cyberlaxamana

by John Smith-Ricco Despite the obvious duplicability of its business model, Rent the Runway has aggressively protected its position as first-mover through investment in technology and operations management. Providing women with the “Cinderella” moments that accompany wearing otherwise inaccessible designer dresses may be Jen and Jenny’s mission, but their company’s expertise lies in the less sexy areas of inventory management, quality control and maintaining high utilization rates of each garment. Rent the Runway was the case I anticipated the most as a student in Launching Tech Ventures. The RTR story is wonderfully hopeful, a feel-good MBA cautionary tale on the type of success risk-averse capitalists might miss out on by taking the safe route [insert finance/consulting/CPG career path here]. Rent the Runway has the potential to democratize the world of luxury ready-to-wear. However, in order to maintain the “magic” and keep would-be competitors at bay, RTR must avoid becoming TJ M...

On Not Bending to Customers' Whims by Katharine Nevins  (blog:  http://katharinenevins.posterous.com/ ) The goal for any startup (or product manager for that matter) is to build a product which customers need and love.  It’s easy to call yourself or your company customer-centric, but actually doing what is best for customers isn’t always straightforward or intuitive.  There are two main reasons why listening to customers doesn’t inevitably lead to good products.  Firstly, not all customers need or want the same thing.  Secondly, customers often do a poor job of knowing or articulating what they want.  Fortunately, both of these problems are addressable. For most products, different customers will have different needs.   Power users have different needs from new users: Sarah Dillard points out that Quora’s integration of feature requests from its power users have led to a bewildering experience for new users.  Different user segments may ...

by Jonathan Enav In many LTV classes we discussed Geoffrey Moore’s Chasm and whether it is a benefit or a hindrance through the lens of startups following the lean methodology.  However, we never discussed what can make the “chasm” shrink or expand.  Moore’s theory is that there is a “chasm” that separates the innovators and early adopters of a new technology from the mainstream, and that technology companies often find it hard to cross this chasm and grow beyond their core user base to become a widely adopted medium.  Crossing the chasm is not easy and often requires pivoting your product away from your core early adopters towards the mainstream.  The lean methodology offers guidelines to achieve this; pivot early, pivot often, form a hypothesis, test it, pivot again until you find product/market fit.  So why do so many startups fail at this stage?  The lean methodology tries to make crossing the chasm easier by effectively making the chasm smaller.  ...

by Natasha Prasad A few weeks ago, Fred Wilson and Jeff Bussgang supplanted our usual LTV class with a fireside chat on lean startup methodologies, monetization and VC value-add.  A Fred idea I found particularly compelling suggests that entrepreneurs should be “hunch-driven”, rather than “data-driven” in the early days of a startup.  Indeed, if Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t stuck to their hunches, Twitter would never have gotten past 1000 users and Facebook’s newsfeed wouldn’t exist. Hunches, however, can only get you so far: most successful startups will at some point face the excruciating transition from early adopter glory to mainstream success.  Founders like Dennis Crowley, who admit to having built products for their own friends, are now struggling to gain momentum with the mass market.  If users outside of NYC, LA and San Francisco lack the vanity-driven penchant for public bar and restaurant hopping, how can Foursquare possibly grow beyond its 6 mil...

by James Matthews Early on in our Launching Tech Ventures course we had the privilege of a visit from Eric Ries to our classroom for a Q&A session. Eric is a leading proponent of the lean start-up methodology; he has written extensively on the subject and has coined much of the terminology of the (increasingly formalized) discipline. One particular point that Eric made stood out to me that day. He made the argument that Moore’s Chasm is a benefit, not an obstacle to the lean start-up. Geoffrey Moore’s seminal book, “ Crossing the Chasm ,” describes a major problem faced by many technology companies: there is a chasm in the product lifecycle between early adopters (or “visionaries”) and the early majority (or “pragmatists”). One fundamental difficulty in crossing the chasm is that your early adopters are not good referees for the mainstream – even if these “visionaries” love your product, the rest of the world does not trust them. Moore observed that many companies failed when cr...

by Jeff Bussgang, republished with permission from his blog I had the pleasure of teaching a new case at HBS yesterday on  foursquare  that I co-authored with Professors  Tom Eisenmann  and  Mikolaj Piskorski  as part of Tom's new course  "Launching Technology Ventures" .  Foursquare executives Dennis Crowley, Naveen Selvadurai and Evan Cohen were kind enough to allow us to interview them in preparation for the case, which framed some of their current key strategic issues and looked back on the choices they made in the early days to draw pedagogical lessons of lean start-up best practices, building a platform business, network effects and running monetization experiments. The foursquare team was consumed this week with SXSW preparations, but we were fortunate to have as class guests Charlie O'Donnell, who wrote the  original blog post on foursquare  that got many in the community excited about the company, and Andrew Parker, who was an a...

by Ernesto Humpierres   The first person that ever told me about BitTorrent was my father; he is a good example of how a previous generation is more tech savvy than the younger one. If you had been there when he first mentioned BitTorrent you would have thought not only did he like the technology, but also that he was selling it. He mentioned all the awesome things you could do with it and how many hours he was spending every night playing with it. But then came the demonstration, he opened something called Azureus (now Vuze) and started talking about seeding, tracking, leeching, share ratio, and other terms. By the end of his presentation I was lost, I had no idea how to use torrents and I really didn’t feel like understanding it anyways (to this day I’ve never used any BitTorrent client). All I really wanted was an uncomplicated Google style search bar. My behavior in this situation is typical of a mainstream consumer, we really like what technology does, but we want it simple a...