Building something users love is, of course, the challenge. 99% of startups are unable to do this, and some of those that can't still manage to raise money because someone involved went to Stanford or is otherwise well-connected, only to inevitably fail later on. Generally speaking, these days if you don't have rabid fans of your product almost immediately among some group of users - however small - the product as you have implemented it is destined for failure.
If you fail to attain at least some group of rabid fans right after launch, then you have to ask users and find out what changes you could make that would turn them into rabid fans - if anything. If you don't get some sense of agreement among users from the responses, odds are that you should move onto another project. Products that the masses love are very rare. Creating them is hard, and because it involves a tremendous amount of subjectivity and pure luck, it will likely take far more than one try. But you can only fail at it if you stop trying or let yourself get bogged down with attempting to make something work that users simply don't and will never care about.
VCs are optimizing for something other than love. They're optimizing for potential scale. You can build a product that customers love, but with a low ceiling for the market (like, say, building a really awesome surfboard). VCs want to see billion dollar market potential. So they may invest in something without real proof of customer love, or even customer need, just because the market potential is great.
This is good advice but on a practical level isn't clearly compatible with other advice like "fix the plane while it's flying".
Also I was under the impression YCombinator focuses on helping companies grow and organizes a demo day 3 months later to help them raise money from VCs. The pg article even mentions growth targets during YC. If this is true then companies accepted to YC should already have a product people love and be ready to hack growth over the next 3 months. This clearly is not the case (eg Airbnb joined YC after about a year not 1000 days).
If YC is not only about growth but also about helping companies at much earlier stage still working on the product people love stage, that would seem to be a challenge. What do YC speakers talk about? Growth or Product? It's like putting kids learning Algebra in the same class as those ready for Calculus, not easy at all. Maybe there should be two types of YC sessions then? One for early startups still working on product, another YC for startups working on growth...
Every founder I have ever met wants their product to be loved, but unfortunately they need time and money to figure this out. Other issues: it's hard to know when to walk away pre-product and pitching VCs without growth doesn't seem to work. So founders raise money by showing early "growth" without PML (product/market love), then they go back to work on the product and when PML doesn't materialize in the first couple months they start to get nervous and switch resources back to growth hacking their mediocre product so they can be ready to raise money again and have another chance.
Obviously this is all very complicated, full of exceptions to rules. In reality product and growth have to be going on at once - but the timelines and resources and challenges to do product and growth at the same time should be part of the advice.
You’ll have to rely on inorganic means like ads, marketing, or PR to maintain your growth, and this gets very hard to sustain
This is a point that I am always curious/skeptical about because growth will always become marginally harder. So ads, marketing and PR are always going to be necessary at some point.
Using his examples, facebook is creating airplanes to deliver facebook to people they can't reach otherwise - talk about high acquisition cost. AirBnB has a ton of TV [2] and Print ads.
Further, companies like abcmouse [3], dealdash [4] all blanket the airwaves with their ads and seem to be doing well.
So maybe some companies/products lend more to traditional ad spend than others, or maybe the idea that viral is the only way to grow and sustain is wrong.
The point is not to never do paid marketing, but to make sure that you have something in motion that doesn't rely 100% on paid marketing before you do. If people are talking about your product, paid marketing can help amplify the signal and the reach (facebook, AirBnB), but if you can get no one excited about it, if no one talks about it, then going all in with paid marketing is akin to shoving down people's throats something they don't want; it's unlikely to be sustainable even if you have large pockets.
CAC ~= CPC / conversion rate. If your conversion rate is 1%, then your CAC is 100 * whatever you're paying for a lead. If it's 50%, it's 2 * what you're paying. Many businesses that are uneconomical at 100 * their ad costs are economical at 2 * their ad costs, and even the ones that are economical are much more profitable.
The article is suggesting that you get your conversion & retention rates up into something reasonable before you blast out ad spending. You've got a lot more leverage here than on almost any other driver of your business's economics. It makes no sense to lose money on CAC - LTV and make it up in volume.
In my experience this goes hand and hand with getting your messaging right. If you have a product people love then you can work to articulate what they love about it and your marketing efforts become more focused and profitable. I agree that those channels can help develop your message, find early customers, etc. but that's different than investing in growth and trying to make your sales process repeatable; you're still learning at that stage. Investing serious money in marketing before you have the right product and the right messaging is the big mistake that I see a lot of startups run into.
