Precios: Como mantener los descuentos

¿Cómo se sostienen los grandes descuentos?

Por Ariel Baños  | fijaciondeprecios.com

La permanencia de grandes ofertas y promociones se ha transformado casi en una costumbre en el mercado argentino, avaladas por su impacto en las ventas. Pero, "cuando la limosna es grande, hasta el santo desconfía".

Gran parte de los consumidores mira con gran desconfianza los grandes descuentos, ante el temor de ser víctimas de un engaño.

La primera sospecha generalmente recae en los precios iniciales, probablemente abultados para poder hacer frente a los grandes porcentajes de descuento anunciados.

Si bien lo anterior no puede descartarse, no es conveniente concentrar toda la atención en dicho factor. De hecho las empresas utilizan alguna combinación de las siguientes herramientas para sostener las tentadoras ofertas y promociones:

COMPARTEN LOS DESCUENTOS CON LOS SPONSORS DE LA PROMOCIONES

En el caso de los descuentos vigentes en supermercados, realizados en forma conjunta con bancos, el descuento total suele dividirse en proporciones iguales entre ambas partes. Es decir que si el descuento anunciado fuera del 20%, finalmente un 10% termina siendo aportado por el supermercado. En el caso que el descuento involucre puntualmente a algún producto, el impacto suele compartirse entre el proveedor del producto y el punto de venta.

REALIZAN LOS DESCUENTOS EN PRODUCTOS O CATEGORÍAS DE PRODUCTOS SELECCIONADOS

Aquí se aplica una tradicional táctica comercial conocida como "loss leader" o "líder en pérdidas". Esto significa que la empresa sacrifica un importante margen de rentabilidad en un cierto producto o categoría de productos, pero espera compensarlo con las compras adicionales de los clientes que concurren al local tentados por el descuento anunciado. Esto ayuda a diluir el impacto del descuento, ya que se combina con ventas adicionales a precios "llenos".

APLICAN LOS DESCUENTOS A CLIENTES SELECCIONADOS

Los descuentos casi siempre se aplican en forma focalizada o segmentada. El sólo hecho de entrar al local no es suficiente para acceder al descuento. Entre las barreras para obtener el beneficio se encuentran: poseer una determinada tarjeta de crédito o debido, la tarjeta propia de la cadena, una cierta tarjeta de fidelización, o pertenecer a algún grupo de clientes favorecido, como puede ser el caso de los jubilados. No todos los clientes que compran en un cierto momento cumplen con las condiciones anteriores, por lo cual no todas las ventas tendrán el máximo descuento anunciado.

EVITAN LA SUPERPOSICIÓN DE DESCUENTOS

La proliferación de descuentos con diferentes formatos, hace que en algunos casos extremos, si se acumularan todos los descuentos, la compra sería prácticamente gratis. Por esta razón, los comercios se aseguran de comunicar que las promociones se excluyen mutuamente, para que no se produzca un efecto cascada en los descuentos. También quedan fuera de las actividades promocionales aquellos productos cuyos precios se encuentren dentro del control directo del gobierno, que son generalmente los de margen más bajo.

LIMITAN EL REEMBOLSO EN CONCEPTO DE DESCUENTO PROMOCIONAL

En muchas promociones se informa un límite de compra en cantidades de producto o un tope de reembolso en caso que el descuento se realice a través de alguna tarjeta. Esto contribuye a administrar el impacto del descuento en los resultados de la empresa, y también desalienta a la compra para almacenar para un tiempo prolongado o para la reventa del producto comprado.

DIFIEREN EL DESCUENTO PARA LA PRÓXIMA COMPRA

Ciertas empresas otorgan sustanciales descuentos, pero solo aplicables en una próxima compra, en un rango de fechas establecido de antemano. Esta práctica permite a la empresa inducir a nueva visita de los clientes, y diferir en el tiempo el impacto de los descuentos. También ocurre que ciertos clientes que concurren tentados por el descuento en las compras futuras, luego extravían el cupón de descuento u olvidan utilizarlo en la fecha indicada. Así es que los descuentos emitidos, terminan siendo superiores a los finalmente utilizados. Algo similar ocurre en las empresas de cupones on-line, donde no todos los clientes que adquieren la oferta, terminan efectivamente realizando la compra.

