Research Customer Behavior and Human Psychology

Knowledge Sharing:
1. Self-Determination Theory, as espoused by researchers Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, contends that people are motivated by deeper psychological needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Clearly, making sure people know why their work matters is always the first step.
2. There will always be tasks people don’t want to do. But, there are ways to get people to do things they don’t want to do. There are better ways to motivate others, principally by designing conditions where people actuate themselves.
3.  Instead, designing behavior by putting in the forethought to appropriately stage tasks, providing progress indicators, and finally, offering celebratory rewards under the right circumstances, are easy ways to motivate while maintaining a sense of autonomy.
4.  The first reason you can’t just ask customers what they want is that they aren’t always attuned to what they really need. Steve Jobs famously said, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
5.  Typically, it is easier for people to review and comment on something that is placed in front of them rather than asking to imagine something that doesn’t yet exist. This can mean anything from developing a fully functioning prototype to a clickable presentation, or even simple, hand-drawn “screens” to help customers get a sense of the experience.
6.  Additionally, it is also difficult for customers to articulate what it is they want or need, especially if it relates to a topic that is not something they often think about. People have a tendency to use what they know, which is why user adoption for certain products may take longer to catch on than others.
7.  The second danger in asking customers direct questions is the human desire to develop patterns and habits. Sigmund Freud called this phenomenon “repetition compulsion,” in that humans seek comfort in the familiar as well as a desire to return to an earlier known state of things.
8.  These habits are sometimes formed over long periods of time, which makes trying to break or introduce new habits an extremely difficult and delicate process. During our user research phase, we try to avoid asking questions about potentially disrupting a customer’s current habit, instead asking questions that are related.
9.  Rather than asking individuals to “imagine a new world” that would alter the current habits of their lives resulting in potential resistance, we are able to gain a better understanding of their natural tendencies, current mentalities and preferences, which results in more rich and insightful information.
10. The final risk is people’s overwhelming desire to be a part of something, to be well liked, and the need to please others.
11. Yes, you read that correctly. Sure, you need to keep your promises, but that's just the bare minimum. If you truly want to keep customers coming back, you need to wow them every time by offering them even more than they think is fair.
12.  Your Customers Love Stories and Are More Open to Your Business Selling through Them
14.

Research about Social Psychology:
1.  Customers Care More about Service Quality and Attitude than about Service Speed
2.  researchers found that the #1 reason customers would abandon a brand was due to poor quality and rude customer service, which were cited 18% more often than “slow or untimely service.”
3.  Good service trumps fast service every time, in both customer retention and satisfaction.
4.  Customers Know What They (and Other Customers) Want; They’re also Willing to Help
5.  User-lead innovations had an average revenue of $146 million dollars (in 5 years).
Internally generated innovations had an average revenue of $18 million (for the same span of time).
6.  Customer surveys and analyzing customer feedback should be an integral part of your research.
7.  Customers like Loyalty Programs… as Long as You Make Them Seem Easy
8.  Customers like reward programs but are much more likely to participate if the business in question utilizes “artificial advancement.”
In a truly interesting look into human nature, people like being part of “gold” and “premium” reward groups… but only if there is a group of people below them.
9.  Beginning a new task is a point where our brains often try to sabotage us, and additional research has shown that we are much more likely to complete a task if we feel like we’ve already taken the first few steps. This “artificial advancement” used on the second card was what made customers more likely to complete the card program to the end.
10. Last but not least, Nunes did a separate study on reward levels within customer loyalty programs and found that customers are even MORE loyal if they are labeled within a “gold club,” but only if there is another level below them.
11.  Customers will embrace loyalty programs if you can make them feel like they aren’t a “new task” to perform, but a task that’s already begun. They also like being part of different levels and will strive to be in a “gold club”… but only if there are levels below them.
12.  Creating Goodwill with Customers Doesn’t Take a Lot of Money
14.  Quite an ROI for a simple can of Coca-Cola!
15.  While the cost of the gifts/actions is quite small, the human mind simply cannot refuse the psychological construct of reciprocity.
16.  Customers perceive the service as a genuine act of kindness rather than as you trying to buy their affection with costly gifts.
17.  Customers Absolutely Adore Personalization; They Will Gladly Pay More for It
18.  Once inside the story, we are less likely to notice things which don’t match up with our everyday experience. For example, an inspirational Hollywood movie with a “can-do” spirit might convince us that we can tackle any problem, despite what we know about how the real world works.
Also, when concentrating on a story, people are less aware that they are subject to a persuasion attempt: The message gets in under the radar.
19.  Customers Will Remember Your Business If You Can Remember Their Names
20.  People open emails with more consistency if their name is included. (That’s a big reason to ask for a name if you want increased conversions via email.)
21.  People often assume you are more competent if you know their name; it’s a big part of their identity, and if you recall it and use it, you are instantly viewed in a better light in their eyes.
22.  It’s difficult to scale, but if you care about your customers, it’s an essential part of winning them over.
23.  There’s quite a difference between receiving an automated email from “DO-NOT-REPLY” versus receiving one from “Scott” saying, “Hey Greg, thank you for your purchase! :)”
24.  It Pays to Surprise Your Customers: You Don’t Need to Trumpet Every Benefit
25.  People like getting things for free and like them even more when they are viewed as “favors,” but they love receiving these favors as surprises.
26.  For instance, did you know that Zappos automatically upgrades all purchases to priority shipping… without so much as even a mention on the sales or checkout page?
27.  That kind of reciprocity is justified by almost any cost, and the hit Zappos takes by doing this is paid back multiple times over by the customer loyalty they generate from making people happy.
28.  Have you ever wondered why commercials for “cheap beer” never, ever focus on the money that you can save by buying them?
Instead, they create ads and slogans that focus on having a great time (i.e., “It’s Miller Time!”)
29.  As it turns out, new research from Stanford reveals that selling “time” over money can make customers more receptive to buying.
30.  Getting people to think about a period of time they enjoyed (associated with a product) can be much more effective than reminding them that they could be saving money.
31.  [Marketers] who should be particularly cautious about money cues are those who want to appeal to the viewer’s feelings about others.
32.  Be wary of reminding your customers about money if your product isn’t related to serving self-interests.
33.  Small companies can differentiate themselves from large competition and win over new customers with great service

