advantage is the ability to iterate on the customer feedback loop and leverage strong customer loyalty to drive word of mouth.

While ROI lets you know if a user acquisition channel is sustainable, the key focus should be on exposing lots of the right people to your fantastic product experience.  It’s much easier to get passionate and creative about this than purely thinking about things from an ROI perspective. Of course positive ROI is essential for any customer acquisition program to remain in the mix.

When it’s time to hire a marketing leader to partner with the CEO, this post explains my recommendations for an ideal startup marketing leader.  The most effective startup marketers are relentless about experimenting with channels until finding things that work. 

Start by building out free channels such as listing in directories and basic SEO.   When you begin building paid channels, extra effort should be put into channels that show strong potential for scale. 

Unfortunately you can’t count on effective online tactics working forever.  I’ve seen many hot online marketing tactics lose their effectiveness over time.  This is because online tracking makes it easier for marketers to quickly figure out what actually works.  As a result we start piling into the most effective tactics.   Eventually online tactics get saturated, as explained in this post. 

Business building

Fast growing businesses are difficult to manage.  This is the point where you should bring in some experienced operations people if they aren’t already on the team. 

It Won’t be Easy

Finally, the top three risks to growing via these milestones are:

1. You lose patience and decide that one or more of the milestones really aren’t that important.
2. VCs and/or board of directors lose patience because you did not achieve conceptual agreement on this approach from beginning.
3. You delude yourself into believing that for “our type of business” customers really don’t need to consider our product a “must have”.  For us, “nice to have” is good enough.

Building a successful business is hard.  Hopefully this milestone driven approach to growing your startup will make it a bit easier.

Update: It’s hard to write a blog post on “milestones to startup success” that covers every type of startup.  Some startup types may need to reverse the order of some of these milestones.  For example, with marketplaces (EBay, social networks, eduFire, dating sites, etc.) user gratification increases with more users so there is a bit of chicken and egg here…  Ad supported sites also benefit from early scale. Many of the articles linked to from this blog post also cover exceptions such as when a startup should start charging (it’s different for enterprise targeted startups).

Posted in 12in6, Acquiring Customers, Branding, Building Awareness, Business models, Competitors, Customer Development, Hiring, Positioning, Product/market fit, Steven Blank, VC, Venture Capital, word-of-mouth
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Seedcamp in London

Seedcamp is an innovative program that brings experienced entreprenuers together with a batch of several promising new startups from all over Europe for a week of mentoring.  The best of these startup receive 50,000 pounds, but the mentoring is worth far more than that…  Seedcamp provides a fantastic model for any region trying to replicate the startup ecology that has helped Silicon Valley thrive.

In addition to mentoring several of the startups directly, I also had an opportunity to present to the full group yesterday.  Here are the slides I presented:

Posted in Customer Development, Seedcamp, Slideshare
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Big Picture Customer Development Revisited

Working with four startups at the same time has steepened my customer development learning curve (and also explains why it has been a month since my last update).   To help balance the load, I’ve brought on a conversion designer and a researcher; we’re finally firing on all cylinders. 

Our customer development goal with every startup essentially boils down to a race to be able to focus on growing the business.  But in order to avoid wasting effort and money on tactical growth drivers, the following steps need to be completed first:

• Validate the product/service is gratifying a reasonable percentage of users.
• Create a value proposition that will attract the right type of users and pull them through the conversion funnel to gratification (and ultimately a transaction). 
• Eliminate friction from the conversion funnel. 
• Fine tune a business model that supports scalable customer acquisition channels. 

If these steps have been executed well it is relatively easy to grow a sustainable business.  But many startups skip these steps and jump right into trying to grow the business – making their job much harder or even impossible.  Some will get lucky, but most will fail.  

Given the importance of getting customer development right, I’m certain that eventually most startups will contract a specialist to help them navigate the challenges of this pre-scale phase.  I’m often asked how I plan to expand 12in6 to help more startups.  Most people are surprised when I tell them I don’t have a desire to expand the business.  I really enjoy being able to work hands on with two new startups per quarter.  If I built a large team to fill the current void of specialists, I’d be too busy managing the team.  This would mean less time learning how to improve my customer development approach. 