LIMITAN LA OFERTA A LAS COMPRAS DE CIERTAS CANTIDADES

Otra de las condiciones frecuentes para acceder a importantes descuentos es comprar una cierta cantidad mínima de un producto. Promociones del tipo "lleve 3 y pague 2" o "la segunda unidad al 70%" siguen este formato. Además de inducir a los clientes a comprar un volumen adicional al usualmente adquirido, este tipo de promociones permite que continúen pagando el precio "lleno" aquellos que optan por comprar una cantidad menor a la sugerida.

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Argenware: Globant... el cielo es el límite!

Globant, de La Plata a Wall Street

El CEO de Globant, Martín Migoya, se dio el lujo de decirle no al Nasdaq, la bolsa para las firmas tecnológicas. Migoya prepara el desembarco en el más tradicional NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) resuelto a hacer de esta firma, nacida de la iniciativa de cuatro amigos de La Plata en 2003, un caso testigo para las empresas jóvenes; en lo que asoma como una disputa con el Nasdaq . Si la crisis internacional no se agudiza, Globant podría cotizaren Wall Street a fines de 2012. Esta multi, experta en soluciones creativas, está por concretar, además, una adquisición en Londres que completa la que cerró este año en Estados Unidos. Pero para brindar servicio on line permanente a gerentes de tecnología de multinacionales o imaginar cajeros de bancos especiales para los más pobres o distintas aplicaciones de bioingeniería, Globant enfrenta la falta de programadores. Así, se lanzó a una búsqueda en el mercado español. La sorpresa es que, pese a la catástrofe, los españoles casi no respondieron al pedido. Migoya lo atribuye a que la crisis no afecta a las tecnológicas.

Guillermo Nielsen, ex vice ministro de Economía de la gestión Lavagna, es considerado en el exterior el arquitecto del canje de la deuda. El Gobierno alemán lo invitó a Berlín la última semana para que exponga sobre la crisis del 2001. Pero allá se topó con otra preocupación: cómo sigue y cuáles son las garantías para la financiación de maquinarias y equipos en el marco de la delicada situación financiera global. Después de todo, algunos equipos vendidos por Alemania siguen impagos dentro del paquete de deuda que reclama el Club de París. Las jornadas fueron organizadas por el KFW Bankengruppe, el banco para el comercio exterior de Alemania. A Nielsen lo escucharon Norbert Kloppenburg, del KFW, Hans Driftmann, presidente de la UIA alemana y el nexo de Berlín con la región, Reinhold Festge. También invitaron a brasileños, como Luiz Eduardo Melin, del BNDES, por el interés que despiertan las obras de infraestructura que emprende Brasil dadas las Olimpíadas y el Mundial de Fútbol.

Lisandro Bril, cabeza de varios fondos que invierten en la web, cuenta que mientras en Nueva York preguntan sobre el tipo de cambio y la seguridad jurídica de la Argentina, en el Sillicon Valley se interesan por el tango y el malbec. Tal vez eso explique lo que ocurre con varias firmas con partida de nacimiento en Buenos Aires. Esta semana Disney le compró a Santiago Ciri, Popego, experta en descubrir el perfil de los que navegan. Y Diego Bash le vendió a Linkedin su empresa que optimiza las búsquedas.

Creador de Patagon, el sitio que ya es leyenda en la industria de internet, Constancio Larguía volvió a la web con Weemba, un sitio en el que son accionistas otros ex Patagon y el Banco de Galicia y que conecta a los solicitantes de créditos con los bancos. A los individuos les permite conocer on line todas las ofertas y a los bancos, encontrar fácilmente clientes. Con base en Argentina, España y EE.UU., Larguía está sorprendido porque los más activos son los bancos españoles. “En la Argentina son mucho más renuentes a otorgar créditos”, asegura. Lanzada en 2010, Weemba ya generó préstamos por $1.000 millones en un año y en España por 280 millones de euros.

Nada Personal señor Moyano es el título de un documento elaborado por Jorge Vasconcelos, economista jefe del Ieral de la Fundación Mediterránea. Allí sostiene que uno de los principales lastres de la competitividad en el país es el exagerado costo de la logística, que multiplica por tres la carga del sector comparado con EE.UU. “Según un estudio del Banco Mundial, mientras en la Argentina los costos logísticos representan una cifra equivalente a 27 % del PBI, en Estados Unidos ese guarismo es de 9 % y en Chile de 16 %”, sostiene. Problemas regulatorios, insuficiencia de inversiones y el sesgo “pro-camiones”, son algunos de los factores que posiblemente ayudan a explicar la brecha con los otros países.

