Download - 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!