As I explained in my last post, I’m now validating that a startup’s product is gratifying users before I commit to working with them.  While I love to hear from as many funded startups as possible, I can barely scratch the surface of the number of startups that need help.  If I don’t have the capacity to help you, here are a few others that specialize in customer development:  (I haven’t dug into their approach enough to be able to endorse them, but I encourage you to check them out)

• Brant Cooper (San Diego)
• Rajiv Kapoor (New York)
• Sean Murphy (SF Bay Area)

If you are specializing in customer development or know someone else that you can recommend, please add names/recommendations in the comments. The main things to consider when evaluating a specialist is their track record building successful companies.  And be sure to check references (especially around chemistry with the team).

I have been sharing discoveries on Twitter (follow me @ http://twitter.com/seanellis) and hopefully  I’ll resume regular blog posts next week (after I get back from a short vacation in Hawaii).

Posted in 12in6, 12in6 Methodology, Acquiring Customers, Customer Development
8 comments

Free Customer Development Help – Survey.io

I’m excited to announce a project that I’ve been working on with KISSmetrics called Survey.io, which provides startups with a free and easy way to prepare, distribute and analyze an initial customer development survey. It includes the content of the survey I use to verify that a startup is ready for the 12in6 Metrics Driven Customer Development Program (which begins at the validation step in Steve Blank’s Four Steps to the Epiphany). 

Determine if you are ready to scale

For startups, this survey is an ideal way for you to determine if you should begin the final preparations before aggressively scaling customer acquisition.  Some VCs have also started using Survey.io as part of their diligence before making Series B investments – so don’t be surprised if a VC asks you for your Survey.io results.

The most important question for determining how well your product is resonating with early users is question 2:

2) How would you feel if you could no longer use [product]?

• Very disappointed
• Somewhat disappointed
• Not disappointed (it isn’t really that useful)
• N/A – I no longer use [product]

If most of your respondents are saying that they would only be “somewhat disappointed” without your product, they are really telling you that it is only a “nice to have”.  When asking users why they selected this answer, I often find that they are focused on commodity aspects of the product and they know of a replacement product.  It’s very difficult to build a business around a “nice to have” product, so you should keep burn and customer flow low while you iterate your core experience. 

If however, you find that around 50% or more of your users are saying that they would be “very disappointed” without your product, there is a great chance you can build a successful business on this “must have” product.  This is the time to reallocate some development resources to optimizing first time user flows and building the tracking/reporting systems needed to effectively scale customer acquisition initiatives. 

Survey.io to develop value proposition

The survey also provides some useful early feedback for verifying use cases, developing your value proposition and positioning against the most common alternative solutions.  This feedback is directionally useful, but I recommend significantly more research (via customer surveys and interviews) before finalizing your value proposition and positioning.

I strongly encourage you to setup and run your own customer development survey via Survey.io.  It only takes a few minutes and it free.  Here’s the link again.

And here’s a link to my customer development survey for Startup-Marketing.com .  I’d really appreciate it if you could take the time to complete it.  This will help me tailor the content of this blog to better meet your needs.

Posted in 12in6, 12in6 Methodology, Acquiring Customers, Competitors, Customer Development, Research, Steven Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, VC
3 comments

What is the Lean Startup Approach?

It took a recession for entrepreneurs to finally start launching startups the right way. But in my experience, a lean startup approach is ideal in any economy.

The two key pillars of the lean startup are customer development and agile product development. Both involve a systematic process of learning through feedback and driving improvement through metrics driven testing. Contrast this to the traditional startup approach of bloated budgets supporting large marketing and development initiatives based purely on intuition.

While I have been working hard to evolve and promote metrics driven customer development, Eric Ries has evangelized the complete lean startup approach. And he has included practical execution guidance (often to the annoyance of more guarded practitioners of agile development).

All startup founders and engineers should find the time to attend Eric’s workshop – if you can get in. You won’t be disappointed.

Posted in Agile Development, Customer Development, Eric Ries
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Keys to Unlocking Startup Growth

When a startup takes VC funds, they usually accept the premise that they need to “get big fast”.  VCs don’t fund lifestyle businesses.