Un grupo de profesionales se movilizó para llevar energía eólica a unas 2.000 escuelas rurales. La iniciativa surgió en medio de fuertes críticas a la importación de gas licuado. “Es una política insostenible ambiental y económicamente cuando en la Argentina hay un recurso gratuito y abundante, el viento. El dinero invertido en la importación de gas se podría destinar al desarrollo de la energía eólica”, destacó Luciana Proietti, coordinadora de 500RPM. La organización se propone llegar con la energía eólica a las escuelas rurales vía un aerogenerador que se fabrica manualmente.

El discurso de Cristina en la Cámara de la Construcción sonó a melodía en muchos oídos. Como antes en la Bolsa, cuando invitó a apostar en acciones y a olvidarse del dólar, esta vez habló de invertir en ladrillos. Ni lerdos ni perezosos los asistentes desempolvaron viejas iniciativas. Así, se lo vio a Moisés Resnick Brenner recordar los títulos VaVi ( Valor Vivienda) que instrumentó en el Banco Provincia en 1985 que permitieron vender 50.000 viviendas que estaban congeladas por falta de créditos accesibles. Esos títulos vincularon por primera vez el mercado inmobiliario con el bursátil y generaron fondos. Otros empresarios impulsan hasta generar una moneda propia para el sector con tal de alimentar la rueda.

Rafael De Bernardi y su suegro Víctor Nataine introdujeron la raza Waygu en Esquel. Lo hicieron a través del método de transplante embrionario. Es decir adquirieron en distintas cabañas los embriones de estos vacunos de origen japonés y que producen la carne kobe. La intención es que los animales se desarrollen en una zona libre de aftosa, lo que otorga un mayor valor agregado y con el sello de Carne Patagónica, tan reconocido y pagado en el mundo.

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Motorola pasa a ser de Google

EE.UU. autorizó la compra y Motorola ya es de Google

Poder. Ahora Google podrá expandirse más en el mercado de celulares.

El Departamento de Justicia de Estados Unidos dio ayer luz verde a la adquisición por parte de Google de la división de celulares de Motorola. La compra, por un valor de 12.500 millones de dólares , estaba pendiente de aprobación por las autoridades estadounidenses reguladoras de la competencia desde que fue anunciada en agosto de 2011.

“Tras una profunda revisión de la operación, la división antimonopolio ha determinado que es improbable que la adquisición disminuya sustancialmente la competitividad”, indicó el Departamento de Justicia en un comunicado.

Gracias a esta compra Google expande su mercado a través de la adquisición de 17.000 patentes en el mercado de telefonía móvil.

La notificación de EE.UU. se produce horas después de que la Comisión Europea (CE) autorizara la compra con el mismo argumento de que “no modificaría de forma significativa” el mercado.

“Hemos aprobado la compra de Motorola Mobility por Google ya que, tras un análisis cuidadoso, esta transacción no plantea por sí misma problemas de competencia”, afirmó Joaquín Almunia, Comisario Europeo de Competencia.

La investigación oficial estuvo centrada en si Google dificultaría que grandes fabricantes de celulares como Samsung o HTC utilicen el sistema operativo de Google, Android.

Clarin

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Precios: Me gusta en Facebook puede tener costos

Riesgos para el bolsillo de poner "me gusta" en Facebook

Por Ariel Baños 

Las opiniones favorable de los clientes
de hoteles en las redes sociales, paradójicamente,
podrían impactar negativamente en su bolsillo en
futuras estadías. Foto: Archivo / Facebook

¿Es mejor quejarse o hablar bien de una empresa para conseguir precios más bajos?

Esta es una pregunta frecuente que se realizan los clientes, en la permanente búsqueda de adquirir aquellos productos y servicios preferidos, a un precio más conveniente.

El inconveniente es que algunas empresas dan señales muy negativas a sus clientes, en relación a la pregunta anterior. Los incentivos se han distorsionado de tal manera, que cada vez más mercados se parecen a la canción "El mundo del revés" de María Elena Walsh. Los premiados son los clientes más conflictivos, y se castiga a aquellos más fieles, que muchas veces suelen hacer correr la voz de su satisfacción.

HABLANDO MAL DE LA EMPRESA

"Llamo para dar de baja el servicio", se apresura a comentar un irritado usuario. Luego de describir brevemente su problema al encargado de Atención al Cliente, llega la rápida respuesta del empleado de la empresa. "No se preocupe señor, para compensarlo por esta situación, a partir del próximo mes lo incluiremos en una promoción especial".