I recommend using https://www.promoter.io/ to measure NPS. It's a brilliant starting point for getting useful feedback too. I've ended up using it for the conference and coworking community that I run as well as for a software product.
I don't think NPS is all that bad, but the one reservation I have is that sometimes a high NPS might be due to factors that might be unadvisable to emulate.
For instance, Apple has a very high NPS. A lot of Apple customers recommend Apple products to all their friends. Why might they do that? On reason might be that Apple products are high quality and their users have a good experience from using them. Another explanation is that there's a network effect and that Mac users want to be able to share programs and files and be able to get help when their computer breaks from their other Apple-owning friends.
A manufacturer of Windows laptops might see that their NPS score is lower than Apple and take that as a sign that their customers are more unhappy with their products than Apple's (which very well might be true), but it could also be the case that, in general, Windows laptop owners don't particularly care what brand their friends all buy because Windows laptops are more-or-less interchangeable. Company executives might conclude that adding more proprietary features to their products and creating a walled-garden ecosystem like Apple's is a good idea, when it probably isn't.
It's really useful to know if your customers enjoy the product with a 1 question survey. We turned a 0/10 customer into 10/10 by giving them extra love.
You're correct, the number by itself, doesn't provide a ton of value beyond a measurable KPI. For some companies however, that KPI is one of their core metrics. Some companies even base compensation around the score.
That said, the NPS methodology is much more than the overall score. The real value is in the individual scores, verbatim feedback and its proven ability to tie those results into both growth and churn. All combined (and when done correctly)it can help drive funding, determine PMF, guide your product roadmap, forecast revenue and drive measurable growth (just to name a few benefits).
Breaking it down to just a score is looking at NPS far to simplistically.
Ditched it, and now only deal with a cut down version every year or so with clients.
CSAT has been far more illuminating. NPS often indicates success, while CSAT would actually show issues happening on the ground.
It feels like NPS is idealistic and in the clouds, while CSAT is grounded and shows real feedback.
What do you do if you make a B2B product that gives your customers such a big competitive advantage in the market that they won't talk about your product, actively hide that they use it, and refuse to let you tell others that they use it?
Small nitpick: The blog is hard to read with so much bright orange distracting from the main content. I use a script to fix that on my browser. Thought the feedback might help with the new blog.
A lot of this has to do with experience and whether or not you're trying to fulfill expectations (VCs, etc). You really don't know when a product will become loved no matter how much you iterate and it's also impossible to know for sure how long you need to "slog" it out. Some products become loved far earlier than others. The best thing to do as a founder is to drive at your vision hard as quickly as possible, acquire users to test multiple theories and gather feedback, and iterate when there are signs. Even then, not all iterations or pivots are created equal. There are many different ways to grow a business (many of which veer from traditional silicon valley values) and it's up to the founder to stick to his/her own values and to what makes sense at the time. I don't think there's a single founder out there who wants to build just a mediocre product. This is why product-market fit should be the primary focus for any growing business.
i don't mean to be a dick but citing airbnb and facebook seems like bad taste. those companies are massive outliers with billion+ dollar valuations. nowhere near your average ycom startup.
i think i'd be smarter to cite maybe smaller companies that exited in the million/100,000 dollar range. seems more accurate.
i understand that ycom wants the people they're funding to focus on ideas that generate billions as that's ultimately advantageous for ycom, but, realistically, most of these companies will putter out or exit in the low millions, which is still cool as hell too!
doesn't seem to make much sense for anyone to constantly cite huge outliers like googs or fb or salesforce etc. when there's plenty of dope ass smaller ycom companies that probably did exactly what sam is talking about: build high quality, fun, exciting, engaging products.
It's a delicate balance, for sure. Focus on product until you have something that really works. But don't fall into the 'build it, and they will come' trap.
As a side note: the new UI for blog.ycombinator is really ...uncomfortable. 3 columns? 4 if you count the social share buttons jutting out on the left. Designed on a > 21" monitor :(
The list of tags doesn't need it's own column... each with it's own row. Just make it a tag cloud above or below the blog list, and give a little breathing room to the actual article.
>> Airbnb slogged for 1000 days before discovering how to make their product loved.
