Repeatable
In our case, Repeatable meant that we could create a customer acquisition process that could be replicated from one vertical to another. While we felt confident Adwords was a good route, the vertical we chose – used cars, was a challenging market to penetrate. As a result, if we wanted to pursue that market, we would have to create a highly specialized service – which defeated the purpose & long-term vision of the Startup.

Scalable
Even if we decided to focus our attention on the used car market, our customer – both consumer & provider, cost of acquisition was way too high. Once again, Adwords was not the problem because we were able to automate much of the process. It was the manual process of trying to determine what exactly the consumer was looking to purchase & validate to some degree that they were seriously in the market. Once done, we had to convince dealers we had legitimate consumers & try to engage them. All in all, a very lengthy & manual process where we were constantly trying to sell our Unique Value Proposition.

To sum it up, if our Unique Value Proposition was good enough, our cost of acquisition would have been much lower.

Now I try to validate first & code later.

Regards,
Steven

Nice post Steve
Thanx

Thanks for picking one of my favorite posts! I’m a big fan & user of leancanvas.com & watched leanlaunchpad.com’s birth from last year’s Startup Lessons Learned Conference.

To be honest, since being out of IBM, I haven’t stayed up-to-date with their offerings. I used Sametime Connect when it transitioned to Unyte but stopped there. Now I see there’s SocialBusiness. Regardless of the canvas/pad, I agree that communication is key & have even suggested to both founders they integrate with a social software platform to improve collaboration & more importantly, transparency.

For my part, inspired by own burning needs and Carl’s comment on It was a good Dip – but a Dip nonetheless, I’ve taken my own social & referral networking lessons learned and am launching Menschenables.com – which certainly can help Startups and their entourage.

Regards,
Steven

I agree that the idea of ‘lean’ and ‘customer development’ are key missing links both for the Silicon Valley start-up as well as the fortune 500 companies that I’ve worked with.

There are some interesting collaborative tools emerging to support the ‘lean startup’ methodology — ie, leancanvas.com and leanlaunchpad.com.

I see that you’ve spent quite a bit of time with IBM’s connections team and products. Do you know of anyone out there developing collaboration tools for lean startup on IBM Connections? I think a ‘leancanvas’ solution on IBM Connections could be a great help to the fortune 500 who want to collaborate globally and want to insure greater security.