Muchas empresas tienen formalizado en sus procedimientos de retención de clientes, la posibilidad de ofrecer un descuento adicional o una promoción especial. Usualmente se otorga este beneficio de precios sólo a aquellos que presentan una queja por el servicio o bien amenazan con cambiarse a un competidor.

Realizar un descuento o una promoción inmediata al cliente, aparecen como soluciones rápidas ante una emergencia. Después de todo el precio es la variable más fácil e inmediata de modificar.

Sin embargo, aún cuando el resultado pudiera ser exitoso, en términos de retención inmediata de clientes, este tipo de respuestas tiene tres grandes inconvenientes .

En primer lugar no ataca el problema principal del reclamo, generalmente vinculado a la prestación del servicio o características del producto. Sin embargo para la empresa resulta más fácil ajustar el precio (a pesar de su impacto económico), que realizar los cambios necesarios en el servicio o producto para satisfacer al cliente. Al no resolverse el problema de base, la queja del cliente queda latente, con grandes posibilidades de repetirse. En este sentido, un viejo refrán sostiene que "la dulzura de un precio bajo desaparece más rápidamente que la amargura de la mala calidad".

En segundo lugar , aún cuando la reducción de precios ataque el problema de base, que en este caso podría ser una diferencia de precios con un competidor, no es una respuesta consistente. El hecho de realizar descuentos selectivos, si bien minimiza el impacto en los resultados económicos de la empresa, puede generar conflictos, cuando otros clientes adviertan las ventajas de precios que tienen ciertos usuarios. La empresa da señales de inconsistencia y falta de transparencia en las decisiones de precios hacia sus clientes.

En tercer lugar , y la más riesgosa de las consecuencias, es que estas conductas estimulan a los clientes a "comportarse mal". Es decir que ante la evidencia de que aquellos que se quejan frecuentemente y amenazan con comprar a un competidor son los que obtienen los mejores precios, aún los clientes más fieles se ven estimulados a imitar estas conductas. La empresa envía señales muy negativas al premiar los comportamientos más conflictivos, y esto suele agravar la situación, además de afectar la imagen pública de la compañía debido a estas inconsistencias.

HABLANDO BIEN DE LA EMPRESA

Imaginemos que se alojó en un hotel, y tuvo una extraordinaria experiencia por la calidad de atención y las instalaciones. ¿Por qué no recomendarlo a través de las redes sociales? Bueno, paradójicamente, ésto podría impactar negativamente en su bolsillo en futuras estadías.

La suma de opiniones positivas, podría convencer a los directivos del hotel, acerca de la oportunidad de elevar precios o bien reducir las promociones otorgadas. En un foro realizado recientemente por la escuela de negocios española Instituto de Empresa (IE), algunas cadenas hoteleras han revelado que las opiniones de clientes en sitios como Tripadvisor o Trivago , tienen un peso importante al momento de definir sus estrategias de precios.

Si bien esta estrategia es mucho más sutil y difícil de rastrear que la anterior, podría tener efectos muy nocivos en el uso de las redes sociales para expresar preferencias de consumo.

¿Se está llegando demasiado lejos? Indudablemente este enfoque tiene grandes riesgos. Si esta práctica se generalizara, y tomara estado público, los clientes evitarían comentar sus preferencias en las redes sociales o intencionalmente postearían comentarios negativos, con la finalidad de forzar una reducción de precios de las empresas.

CONCLUSIONES

Las empresas deberían ser muy cuidadosas en la utilización de los canales de comunicación con sus clientes. La recepción de reclamos, opiniones o comentarios, no debería utilizarse como un medio para ajustar precios, cualquiera fuera la dirección del ajuste. La utilización indebida de estos canales podría finalmente distorsionar sus verdaderos objetivos, alentando comportamientos nocivos tanto para empresas, como para clientes.

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Lean Startup: Aprender (4/4)

The Lean Startup in a Nutshell IV: Learn

In this part of the Lean Startup in a Nutshell series, we finally close the build-measure-learn loop and learn how to—well, learn. Learning is arguably the most crucial step within the feedback loop. If a startup is unable to learn properly, people's time is wasted. Lean means: eliminate waste. Waste is eliminated by learning as much as possible as frequently as possible.