Unfortunately desire for growth causes many startups to make poor choices.  There are generally two opposite mindsets that lead to the same mistakes:

1. Overconfidence: “We have lots of money, so let’s move fast (no need to be cautious).”
2. Panic: “We are running out of money, so let’s move fast (get traction before we run out).”

For an entrepreneur focused on growth, it seems natural that they should “get the word out” about their new innovative solution. Thus many startups quickly launch awareness building initiatives ranging from advertisements in a tech magazine to exhibiting at tradeshows.   Generally this is a complete waste of money.

While experienced marketers recognize the need for some positioning work upfront, they still generally lack a broader understanding of where to focus resources and in which order. 

The first time I saw an effective go to market roadmap was when I read Steve Blank’s Four Steps to the Epiphany.  His roadmap consists of the following four steps:

1. Customer discovery
2. Customer validation
3. Customer creation
4. Scale company

He warns that a company should not kick into growth mode until reaching the fourth step.  By this point they have figured out a sustainable and scalable process for acquiring and monetizing customers.  If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it.  For a more detailed overview of the book see this post from Eric Ries.

The approach I’ve used to attract 10s of millions of users to startups is similar, but allows growth a little earlier (click graphic below for full size).  

 
Within a few weeks of initiating the understand phase, we generally have enough user insight to baseline allowable acquisition costs of a new user and begin iterating.  It can be tempting to start building all customer acquisition channels that fall within this allowable acquisition cost, but finding and managing these channels takes too much time to already be a priority.  Instead, we just want to generate enough new user volume to iterate landing pages and sign up flows.  These iterations can increase the allowable acquisition cost by more than 10X in only a few months. 

At the completion of the iteration phase we can put all of our energy into building profitable customer acquisition channels.  With a much higher allowable acquisition cost, the process of building profitable channels is relatively easy (and even fun).  I recommend starting with free channels first and ultimately spending up to your allowable acquisition cost.  This recent post gives more details on building these channels.

Posted in Acquiring Customers, Customer Development, Steven Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany
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The Lean Startup Era?

Steve Blank and Eric Ries presented their lean startup approach to a very receptive crowd at last night’s Startup2Startup dinner in Palo Alto.   Here’s a link to the must watch video.

Highlight’s of of the presentation include:

• Startups fail from lack of customer – not product failures
• Fail fast and often on the path to success
• Decide on a business model early
• The correct customer development approach changes by market type

Following the presentation each table discussed the topics over dinner.  I was pleasantly surprised that  the entrepreneurs at my table had all implimented some form of customer development and agile development.

Posted in Agile Development, Customer Development, Eric Ries, Lean Startup Entrepreneurs, Steven Blank
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Fast Vs Careful Decision Making in Startups

Reversible or Irreversible Decision?

Fast decision making is often the mark of a great entrepreneur.  But as Steve Blank points out in a recent blog post: decisions have two states: “those that are reversible and those that are irreversible.”  Entrepreneurs should take the time to make careful decisions when they are irreversible (such as accepting money from a VC).  For reversible decisions, he recommends starting “a policy of making reversible decisions … before a meeting ends. In a startup it doesn’t matter if you’re 100% right 100% of the time. What matters is having forward momentum and a tight fact-based feedback loop (i.e. Customer Development) to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions.” 

This is awesome guidance considering the countless hours I saw wasted at my first startup where people debated decisions that had little impact on results.  On my marketing team I quickly ended these debates with “test it.”  When debates extended across departments I abdicated the decision to others but measured the results to make sure they weren’t negatively affected.

Higher Velocity Testing Better than Perfect Certainty

At LogMeIn (my second startup) the goal was to start a testing and analytics culture on the marketing team right from the beginning.  Rather than hiring someone with a traditional marketing background, my first marketing hire had an actuarial background (the people that assess insurance risk).  Next we hired a super fast web designer/developer and an equally fast copywriter.  This team was able to rapidly iterate everything to determine combinations that generated optimal conversions. 

