ABOUT THIS EPISODE
In this episode, I sat down with Cody Candee at the beautiful HERE Collective (that's us in the pic above with his co-founder). We have a detailed conversation about how he tested and launched Bounce, the next generation of bag and luggage storage. Cody have us the scoop on the following:
- rapid prototyping
- testing demand for your product
- assumption testing
- working through operational challenges
- and much more
Extra Extra
Rapid Prototyping - this is a method of testing interfaces and customer experiences before you invest the time into building them. Click this link to learn the different types of prototyping and other best practices.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) (17:50) & Churn (19:35) - Having a deep understanding of how much it costs to acquire new customers is critical to building your financial model. Another important piece is understanding how you retain users, or lose them (churn). Knowing your retention curves can help you understand the lifetime value of each customer, at which point you'll know exactly how much you can pay to acquire each new customer profitably. Bill Gurley wrote an excellent article that provides the key terms and math behind calculating your customer LTV.
Notable Mentions
Adwords (4:50) - Cody used Google Adwords to test demand for his product by running ads before the product was live. By running ads he could understand search volumes and click-through-rates.
Google X (6:10) - Google's entity that focuses on "moonshot" ideas. Solving the world's hardest problems.
NYC Citi Bikes (6:50) - NYC's urban bike program.
Facebook Messenger Chat Bot (9:15) - you can build programs to interact with users through FB's messenger app
Stripe (9:35) - credit card processor for internet products
Elixir (10:50) - modern programming language
React (10:55) - modern Javascript framework for developing web interfaces. See ReactNative for mobile
Lean Startup (12:22) - a product development methodology (and book) that focuses on rapid prototyping and constant product iteration to capture learnings cheap, fast, and often.
Google Analytics (13:30) - analytics platform that gives you visibility into how people find and interact with your website
Mixpanel (13:45) - product analytics tool
Segment (13:45) - help you get the most utility out of your customer data