Customer interviews

Learning from accessible and actionable metrics is straightforward. Learning from qualitative one-on-one interviews with customers is harder. When conducting these interviews, the reality distortion field of the founders must be taken into account:

True visionaries spend considerable energy every day trying to maintain the reality distortion field. Try to see it from their point of view – none of the disruptive innovations in history were amenable to simple ROI calculations and standard linear thinking. In order to do something on that scale, you need to get people thinking, believing, and acting outside the box. Their greatest fear is categorically not that their vision is wrong. Their real fear is that the company will give up without ever really trying.

— Eric Ries

Nobody wants to become trapped in local maxima: "Customers don't know what they want." It's true—they don't. So how can we then learn from customers? The rules are simple:

1. Stay true to the vision—an acute pain that others do not see.
2. Present the currently specified product to early adopters.
3. Look for customers for whom your product vision is a perfect fit.
4. Only if you are unable to find them after extensive trials, pivot.

In a customer interview, you are thus essentially looking for a negative result. It is like a scientific experiment—you are trying to prove your current product vision wrong. It is not that you want to extract feature requests from customer interviews—it is the vision and the founders' intuition which should dictate the next feature additions. You are merely looking for the constant assurance that you are on the right track.

If you are curious to see how a negative result in customer interviews—even withstanding the enormous power of the reality distortion field—looks like, enter Eric Ries:

 "I've never heard of that. My friends have never heard of that. Why do you want me to do that?" It requires a lot of explanation. Instant messaging add-on is not a category that exists in your mind. But since she is in the room with us, we could talk her into doing it. So, she downloads the product. We have her install it on the computer. And then we say, "Okay. It’s time to check it out. Invite one of your friends to chat."

And she says, "No way."

Customer segmentation

One-on-one conversations with customers are a good way to look for patterns in the noise. While you should be ignoring a single feature request made by a single customer, a feature request being articulated consistently across interviews should make you aware of the possibility that you have identified a real need.

Often, using the knowledge from customer interviews is not enough to identify reliable customer segments. Surveys are a good tool to broaden the search. Of course, you always want to know which customer segment is closest to bring you product/market fit.

Segmentation will help you see which customers are the most relevant to realizing the overall vision of your startup.

Customer Advisory Board

The culmination of letting customer feedback penetrate your company as part of an integrated discipline is a Customer Advisory Board:

Here’s what it looks like. In a previous company, we put together a group of passionate early adopters. They had their own private forum, and a company founder (aka me) personally ran the group in its early days. Every two months, the company would have a big end-of-milestone meeting, with our Board of Directors, Business Advisory Board, and all employees present. At this meeting, we’d present a big package of our progress over the course of the cycle. And at each meeting, we’d also include an unedited, uncensored report direct from the Customer Advisory Board.

I wish I could say that these reports were always positive. In fact, we often got a failing grade. And, as you can see in my previous post on “The cardinal sin of community management” the feedback could be all over the map. But we had some super-active customers who would act as editors, collecting feedback from all over the community and synthesizing it into a report of the top issues. It was a labor of love, and it meant we always had a real voice of the customer right there in the meeting with us. It was absolutely worth it.

— Eric Ries, A real Customer Advisory Board

A Customer Advisory Board is essentially a safety net, safeguarding against the cases where the reality distortion field of the founders clouds their vision.Facebook Beacon comes to mind. A customer advisory board gives the customers the power to break through to the visionaries, essentially begging them for help: Look, we aren't asking for much, but this is absolutely necessary. Please, please, implement this.

Five Whys

Five Whys is one of my personal favorites. It is a technique for solving problems in a sustainable way, not combatting symptoms, but using root cause analysis. Five Whys is easy to formulate. It consists of two distinct steps.

The first step is to ask "Why?" five times whenever there is a problem, going deeper with each question and unconvering the root cause of the problem, not just the surfacing symptoms:

A new release broke a key feature for customers. 

1. Why? Because a particular server failed.
2. Why did the server fail? Because an obscure subsystem was used in the wrong way.
3. Why was it used in the wrong way? The engineer who used it didn't know how to use it properly.
4. Why didn't he know? Because he was never trained.
5. Why wasn't he trained? Because his manager doesn't believe in training new engineers, because they are "too busy."