One warning before hiring a math wizard to lead your analytics is that they will often want sample sizes that almost completely eliminate doubt that you are making the right decision.  With the volume of users at most startups, this would limit you to very few tests.  When I suggest the following mental exercise to a mathematician, they usually come around to high velocity testing with lower certainty.   I suggest that they try modeling the results of 25 tests with 80% certainty compared to 5 tests with 95% certainty.  I also explain that we can always go back and test it again when we have higher volume.

Understanding User Motivations

But some decisions are a lot harder to test and require more up front traditional research.  For example, when trying to understand the motivations behind users’ actions (or lack of actions) I generally interview and/or survey them. But as Robert Cialdini points out in his latest book: “We know that people’s ability to understand the factors that affect their behavior is surprisingly poor.”  So in the past, this research often confused rather than enlightened me. 

It wasn’t until I read Four Steps to the Epiphany that I realized you could take a more scientific approach to understanding user motivations.  Steve Blank recommends starting with hypotheses around the key factors that will be important for building your business – such as the real problem you are solving and the people who are most motivated to solve this problem.  By engaging prospective and actual users you can validate and/or refine these hypotheses.  Unlike the previous approach to surveying, we now gain clarity with more user input. 

Still I know there is a lot of room for improvement in my scientific approach to understanding user needs and motivations, so I recently brought on someone to help me take my research and analytics to the next level.  He is Molecular Biologist as well as an entrepreneur who earlier in his career spent 10 years in biotech research.  It should be interesting to see what happens when he applies his rigorous research approach to customer development.  He’ll be joining me for my two projects that start next month.

At early stage web startups we have the distinct advantage over established companies of starting with a blank slate, making it possible to set up much more controlled experiments.  In addition to making better use of tight startup time and money, we also hope to leverage the blank slate to challenge some long held marketing beliefs regarding what really works.

Posted in Analytics, Customer Development, Research, Steven Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany
4 comments

Iterating Without Understanding?

It seems there are two camps of “evolved” marketers these days. One group recognizes that it is critical to understand customer needs by engaging them at every opportunity. The other group is completely focused on metrics driven iteration. Until recently, few combined these powerful forces.

I started in the camp of online metrics and scorned the beanbag marketers who didn’t “get” analytics. At Uproar in the mid to late 90s, metrics were our competitive advantage. We tested, measured and optimized everything. We knew we couldn’t afford any waste if we were going to have a chance to beat the heavily funded Silicon Valley gaming startups and the established companies getting into online games (Microsoft, Yahoo, Sony). Ultimately, this obsession with leveraging metrics to track ROI and improve conversion through iteration was key to becoming the worldwide leader in online games and peaking at a billion dollar stock market valuation. Despite their much deeper cash war chests, the beanbag marketers couldn’t compete with our no waste metrics driven approach.

Today the Darwinian economy has killed off most web businesses that don’t leverage metrics, so this is no longer a competitive advantage – it’s a necessity. But many web marketers stop there.

In my next startup I was fortunate enough to have a venture capitalist who helped take our approach to the next level. We attracted his investment with our metrics driven online marketing approach and then he quickly improved it. He constantly grilled me with the question “Who is your customer?” During our weekly meetings he never failed to ask about the last time I spoke to a customer. I got extra brownie points for meeting with customers in person. To be honest I initially focused on engaging customers just to appease this VC. But it didn’t take long until I was able to use this information to improve results. Informed iteration helped us increase purchase transaction rates 10X in just a few months, which made scaling a profitable marketing spend infinitely easier. Later customer engagements uncovered revenue opportunities we never could have found through metrics driven iteration. These revenue opportunities eventually accounted for more than half of the company’s overall revenue volume – making possible the eventual IPO filing.

It wasn’t until I began the Interim VP Marketing role at Xobni that I discovered Steve Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany. This book added a systematic process for uncovering the critical information needed to build a thriving business and keep improving results.  The great news is that Steve Blank recently started blogging at steveblank.com. Perhaps even better news is that Venture Hacks now records Steve Blank’s lectures at UC Berkeley and posts them online.