Airbnb had a network effect product (marketplace of buyers and sellers). Growth accelerated once they had enough of both.
>> It’s unclear exactly when Airbnb implemented what’s become their most famous growth hack, ...
Craigslist had one thing that Airbnb did not - a massive user base.
https://growthhackers.com/growth-studies/airbnb
The "unwilling to engage in conversation, if they don't like it they leave and won't communicate why" is your feedback.
Dirty secret that startup methodologies usually doesn't tell you: it's mostly trial and error. You observe people, you form a hypothesis about what they want, you put something in front of them, and you see if they want it. If they don't, change something. It's not unusual to require dozens to hundreds of iterations before you converge on something folks like.
This is also why founders that are building for themselves have such an advantage: then you do get some signal about exactly what you might need to change, and why you would want it. You've got to know (and accept) yourself pretty well to be able to listen to it, though.
If you're standing in front of them with a notebook in hand, it's hard for them to avoid saying something. So that's step one.
Step two would be to interpret nothingness as (negative) feedback that your product wasn't interesting enough for them to bother commenting on. Which probably means you're not solving a deep enough problem.
This problem is really hard for whatsapp-like products, since people already have their problems solved pretty well in that domain and so they are less likely to find a new product particularly interesting. If I were advising a startup who were making a whatsapp-like product then I would tell them to find a narrower niche where they could solve a deeper problem.
"""Startups are defined by growth, but growth isn’t step one in building a great company."""
I'd argue it is. Building something people love is all about growth. If they love it, they'll talk about and champion it. In fact measuring generic word of mouth growth is a decent way of figuring out if people love the product (my working hypothesis is that engagement is great but if they go beyond that...we're golden).
I'd say ignore all kinds of growth except word of mouth growth. I don't care about user acquisition schemes...as soon as the word of mouth growth flattens the alarm bells must go off and all other measures are probably just life extending measures.
I'd also say ignore "growth hacking" especially of the "I'll trick people to like my product" variety. Genuine product improvement is the best growth hacking there is.
Another alternative: don't build something huge, don't get funding from VCs, build a comfortable business for yourself instead of a gimmicky trend that will be irrelevant in a few years. I feel like this is really underrated these days, if you spend the time truly earning it, not only is it more rewarding but the company may last more than 3-4 years.
Build a small focused product to generate some revenue, then hopefully that will give you time and financial freedom to build more complex products down the road.
Is there any data on the success rate of companies that aim small? A lot of the allure of the startup is a chance to strike it big. If one isn't doing that anyways, might make more sense to join a big company since they offer a considerably higher expected return on your work.
(Also if one can get funding, it lets one get paid an actual salary more quickly.)
Usually if people put money down and there is an entire industry around it, the collective mindset of that industry is close to optimal. They might be wrong on a couple of important issues. They also might be very wrong, but they're still close to optimal by definition because nobody's doing it better.
If an idea works but you don't scale it to some sort of monopoly using your tech advantage or lock in systems a competitor with VC money will eventually outprice you out of the market, get an unbreakable hold on the business whole then convert some aspect of it to premium to monetize the now huge user base.
IMO there is to much focus on becoming high growth vs simply creating revenue. Of course creating high growth companies is great thing to do - But so is creating a company that solves a small niche problem and creates sustainable revenue.
Do people have thoughts or pointers for building something users love when your product depends on there being enough users using the product? Dating apps, platforms and such.
When a single user gets no utility from your product if there aren't enough already using it, what does one do? You kind of have to spend some money marketing to get the initial word out. This is something I've been struggling with. We've been doing a lot of writing content and there's some word of mouth happening. We spend small amounts on FB too. But we're seeing a lot of users drop off with the reason "there just aren't enough other people using this".
There are also countless examples of successful two-sided marketplaces who started out by "nurturing" (aka faking) one side of the market until they reached their critical mass.
Foursquare solved the issue with gamification (badges).
For your dating app example, you could add a non-geographically bounded ranking feature, similar to "hot or not."
Basically, creating any sense of accomplishment within the platform will make it more difficult for people to abandon, giving you time to reach a scale where the core product value can be realized.
Hard to give pointers without more details of what the product is.
There's all kinds of strategies, like starting hyper local (Facebook started just on Harvard's campus) or other startups have used waiting lists before launching to get a minimum threshold of users before opening the experience.