— Eric Ries, The Five Whys for Start-Ups

The second step is to make proportional investments at each layer of the problem. For the above example that means that:

1. The broken release should be rolled back and fixed.
2. The subsystem should be made less obscure.
3. The engineer should be trained to be able to use it properly in the future.
4. A roadmap for setting up a training program should be formulated.
5. The manager should be talked to and convinced of the value of training.

Five Whys usually traces back a technical problem to a human problem.

Proportional investments are never complete solutions at each problem layer. Rather, they are a first step to improving the situation at that level of depth. Imagine the Five Whys hierarchy as a building. Each floor should be reinforced a little bit. That makes more sense than reworking the entire first floor and leaving the other floors in their desolate condition.

Proportional investments leverage the 80/20 rule. The minimal solutions will always account for the bulk of the problem. With each subsequent Five Whys analysis, similar investments will lead to more complete solutions for those layers which seem to be among the root causes of many surfacing issues.

If you are interested in the detailed mechanics of conducting a Five Why root cause analysis, I highly recommend this in-depth guide by Eric Ries. 

Conclusion

Learning in a Lean Startup is the hardest part. It takes a commitment to objective standards and scientific methods to break through the reality distortion field. Learning creates anxiety for the founder's ego. Setting up processes designed for continuous learning are thus indispensable for a thriving startup whose success is not based on mere luck, but on method.

This concludes the Lean Startup in a Nutshell series. I have left out some of the concepts which I personally consider more controversial and less well illustrated in detail—such as the subdivision of a startup into two cross-functional teams—, but I bet that you will not have a difficult time continuing your Lean Startup journey on Eric's blog or by reading his book.

Devianbits

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Lean Startup: Medir (3/4)

The Lean Startup in a Nutshell III: Measure

In this part of the Lean Startup in a Nutshell series, let us look at how to take the interactions between customers and our code and turn them into valuable data about these customers. Each technique described here is designed to help us become more data-driven and ease decision making by favoring facts over fiction.

Split testing

Spli testing (or A/B testing) is the core technique required to learn about user behavior.

In a split test, we deliver a reference experience to some of our users and an alternative experience to the rest of our users—while measuring the impact of the change within one group as compared to the other.

Split tests should be micro in their scope but macro in their impact measurement. The former means that a split test should test an isolated aspect of the experience, such as adding a feature, changing the appearance of a button, consistently changing a design element across the site, etc.

The latter means that the impact of the change implemented within a split test should be measured in terms of the overall metrics relevant to the business—such as the global signup rate or the revenue per customer—and not in terms of a local click-through or conversion rate.

Eric Ries offers many examples for counter-intuitive—but extremely powerful—insights derived from split-testing. Let me cite only one: When a mere link indicating a premium experience (such as a V.I.P. club) was added to the navigational interface at Ries's company IMVU, this increased the overall revenue per customer even for those customers who never clicked on the link. The mere presence of the link primed the users to make them willing to spend more on the website.

A good split testing environment ensures:

1. easy one-line implementation for developers
2. easy reporting to render all test results understandable
3. starting simple and getting more complex over time
4. making concrete predictions and testing against these

Cohort analysis

They were adding new features, improving quality, and generally executing against the product roadmap. Each month, their gross numbers move up and to the right. So, they said, they must be on the right track.

Then I asked them this question: what would happen to the company if the entire product development team took a month off and went on vacation? The sales staff would keep signing up new customers. The website would continue to get new traffic from word of mouth. Could they be sure that they wouldn’t—as a business—be making just as much “progress” as they claim to be making now?

In one scenario, they’ve been working overtime, putting in crazy hours, and in the other, they’d be on vacation. If both scenarios lead to the same result, how can the product development team claim to be making progress? To be doing effective work?

— Eric Ries, Are You Building The Right Product?

Cohort analysis means looking at the new customers who join every day as a distinct group. This enables an organization to ask how today's customers compare to yesterday's, to ask whether measured improvements are not just a result of the already well-working system, but of the most recent changes. It also enables an organization to detect "fake improvements", features or changes which actually worsen the user experience.

For each cohort, you may ask:

1. What fraction of users signed up?
2. What fraction of users bought the product?
3. What fraction of users upgraded to the premium account?

Cohort analysis is also perfect for killing features. Just remove a feature and see what happens. If the relevant overall business metrics don't change, you just improved the product by making it simpler.

Conversion funnels

Sales funnels and customer acquisitions funnels are old and time-tested concepts. Key to building meaningful and trustworthy conversion funnels are person-based analytics (or per-customer metrics) instead of global analytics (or vanity metrics) such as the total number of views or visitors.

