Customer Development: How to question your way from an idea to a business

Cleveland, OH - December 3, 2015

Follow the journey of Pigeon.io from an idea to a viable business

Video: https://youtu.be/4-Wb8YPabjQ

www.pigeon.io

Transcript

1. How to question your way from an idea to a business Customer Development
2. Hi, I’m Kim. @kgardnr
3. pigeon.io Take back control of your email.
4. Q. What is Customer Development?
5. Product-Market Fit
6. “Customer Validation proves that you have found a set of customers and a market who react positively to the product: By relieving those customers of some of their money.”
7. “Make things people want.”
8. “Make a painkiller, not a vitamin.”
9. “Find real problems for real people”
10. As entrepreneurs, we look at problems as opportunities.
11. Step one: Validate the problem
12. Step two: Validate your solution
13. This is a story about email.
14. Q. Where do you host your email?
15. Q. Why don’t more people host their own email?
16. Q. How hard is it to set up my own mail server?
17. Interviews round #1 12 people hosted their own email in the past ~8 hour setup ~1 hour/week maintenance (monitoring, patching, upgrades, troubleshooting)
18. WOULD NEVER DO IT AGAIN
19. Q. How big is this problem?
20. "Rolling your own [email setup] is an academic exercise.” - Slashdot comment
21. "It remains a constant frustration to me that Postfix, Exim, Cyrus, Dovecot and the like still feel as if they belong very much in the "here be dragons" territories of the Unix world. Configuring these systems is an exercise in constant frustration and bafflement." - HackerNews comment
22. "Would anyone be interested if we did offer an alternative to Gmail? I've been noticing more and more of my friends wanting to move to something new, but not having better alternatives to move to." - HackerNews comment
23. Q. Is there market potential for private email?
24. 50M 10M 3M
25. Q. Who has this problem?
26. Meet Benson.
27. male 30 years old works in tech, 10 years exp. 130K/year works at a pre-IPO growing startup disposable income doesn’t have a lot of free time owns bitcoin working on a side project reads hackernews, reddit EFF supporter open source contributor
28. A. People want to host their own email, 
 but it’s painful.
30. Twitter ad campaign #1 $200 Twitter ads 303K impressions 1.59K engagements 22 signups ~$9.00 COA
31. Twitter ad campaign #2 “Easy” “Control your data” “Host your own email” “5 minute setup”
32. Twitter ad campaign #2 “Control your data” “Easy” “Host your own email” “5 minute setup”
33. Q. Does my solution solve the problem?
35. Q. Can I get people to commit to paying for my solution?
36. Twitter ad campaign #3 $65 Twitter ads 30.8K impressions 457 engagements 20 “payments” $3.60 COA
37. Q. Can I get people to pay more for it?
38. Twitter ad campaign #4 $10/month pricing $39 Twitter ads 14.5K impressions 138 engagements 5 “payments” $8.00 COA
39. Twitter ad campaign #4 $20/month pricing $21 Twitter ads 1K impressions 199 engagements 3 “payments” $7.50 COA
40. A. People want Pigeon, and they would pay ~$20/month for it.
41. Q. Can I get people to keep using it?
42. Beta testing round #1 15 customers getting feedback fixing bugs aesthetic
43. Beta testing round #2 78 customers continue getting feedback assist with prioritizing features pivot as necessary
44. Q. What are other niches that care about email privacy? Q. Could this be a B2B product? Q. What other value-adds can we leverage/sell? Q. What other vertical markets might be appropriate?
45. www.pigeon.io kim@pigeon.io @pigeon_io