FAQ

 

 

Handling Negative Customer Feedback (Greg)

 

• QBIn - Great site for getting feedback (Maurice)
• No company has ever been destroyed by one furious customer (Cindy A)
• You may only have 1000 customers at some time and that may be sub-optimal.  You may consider even pivoting to get to 100k customers

 

When is it a pivot vs. a new product? (Maurice)

 

• Changing product you're likely changing to find an opportunity (Hiten S.)
• Fundamentally changes your business model and not your product
• Kissmetrics has had 2 pivots - changed to target different customer types (Hiten S.)
• "Note to all, never target everyone" Cindy A.
• There are a number of different kinds of pivots... you're grounded in what you did
• "Pivot is the adjustments you make along the way to find the optimal solution" (Lydia S.)

 

How do you decide when to pivot? (BJ)

 

• "I don't think there's a specific formula" (Hiten S.)
• Kissmetrics did not want to build a sales force or give their product away and that served as their key guidance as they moved forward
• "If working harder isn't going to get you there, you may need to pivot" (Cindy A.)
• "Scalability and ability to charge otherwise you find yourself in a .org kind of situation" (Tommy P.)
• "Pivoting without customer feedback is flip-flopping" (Tommy P.)
• "If you have your metrics and can't get to at least 40% satisfaction, you may need to pivot" (Hiten S.)
• "It almost doesn't matter what you do, if you can achieve that PMF and scale it, you likely have a business" (Ranvir S.)
• "Having revenue on the table early seems to make it easier to measure your progress and traction" (Ranvir S.)
• "Whether you charge or not may have little to do with PMF, if you are getting indicators that people are willing to pay" (Hiten S.)
• "Value of not charging is you get more feedback and can learn more about these customers" (Hiten S.)
• "There are lots of ways to make cost of acquiring go down and revenue go up - those are levers, however, PMF is a much harder challenge" (Hiten S.)

 

How do you know your customer acquisition cost? (Tommy P)

 

• Can test by changing pricing dynamically
• Or take a credit card and not charge it
• Show different price points but charge the lowest price point

 

How do you figure out what feedback to pay attention to? (Tommy P)

 

• Free users aren't always the best ones to listen to (Tommy P.)
• "Free is a path to pay" - (Hiten S.)
• Figuring out what should be free is really hard
• "If you can get your free user's costs down to pennies, that's a great place to be" (Hiten S.)
• "Only your early people would have faith to pay for an early product" (Cindy A.)
• "Some early majority will need free to get in the door" (Cindy A.)