There is a great talk by Mike McDerment explaining what he calls the Google Analytics line and how to go beyond it by connecting marketing and customer account databases. Going beyond the line of vanity metrics (such as the total number of page views) is a prerequisite for collecting the data necessary to analyze and build conversion funnels.

I highly recommend the above talk as well as the related article by Eric Ries in order to get started with person-based analytics. Always remember, "metrics are people, too".

Net Promoter Score and product/market fit

NPS is a methodology that comes out of the service industry. It involves using a simple tracking survey to constantly get feedback from active customers. It is described in detail by Fred Reichheld in his book The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth. The tracking survey asks one simple question:

"How likely are you to recommend Product X to a friend or colleague?"

The answer is then put through a formula to give you a single overall score that tells you how well you are doing at satisfying your customers.

— Eric Ries, Net Promoter Score

The Net Promoter Score is a powerful concept to get a birds-eye holistic view of your business. It is designed to measure the overall customer satisfaction a product or service yields.

For Sean Ellis, a slightly different question is at the root of determiningwhether a startup has reached product/market fit:

"Would you be very disappointed if you could no longer use the product?" or

"Do you consider the product a must-have"?

Sean Ellis supposes that only when 40% answer "yes" to the above question, the startup has reached product/market fit.

Measuring the NPS and the product-market fit constantly ensures that a startup never forgets the overall picture of improving customer happiness while split-testing and working on conversion optimization. These holistic metrics are probably also the best way to measure product development progress in the long run.

User testing

If Product Development is simply going to start building the product without any customer feedback, why have anyone talk to customers at all? Why don’t you just build the product, ship it, and hope someone wants to buy it? The operative word is start building the product. The job of Customer Development is to get the company’s customer knowledge to catch up to the pace of Product Development—and in the process, to guarantee that there will be paying customers the day the product ships.

— Steve Blank, Four Steps to the Epiphany

User testing is a cheap way to "get out of the building" and talk to customers. User testing means having a bunch of individual users interact with your product or service, giving you qualitative feedback. There are a number of user testing service providers on the web, usually providing a screen-sharing video and a written report for each user doing the test.

Conclusion

Good measurement relies on good and reasonable metrics. It requires an actual understanding of what constitutes progress and how to document it. It puts science ahead of vanity. And it recognizes that metrics are people, too.

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Lean Startup: Construir (2/4)

The Lean Startup in a Nutshell II: Build

In this part of the Lean Startup in a Nutshell series, we discuss how to accelerate the first stage of the build-measure-learn feedback loop where we build code from ideas. Each technique is designed to help us build faster and eliminate waste.

Minimum viable product

In product development, the Minimum Viable Product or MVP is a strategy used for fast and quantitative market testing of a product or product feature, popularized by Eric Ries for web applications. — Wikipedia

Or, as defined by Eric Ries himself,

The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. — Eric Ries, StartupLessonsLearned.com

The MVP caters to early-adopter customers:

The minimum viable product is that product which has just those features and no more, that allows you to ship a product that early adopters see and—at least some of whom—resonate with, give you money for, and start to give you feedback on. —Eric Ries, Venture Hacks interview

The MVP falls in between the maximum-feature approach—building a complete product implementing the entire vision of the startup founders—and the "release early, release often" mantra—shipping code immediately, listening to customers, implementing what customers want, repeating the process.

The MVP presupposes a clear long-term vision of a product or service which solves a core problem. It represents the smallest effort of building a product that delivers the promise of that vision to early adopters—the people who have the same visioning power as the entrepreneurs, who will be the most forgiving, and who will fill in—in their minds—the features which aren't yet there.

An MVP can be a crappy first web application, a clickable screen design, a paper prototype, or just a text, video, or graphic describing the problem and the solution embodied in the vision for the product.

Agile development

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

— The Agile Manifesto 

Talking in depth about agile development would require a blog post of its own—or probably even an entire book. Let me thus assume that you are familiar with the basic aspects of the agile methodology (XP, Scrum, TDD) and talk instead about how agile development relates to customer development.

All agile development methodologies, be it XP or Scrum or Kanban, at some point need to answer the question, "What is the most important work we should do right now?". Usually, the answer to this question takes the form of a backlog, a collection of stories to be worked on in the next iteration.

In a Lean Startup, the backlog is fed as part of the company-wide feedback loop, by the new hypotheses derived from actual customer feedback.