Be careful of "there just aren't enough other people using this" as it directly relates to Sama's advice. Again it depends on the type of product you are building, but when there's a product users love or see they will love even more if there were more users, they don't drop it so easily rather they go out and recruit more users.
What could you change to get these users to love the product so much they instead help it grow and recruit other users instead of just dropping it? I don't mean give them $20 (though you can) I mean how could you make the product so great they want to tell others to use it too?
1) New every time - I don't think there can ever by a free and repeatable way to do it because its so valuable that any method that gets discovered quickly gets saturated or gated to extract a % of the value
2) Bootstrap - grow from a small X that generates value for individuals/small-groups and slowly mutate into a Y that delivers value primarily from the network as your user-base grows.
3) High cost blanket advertising or PR - get an inrush of like minded people at the same time. I can't actually think of a success story that achieved this, plenty of failures though.
4) Better than 3) is to use capital to buy users and user activity such that the value stays in the network e.g. paypal giving away free $$ to every sign-up that they then paid to a paypal merchant.
[+] [-] downandout|9 years ago|reply
If you fail to attain at least some group of rabid fans right after launch, then you have to ask users and find out what changes you could make that would turn them into rabid fans - if anything. If you don't get some sense of agreement among users from the responses, odds are that you should move onto another project. Products that the masses love are very rare. Creating them is hard, and because it involves a tremendous amount of subjectivity and pure luck, it will likely take far more than one try. But you can only fail at it if you stop trying or let yourself get bogged down with attempting to make something work that users simply don't and will never care about.
[+] [-] beat|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maximp|9 years ago|reply
There's this weird balance between the lean "get it out as soon as you can, fail fast" and "make sure it's a good product before you ship".
[+] [-] qwrusz|9 years ago|reply
Also I was under the impression YCombinator focuses on helping companies grow and organizes a demo day 3 months later to help them raise money from VCs. The pg article even mentions growth targets during YC. If this is true then companies accepted to YC should already have a product people love and be ready to hack growth over the next 3 months. This clearly is not the case (eg Airbnb joined YC after about a year not 1000 days).
If YC is not only about growth but also about helping companies at much earlier stage still working on the product people love stage, that would seem to be a challenge. What do YC speakers talk about? Growth or Product? It's like putting kids learning Algebra in the same class as those ready for Calculus, not easy at all. Maybe there should be two types of YC sessions then? One for early startups still working on product, another YC for startups working on growth...
Every founder I have ever met wants their product to be loved, but unfortunately they need time and money to figure this out. Other issues: it's hard to know when to walk away pre-product and pitching VCs without growth doesn't seem to work. So founders raise money by showing early "growth" without PML (product/market love), then they go back to work on the product and when PML doesn't materialize in the first couple months they start to get nervous and switch resources back to growth hacking their mediocre product so they can be ready to raise money again and have another chance.
Obviously this is all very complicated, full of exceptions to rules. In reality product and growth have to be going on at once - but the timelines and resources and challenges to do product and growth at the same time should be part of the advice.
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|9 years ago|reply
This is a point that I am always curious/skeptical about because growth will always become marginally harder. So ads, marketing and PR are always going to be necessary at some point.
Using his examples, facebook is creating airplanes to deliver facebook to people they can't reach otherwise - talk about high acquisition cost. AirBnB has a ton of TV [2] and Print ads.
Further, companies like abcmouse [3], dealdash [4] all blanket the airwaves with their ads and seem to be doing well.
So maybe some companies/products lend more to traditional ad spend than others, or maybe the idea that viral is the only way to grow and sustain is wrong.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/the-technolog...
[2] https://www.ispot.tv/brands/oLp/airbnb
[3] https://www.ispot.tv/brands/d9N/abcmouse-com
[4] https://www.ispot.tv/ad/7Tc0/dealdash
[+] [-] Mahn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nostrademons|9 years ago|reply
The article is suggesting that you get your conversion & retention rates up into something reasonable before you blast out ad spending. You've got a lot more leverage here than on almost any other driver of your business's economics. It makes no sense to lose money on CAC - LTV and make it up in volume.
