Presentation I gave at LeanLA about Sharethrough's tips and tricks, learnings from running the company as a Lean Startup

1. Conquering
as a
Lean Startup

2. MEETUP CUSTOMER DEV
Background
• What industry are you in? What stage startup in
you in?
Lean Startup Experience
• Do you know what customer development or MVP
is?
Burning Topics of Interest
• What do you want to get out of this? Why did you
come here?

3. Guaranteed Video Views. Maximized Sharing.

4. THE PROBLEM
In the time it takes you to read
this, over 36 hours of videos
were uploaded to YouTube.

5. THE PROBLEM
In the time it takes you to read
this, over 36 hours of videos
were uploaded to YouTube.

6. THE PROBLEM
In the time it takes you to read
this, over 36 hours of videos
were uploaded to YouTube.

7. We guarantee views
for brand videos.

8. THE SHARETHROUGH SOLUTION
Repeatable
• Social video ad products
Scalable
• Social publisher network
Transparent
• Optimization/reporting
• Data and targeting

9. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE SHARED VIEW

10. Shared Views are the Holy Grail
View Length: Paid vs. Shared
100
75
% People
50 Shared
Still Watching
Pai
25
d
0
0s 12s 24s 36s 48s 60s 72s 84s 96s 108s
Video Time Elapsed (seconds)

11. All-time Most Videos on Ad Age’s Viral Video Chart

12. Dentyne Pure - Epic Rap Battle
3.8MM Views
Rockhard - Scarface School Play
5.4MM Views
Features on MSNBC, Fox News, Good Morning America
Modern Warfare 2
Butterfinger - I Like Big Butterfingers Everyone’s Doing It
4.2MM Views 1.5MM Views
Muscle Milk - Sexy Pilgrim
4.5MM Views
Features on WSJ, NYT, Metacafe, Break, Digg, Reddit
GMC - Dude Perfect
Cliff Shot
Features on Buzzfeed, Digg, Tony Hawk Ride - Skateboarding Dog Plays Video Game
Metacafe, USA Today
6.1MM Views
Features on Kotaku, Joystiq, CollegeHumor, Yahoo, Break, Metacafe, MySpace Video

13. THE TEAM
Team members from Stanford,
Google,VideoEgg, Current TV, Feed
Dan Greenberg Rob Fan
CEO, Co-Founder CTO, Co-Founder
Funded and advised by industry leaders
Mike Maples Cali Tran Ron Conway Ron Steve Blank Auren Dave McClure Eric Ries
Floodgate Northbridge Bouganim Hoffman
Hundreds of forward-thinking customers

14. Roots in Facebook applications
and viral video consulting.

15. How did startups do business
before the concept of Lean?

16. OUR FIRST MVP
2 Hours of Development
20M Daily Active Users

17. CUSTOMER DEV GONE RIGHT
The Story
Take-Aways
• Make your customer an internal hero
• Find your early evangelists (good ones will want to
“invest in you”)
• Change your pitch/product to appropriate customer
archetypes

18. pters/Earlyvangelists
INSTITUTIONALIZING LEAN STARTUP
The Revised Technology Adoption Life Cycle
am
tion.
ossing
the con-
doption
ed in five
yer:
Ea
Ea
La
te
rly
rly
La
Inn
Ma
Ad
Ma
gag
ova
jor
op
jor
rds
ter
ity
tor
ity
s
s
We all want to cross the chasm.
Figure 2: Moore’s Revised Technology Adoption Life Cycle Curve
y adopters –
How do we do this (i.e. how do we scale)?
• Early majority – • Late majority – • Laggards –
the first to pursue rely on benefits of new not interested in don’t want anything
nology for its technology, but will technology per se; to do with technology;
nsic benefits. wait for others to work waits for established uses technology when
out the kinks. leader to emerge, buys it’s without knowledge
de facto standard. of its existence.

19. Always visible customer archetype board

20. Paired programming on all stories

21. Daily scrums, Rotating pairs daily

22. Good amount of ping pong

23. KEY LEARNINGS
Customer Development
• Everyone does customer development
• During training, new hires listen in on sales calls
• New hires learn about the campaign trafficking
process
Agile Development
• It’s all about discipline
• All engineers work on the entire stack
• Documentation and training handled via pairing
• Visual status of build continuous integration
(working toward continuous deployment)

24. IS THIS IT FOR LEAN STARTUP?

25. CHALLENGING THE ASSUMPTION
lean user
design
customer agile/xp
development development

26. Communicate with visuals instead of words

27. Low fidelity mocks solving a user’s pain

28. Stanford d.school whiteboards

29. Physical, visual, and transparent
product communication

30. All teams co-located
Frequent communication encouraged

31. LEAN USER DESIGN
What’s the goal?
• Iterative design
• Get designers speaking the same language as
Engineering and Business
Some more practices
• Designers “pair program” with engineers
• Communicate with visuals instead of words
Want to learn more?
• http://luxr.co

32. WHAT’S DIFFERENT ABOUT A LEAN
ADVERTISING STARTUP
Cash is a vanity metric
• Cash should be treated like user count
• More cash doesn’t equal long-term equity value
Lots of users, immediately.
• All products need to instantly handle web scale
Lifestyle or Venture scalable?
• Easy to slip in to a consultancy or agency

33. LEAN STARTUP TIPS
Figure out customer archetypes
• You will save yourself much time and money
Plan everything in terms of an MVP
• Not just product, but also marketing material,
sales plan, infrastructure
Technology is a problem solver NOT the
product
• Great technology by itself doesn’t prove business
models

34. Rob Fan
rob@sharethrough.com
twitter: rfan622
Chris Schreiber
chris@sharethrough.com
twitter: cousinchris
http://sharethrough.com