Imagine if you spent all that time building your business–plus risked your money–and customers hated what you built. In this program Eric Ries teaches you the lean startup ideas that saved his business when customers hated his product. You gotta imagine a seventeen-year-old teenage girl sitting down with us to look at this product. If you’re reading Mixergy, I know you routinely work hours that most people don’t know exist. Want to learn how to protect yourself from that devastation?

While most online companies struggle to get hits to their sites, Chance Barnett is attracting customers and racking up sales . But spend a few minutes with Chance and you’ll see that he’s refined a system for dependably launching online products — profitably. In his career, he has built 7-figure email subscriber-bases and personally created products and marketing that have sold over $25 million via direct sales and Most people don’t know Chance. Direct marketers like him aren’t covered by the cool bloggers because their businesses aren’t

While most online companies struggle to get hits to their sites, Chance Barnett is attracting customers and racking up sales . But spend a few minutes with Chance and you’ll see that he’s refined a system for dependably launching online products — profitably. In his career, he has built 7-figure email subscriber-bases and personally created products and marketing that have sold over $25 million via direct sales and Most people don’t know Chance. Direct marketers like him aren’t covered by the cool bloggers because their businesses aren’t

Chris Dixon wrote a blog post last week titled, “ Techies and Normals ” in which he defined “Techies” as people who are not just “early adopters” but also have more of a geeky, technical, product bent.  Normals Normals (or “Muggles” as Catarina Fake called them) are people who, unlike Techies, don’t just use products simply because they’re infatuated with them and with showing the world how cool it is that they’re using the latest tech product.  They They use products because the products solve a need they have.

As organizations we have become more open and I believe this is great for businesses and their customers.  We spent time out in the marketplace talking with customers, looking at their solutions, comparing ourselves with our competition and then squirreling ourselves away in our offices designing our next set of features.  They communicated this to product management who looked at all of the internal requirements we had generated (e.g. Turn Your Organization Inside Out This is part of my ongoing posts on Startup Advice .

In a world where everyone assumes that content must be free online, how is Gideon Shalwick getting customers to whip out their credit cards to buy his online classes?! Gideon told us why the first product he created and sold — an ebook called “Millionaire Drop-Out Secrets” — wasn’t a hit. “When He told me that before “every promotion we do now, every launch, we What’s what I invited him to come to Mixergy to talk about. I

He has a really interesting background as a product manager and now an entrepreneur. Tell me a bit about your background. Like many product managers, my background is fairly eclectic. That's where I learned I enjoyed interacting with customers and working with development teams to build and launch products. From there, I became the first non-founder employee at an e-commerce startup called BITSource, which was the first electronic software distributor delivering electronic volume software licenses to corporations. Visible networking is turning into a really great opportunity to get to know people better, get to meet new people, and have some interesting conversations.

As noted in Pour and Stir Part I , the key to the successful execution of this strategy is managing the following equation:      The cost to acquire a customer < lifetime value of a customer This entry focuses on how you can minimize your cost per customer acquired by systematically establishing the infrastructure necessary to track the results obtained from a variety of online and offline marketing vehicles.  “I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I can never find out which half.” John Wanamaker

I recently wrote a post about avoiding the “ Deferred Life Plan ” and some related thoughts about personal productivity that came from Tim Ferriss’s book, The Four Hour Workweek. would love to say that I’m the productivity guru.  Unfortunately Like many of you, though, I’m always struggling with productivity drains and in search of improvements. I Unfortunately my wife reads my blog and she’d log in and add comments to dispel this rumor (she keeps me honest .  Like

In many cases, I can break it down into: Customer Acquisition Cost – how will you reach prospects, how will you convert them and how much will it cost to convert them Customer Lifetime Value – how much will you make off of each converted customer This very simple model works for a surprising number of business models. We'll need to look at different customer acquisition channels, figure out how they are converting, and the expected lifetime value of customers acquired through those channels, and apply cost to those channels. A post by Fred Wilson pointed me to Dave McClure's Startup Metrics presentation.