[+] [-] terryjsmith|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jot|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] web007|9 years ago|reply
It's a vanity metric, just like asking "would you pay $10 for this?" instead of getting someone to actually pay $10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter#Criticism_of_NPS
[+] [-] elihu|9 years ago|reply
For instance, Apple has a very high NPS. A lot of Apple customers recommend Apple products to all their friends. Why might they do that? On reason might be that Apple products are high quality and their users have a good experience from using them. Another explanation is that there's a network effect and that Mac users want to be able to share programs and files and be able to get help when their computer breaks from their other Apple-owning friends.
A manufacturer of Windows laptops might see that their NPS score is lower than Apple and take that as a sign that their customers are more unhappy with their products than Apple's (which very well might be true), but it could also be the case that, in general, Windows laptop owners don't particularly care what brand their friends all buy because Windows laptops are more-or-less interchangeable. Company executives might conclude that adding more proprietary features to their products and creating a walled-garden ecosystem like Apple's is a good idea, when it probably isn't.
[+] [-] trjordan|9 years ago|reply
A lot of SaaS businesses have proved this for their customer base and found it's worth driving by. If it's not true for you, that's fine.
[+] [-] randall|9 years ago|reply
It's useful for us.
[+] [-] danaseverson|9 years ago|reply
That said, the NPS methodology is much more than the overall score. The real value is in the individual scores, verbatim feedback and its proven ability to tie those results into both growth and churn. All combined (and when done correctly)it can help drive funding, determine PMF, guide your product roadmap, forecast revenue and drive measurable growth (just to name a few benefits).
Breaking it down to just a score is looking at NPS far to simplistically.
[+] [-] danieltillett|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethiclub|9 years ago|reply
CSAT has been far more illuminating. NPS often indicates success, while CSAT would actually show issues happening on the ground. It feels like NPS is idealistic and in the clouds, while CSAT is grounded and shows real feedback.
Plus, clients just don't like NPS either.
[+] [-] aacook|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danieltillett|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silvaben|9 years ago|reply
Seems really nice. I figured it might be useful for folks trying to run an NPS survey after reading Sam's recommendation.
[+] [-] elwell|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trg2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seoseokho|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fillskills|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vsloo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] debt|9 years ago|reply
i think i'd be smarter to cite maybe smaller companies that exited in the million/100,000 dollar range. seems more accurate.
i understand that ycom wants the people they're funding to focus on ideas that generate billions as that's ultimately advantageous for ycom, but, realistically, most of these companies will putter out or exit in the low millions, which is still cool as hell too!
doesn't seem to make much sense for anyone to constantly cite huge outliers like googs or fb or salesforce etc. when there's plenty of dope ass smaller ycom companies that probably did exactly what sam is talking about: build high quality, fun, exciting, engaging products.
[+] [-] brlewis|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcmaffey|9 years ago|reply
As a side note: the new UI for blog.ycombinator is really ...uncomfortable. 3 columns? 4 if you count the social share buttons jutting out on the left. Designed on a > 21" monitor :(
The list of tags doesn't need it's own column... each with it's own row. Just make it a tag cloud above or below the blog list, and give a little breathing room to the actual article.
[+] [-] blacksmythe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] euph0ria|9 years ago|reply
I've experienced that many users are unwilling to engage in conversation, they test it and if they don't like it they leave and won't communicate why.
Suppose one creates a new Whatsapp-like product, how would one, in practice, go about gathering feedback?
[+] [-] nostrademons|9 years ago|reply
Dirty secret that startup methodologies usually doesn't tell you: it's mostly trial and error. You observe people, you form a hypothesis about what they want, you put something in front of them, and you see if they want it. If they don't, change something. It's not unusual to require dozens to hundreds of iterations before you converge on something folks like.
This is also why founders that are building for themselves have such an advantage: then you do get some signal about exactly what you might need to change, and why you would want it. You've got to know (and accept) yourself pretty well to be able to listen to it, though.
[+] [-] lincolnq|9 years ago|reply
Step two would be to interpret nothingness as (negative) feedback that your product wasn't interesting enough for them to bother commenting on. Which probably means you're not solving a deep enough problem.
This problem is really hard for whatsapp-like products, since people already have their problems solved pretty well in that domain and so they are less likely to find a new product particularly interesting. If I were advising a startup who were making a whatsapp-like product then I would tell them to find a narrower niche where they could solve a deeper problem.
