the lean startup

The Lean Startup

Who I am

case study of lean startup at work

qeryz

I started qeryz april 2014

It was fully bootstrapped

I didn’t really have a lot of money to burn in the runway

I only had 1 year to build a profitable software company

So we started with the leap-of-faith assumption

People are willing to pay for a microsurvey but not at the existing price

Our main competitor was charging $79/mo with a 3-month minimum lock-in

There was no alternative during the time

Our value hypothesis

if we get the pricing model to become value-for-money, we can be profitable in a year

This is our initial pricing model

The main difference is that we have a free forever plan and our most expensive plan is $79/mo

Granted, we did not have a lot of integrations and features but it did one thing right

Gather customer feedback

Our growth hypothesis

We have a natural engine of growth so long as users are running our product

This is how our product looks like

Notice how we have a ‘powered by qeryz’ link at the bottom part of the microsurvey

That’s our main source of traffic and user acquisition

After we set our leap-of-faith assumptions in stone

we went ahead and built the mvp

This is how it looked like

During the time we had minimal traffic

We would have mostly 0 – 1 signups per day

Most of them were not able to use the product and reap the benefit

But for those who did, they were able to let us know their experience

They told us the difficulty of signing up

The difficulty of getting the software to work

And a lot more

From what we learned, we set measurements

We measured signups per day so we can measure successful users

Successful users are people who were able to activate the benefit of the software for themselves

Based on those measurements, We learned how to increase the success rate of our users

we made tweaks based on the things we learned

We added an explainer video

That increased our visitors-to-users signup rate by 84.95%

We added a signup form in the homepage

That increased our visitors-to-users signup rate by 21.02%

We added a 4-step user onboarding process

That increased our user success rate by over 600% in 4 months

We reduced all friction in our user onboarding process

We did a lot more experiments using the build-measure-learn loop

Here is how our homepages have changed

And it will change again

We started making money 8 months after starting - dec 2014

It’s a slow climb but you could see the gradual improvement in our MRR

In our first year, we missed turning profitable

Our value hypothesis was mistaken

So we made a pivot

we cut expenses, changed our pricing model and introduced an annual subscription plan

We introduced behavioral email triggers to encourage people to upgrade

We lowered the free forever plan’s monthly responses from 200 to just 50

We re-prioritized feature development and put bug squishing as top priority

We improved our growth model to include viral display ad re-targeting

Qeryz turned 2 on april 2016

Because of our lean operation and continuous learning

we have already reached profitability

We were a 6-man startup company

We are still a 6-man startup company

The point is: we are as lean as possible but we are serving thousands of users

I’ve burned a considerable sum in the runway

But I learned a lot and we’ve built a solid product

My contact details

Thank you very much!