The same Darwinian forces that made metrics a necessity for online marketers are once again shaking up the web startup world. It has become a major competitive advantage to combine Steve Blank’s customer development approach with informed metrics driven iteration. And it’s only a matter of time until this approach becomes a necessity for survival.

So what’s next? I’m certain that eventually a platform will emerge that ties it all together. This platform will facilitate the process of collecting and analyzing actionable customer information and manage the iterations that deliver optimal results. Up to this point we’ve always had to custom develop these tracking and reporting systems, while using disconnected systems to drive understanding (surveys, Excel…). Off-the-shelf analytics programs have been bloated with data that is useless for improving results.

Rather than holding my breath for someone to deliver this dream platform, I’ve been advising KISSmetrics as they work to create it. I’ve given them total visibility into my approach and turned over reports that have evolved over many years of execution. Of course they have given me equity in the company – but I’d be passionate about this metrics driven customer development platform either way.

Posted in Analytics, Customer Development, KISSmetrics, Metrics Driven Marketing, Steven Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany
2 comments

The New Chasm – Flawed First User Experience

The first chasm most startup marketers face is not the well-known chasm originally described way back in 1991 (jumping from early adopter to mainstream users).  Instead, it’s the chasm from “click” to “gratification” experienced by website visitors.  In my direct experience with six startups and indirect experience with several others, it has become clear that the majority of new people that visit a website receive zero gratification.  In other words, they do not experience any benefit from the product or service being offered.  Without gratification, it is very unlikely they will generate transactions or positive word of mouth/virality. In fact, I generally assign a negative value to these people because any brand awareness created is saddled by the memory of wasted time and effort.

Most companies concentrate resources on the two sides of this chasm.  The product team focuses on creating a fantastic product experience for those who make it to the other side of the chasm, while the marketers are busy trying to stuff as many people into the top of the acquisition funnel as possible – often at a large expense.  The negative experience and wasted money happen in this no-man’s-land between the click and a gratifying experience with the product. It is into this chasm that the majority of online marketing dollars are lost.

My first startup marketing experience in online games at Uproar.com was helpful for developing skills in all three of these areas.  Games are all about engagement and we were able to surface this engagement early in the user acquisition flow.  In 1997 we introduced a syndicated widget/app that is generally considered to be the first of its kind.  This app appeared on tens of thousands of websites and “extended” our game play experience to these sites.  Users would visit a web page on the affiliate’s site which would automatically start an embedded animated trivia game.  Players with a qualifying score were given an opportunity to enter a weekly cash prize drawing.  If they didn’t qualify, they were asked to try again.  Only after they completed this gratifying experience did we ask them to fill out a registration form.  Upon completion of the form, they were told that they were now eligible to win cash prizes in other games on the Uproar site.  They would then see a list of games and the next prize in each game.  Once they entered the game and began chatting with other users, we had them.  They became part of the community and one of the “stickiest” sites on the web.  This approach was the key to becoming the biggest game site in the world prior to Uproar’s acquisition by Vivendi Universal in 2001.

Of course not all products/services can engage users like a game site does.  Still, there are important lessons that can be applied about surfacing your primary benefit early in the acquisition process and drawing users into the core experience.  LinkedIn and other websites have done a fantastic job with the “% completed” box that appears next to your profile.  Rather than having the barrier of asking for all the information up front, they ask for it gradually.

Free trials are another way companies have offered a gratifying experience before asking users to commit.  But with a software product, there are still several costly steps required before the trial begins.  These include the challenge/risk of downloading software and the time it takes to learn how to use the product.  If a company can sprinkle in a gratifying experience through this process, people will remain engaged. 

At LogMeIn we took it a step further and rewarded prospects for their effort with a completely free version of the software.  Prospective customers knew they would be rewarded for their effort downloading/learning the software even if they didn’t upgrade to the premium version.  This helped get LogMeIn eventually installed on over 50 million devices.

Another example is Tripit, whose process I described here. 

Can you think of examples of how companies have bridged the chasm between click and gratification?  If you’ve benefitted from this post, I’d appreciate it if you could give back to me and other readers by posting suggestions (in comments) of other sites that have effectively bridged this chasm.

Posted in Customer Development, Research
3 comments