[+] [-] kriro|9 years ago|reply
I'd argue it is. Building something people love is all about growth. If they love it, they'll talk about and champion it. In fact measuring generic word of mouth growth is a decent way of figuring out if people love the product (my working hypothesis is that engagement is great but if they go beyond that...we're golden).
I'd say ignore all kinds of growth except word of mouth growth. I don't care about user acquisition schemes...as soon as the word of mouth growth flattens the alarm bells must go off and all other measures are probably just life extending measures.
I'd also say ignore "growth hacking" especially of the "I'll trick people to like my product" variety. Genuine product improvement is the best growth hacking there is.
[+] [-] tjholowaychuk|9 years ago|reply
Build a small focused product to generate some revenue, then hopefully that will give you time and financial freedom to build more complex products down the road.
[+] [-] arikrak|9 years ago|reply
(Also if one can get funding, it lets one get paid an actual salary more quickly.)
[+] [-] coffeemug|9 years ago|reply
Usually if people put money down and there is an entire industry around it, the collective mindset of that industry is close to optimal. They might be wrong on a couple of important issues. They also might be very wrong, but they're still close to optimal by definition because nobody's doing it better.
TL;DR: calling entire world-class industries clueless implies naiveté.
[+] [-] khuknows|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LoSboccacc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adentranter|9 years ago|reply
IMO there is to much focus on becoming high growth vs simply creating revenue. Of course creating high growth companies is great thing to do - But so is creating a company that solves a small niche problem and creates sustainable revenue.
[+] [-] EGreg|9 years ago|reply
https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2016/11/properly-valuing-con...
[+] [-] blizkreeg|9 years ago|reply
When a single user gets no utility from your product if there aren't enough already using it, what does one do? You kind of have to spend some money marketing to get the initial word out. This is something I've been struggling with. We've been doing a lot of writing content and there's some word of mouth happening. We spend small amounts on FB too. But we're seeing a lot of users drop off with the reason "there just aren't enough other people using this".
[+] [-] melvinmt|9 years ago|reply
Here are some links to get started:
http://avc.com/2012/12/single-user-utility-in-a-social-syste...
http://andrewchen.co/social-products-win-with-utility-not-in...
http://platformed.info/seeding-platform-standalone-square-op...
There are also countless examples of successful two-sided marketplaces who started out by "nurturing" (aka faking) one side of the market until they reached their critical mass.
[+] [-] kromem|9 years ago|reply
For your dating app example, you could add a non-geographically bounded ranking feature, similar to "hot or not."
Basically, creating any sense of accomplishment within the platform will make it more difficult for people to abandon, giving you time to reach a scale where the core product value can be realized.
[+] [-] qwrusz|9 years ago|reply
There's all kinds of strategies, like starting hyper local (Facebook started just on Harvard's campus) or other startups have used waiting lists before launching to get a minimum threshold of users before opening the experience.
Be careful of "there just aren't enough other people using this" as it directly relates to Sama's advice. Again it depends on the type of product you are building, but when there's a product users love or see they will love even more if there were more users, they don't drop it so easily rather they go out and recruit more users.
What could you change to get these users to love the product so much they instead help it grow and recruit other users instead of just dropping it? I don't mean give them $20 (though you can) I mean how could you make the product so great they want to tell others to use it too?
[+] [-] duncanawoods|9 years ago|reply
2) Bootstrap - grow from a small X that generates value for individuals/small-groups and slowly mutate into a Y that delivers value primarily from the network as your user-base grows.
3) High cost blanket advertising or PR - get an inrush of like minded people at the same time. I can't actually think of a success story that achieved this, plenty of failures though.
4) Better than 3) is to use capital to buy users and user activity such that the value stays in the network e.g. paypal giving away free $$ to every sign-up that they then paid to a paypal merchant.
[+] [-] jgh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pedalpete|9 years ago|reply
I'm working on a product that is seeing great growth (free atm), and what appears to me to be good customer engagement.
When I break things, users email and let us know, time on site is good, etc. etc. At what point do you go, yup, this is something people love.
Of course, I'm still making product improvements and figuring out what people will pay for.
[+] [-] paki123|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] statictype|9 years ago|reply
Any examples of this?
[+] [-] huangc10|9 years ago|reply