Lean Startup in action at eCommerce furniture company

1. Urban Ladder is one of the top online furniture companies which operate from
Bangalore, India
I got a chance to meet Rajiv Srivatsa, one of the founders of Urban Ladder and
understood that they are truly a Lean Startup in many ways.
Let’s see how they have been Lean in their approach
You just need a landing page to learn what customers need
Initially the founders interviewed many potential customers to find out
 How they are currently fulfilling their furniture needs
 What they feel about buying furniture online
 What categories of furniture are they comfortable buying online
 If they do not want to buy online, what are they afraid about
 Identify which piece of furniture is most in need
Once they have got good initial insights by interviewing potential customers,
they started their second phase of customer discovery
They wanted to know if customers who told that they would buy online will

2. truly buy, for this they created a landing page using Launchrock, where they
could collect Email’s of potential customers and also direct them to a survey,
to further understand their needs
With these insights, they narrowed down to the categories where they would
start. Survey results clearly pointed to coffee tables, book racks, bed side
tables etc. They also decided that they would postpone the bigger categories
like sofas
‘Everyone who needs furniture’ is NOT the right way to define your customer
segment
As I always believe, identifying your customer segment is one of the most
important elements of your business model; founders at urban ladder have
thought through well in defining their customer segment
One of their customer segments is families who live in urban cities, who earn
upwards of one lakh per month, who are digitally savvy, probably married and
who bought a new house or moving into a rented house.
When you define a customer segment such clarity, you can define customer
personals and market your solution better to the chosen segments.

3. It’s not the number of people who like your page is important
Founders at Urban ladder realized the power of social media and decided to
invest time and money on Facebook business page
They did not run un-targeted ads, since they didn’t want people who may not
be their true customers
Instead, once they got their initial fans, they analyzed their profiles and
targeted similar profiles in their ad campaigns, and also since they had a
defined customer segment they could target them efficiently via Facebook ads
No to Deals & Discounts
Founders decided that people who are looking for genuine quality products did
not care much about deals and discounts. Hence one will not see any discounts
in their site
Customer Service is the key to success
After successfully launching in Bangalore, founders decided that they would
expand to other cities by using third party delivery services.
Since they track many data points, they found out that customers who were
delivered using third party services were not greatly satisfied, for reasons
including delay in delivery, poor customer service ethos etc.
Because Customer service was at the core of Urban Ladder’s culture, they
immediately stopped third party delivery, though this meant losing up to 30%
of their revenue. But by making this call, they not only got a lot of positive
word of mouth, they also got more than 30% repeat traffic thus more than
compensating for the loss in business by serving a smaller geography.
Other experiments which are run at Urban Ladder
Open temporary offline shops at exhibitions, apartments and office
Though they generated good revenue, return on investment was much low
and the bandwidth it took to do these events was much higher, so Urban
Ladder decided to postpone going the offline route

4. Pricing: they experimented with various prices before finalizing a price for each
furniture unit.
Ad campaigns: After experimenting with Facebook and Google ads they found
out that Facebook ads serve their purpose well, because Facebook ads are
more visual (which is necessary to show a photo of their furniture) and they
can run targeted ads
And finally I loved what Rajiv has to say about funding. Raise money so you are
able to build a team and go out into the market, but take lesser money, so it
keeps you on your toes w.r.t what you do with it
Please visit http://blog.leanmantra.in for more such case studies