Continuous deployment

Remember, a Lean Startup optimizes the total time through the company-wide feedback loop. Imperative to that aim is not to "get stuck" in the build phase for longer periods of time than necessary. Whenever you're working on a current release, make it as minimal as possible. Your aim is to learn as quickly as possible whether the work you are doing makes sense.

Continuous deployment is the natural extension (and completion) ofcontinuous integration:

For those of you with some background in lean manufacturing, you may notice that integration risk sounds a lot like work-in-progress inventory. I think they are the same thing. Whenever you have code that is un-deployed or un-integrated, it's helpful to think of it as a huge stack of not-yet-installed parts in a widget factory. The more code, the bigger the pile. Continuous integration is a technique for reducing those piles of code.

— Eric Ries

What continuous deployment adds to that is to actually deliver the code to the customer to get the company-wide feedback loop running again. It means to overcome the anxiety of occasionally releasing a broken or malfunctioning product and to embrace the power of being fast and flexible enough to fix problems as they occur.

Of course, some development environments—such as the iTunes App Store—restrict the developer's ability to do continuous deployment. In that particular case, try to gain back the freedom of continuous deployment by having an alternate version of the product—a web-based client—running at a faster pace of iteration, or by relocating part of the product's magic from the client side to the server side.

Open-source components

There are two kinds of philosophies: the closed-source world of Microsoft Windows and proprietary systems, and the open-source world of harnessing the world's knowledge and giving back accordingly. I tend to resonate much more with the second philosophy, and it is at the very heart of the Lean Startup.

Leverage open-source technology to its full extent not only to keep costs down, but to increase the speed and versatility of product development early on. Open source operates using the model of commons-based peer production which is proven to be incredibly effective at creating and nourishing extensive collaborative communities and cooperative ecosystems.

If I were to include one specific tool here, it would be GitHub.

The cloud

Cloud technologies—such as cloud computing, cloud storage, SaaS offeringsand IaaS offerings—enable young tech companies to start with zero overhead and practically zero cost while being able to scale considerably onceproduct/market fit is achieved.

Today, there is almost no point in setting up your own data centers upfront, before having validated that you are actually building something people want. My newest startup uses open-source technology (e.g. Ruby on Rails) and cloud IaaS (e.g. Heroku) exclusively in order to achieve a high speed of iteration at low cost.

I believe that the advent of powerful scalable cloud infrastructures with pay-as-you-go models basically supersedes—and renders less important—Eric Ries's concept of just-in-time scalability. If you are interested in the story of just-in-time scalability, enter Eric Ries.

Cluster immune system

The concepts of agile development and continuous deployment may seem quite radical to project managers of older schools, having practiced thewaterfall-style approach to product development. When you think of a product juggernaught such as the Microsoft Windows operating system, for instance, how could you possibly even dare to think about deploying this piece of software continuously?

What if someone breaks an important feature during a deploy? What if someone interrupts the e-commerce flow of an online store system? What if someone hides the "Payout" button in an online payment system, turning the entire business into a hobby (borrowing from Eric Ries)?

These concerns are all valid—unless there are proper defenses in place to guard against such potential dangers. Test-driven development and strict continuous integration rules are among the first lines of defense. The cluster immune system is later-stage, more sophisticated, line of defense.

A cluster immune system is designed to track bad deployments—changes having unintended consequences—to the production environment in real time. It continuously measures the business's core metrics and automatically rejects and reverts changes affecting these metrics in a negative way.

A good cluster immune system would understand that a recent code change made the average order volume drop to about 50% of the original value. It would then revert the change, returning the system to the previous working state. It would also interrupt the deployment pipeline so that further changes would become impossible. It would send an e-mail to the author of the change as well as the whole development team to inform them about the problem. It would only allow deployment to resume once a human got to the root cause of the problem and understood and fixed it.

Building a cluster immune system isn't easy. It doesn't happen in a single day. Cluster immune systems should be built iteratively as well, starting simple and becoming more complex over time. Their development should be driven by the needs of the development team and the particular technology stack used by the team.

Conclusion

Building products in a Lean Startup requires technology and methodologies which enable the development team to iterate as rapidly as possible while remaining as flexible as possible at the same time. The speed of iteration is to be counter-balanced by defensive methods designed to remove anxiety from the team. Making mistakes is vital in a Lean Startup. Design the development environment so that mistakes can never have disastrous consequences.

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