34.  Eliminate unnecessary barriers between you and your customers. They will happily do business with you if they feel valued

35.  If you offer some sort of live service (phone or live chat), it’s paramount that you get customers to a live person in 2 minutes or less. Otherwise it creates frustration that can lead to a seriously unhappy customer.

36.  Decide what metrics are critical to measuring customer satisfaction. Don’t just go with your gut; prove that you provide great service with data. Also, don’t hesitate to survey customers for feedback and measure success that way.

37.  Resolve a complaint in the customer’s favor and they will do business with you again 70% of the time..

38.  Competing on price isn’t the most effective way to build an enduring business. Great service, delivered time and time again, is defensible against the stiffest and most well-funded competition

39.  you need to make people who aren’t your customers wish they were. Social media gives businesses the tools to do that for the first time in a scalable way.
40.  Engaging with your customers on Twitter is a great investment. Follow and promote them to your own followers when you have the opportunity. Most importantly, be there to listen if something goes wrong.
41.  Monitor your brand’s mentions on social media channels so you can respond to customer complaints before they escalate. It’s an opportunity to wow them!
42.  A high percentage of buyers on your website will have a question before completing their purchase. The speed, personal touch and accuracy with which you are able to provide an answer will make all the difference in whether they buy and keep buying from you.
43.  Knowledge of the product is more important than speed when emailing a customer, so do everything in your power to get it right the first time, every time.
44.  Smart businesses should come to realize that the customer service bar is lower— and that today, it’s easier than ever to differentiate your company from the pack with (crazy as it seems) actual quality customer service.”
45.

Experiment:
The first card needed 8 stamps to get a free wash.
The second card needed 10 stamps to get a free wash, but 2 stamps were automatically added when the customer joined.
That means both cards took 8 stamps total to get a free wash; they were just framed differently. Which one do you think performed better?
Their findings: Despite the similar process, the second card performed almost twice as well as the first card, having 34 percent of participants complete it versus 19 percent for the other card.

The results were surprising to say the least:
The first group studied had waiters giving mints along with the check, making no mention of the mints themselves. This increased tips by around 3% against the control group.
The second group had waiters bring out two mints by hand (separate from the check), and they mentioned them to the table (i.e., “Would anyone like some mints before they leave?”). This saw tips increase by about 14% against the control group.
The last group had waiters bring out the check first along with a few mints. A short time afterward, the waiters came back with another set of mints and let customers know they had brought out more mints, in case they wanted another.
That last group is where waiters saw a 21% increase in tips… yet they still were bringing out only two mints.

Principles:
The Customer Doesn’t Always Know What They Want
The Human Desire to Develop Patterns and Habits
Our Overwhelming Need to Please Others

Principles:
1. Try to avoid people to do things they don't want to do.
2. If absolutely needed, figure it out why ?
3.

References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/what-customers-want/
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/what-customers-want/

Research customer development

Document: How to do customer research

Customer Research:
1. Customer Development is about Testing the Founder’s Hypothesis
2. All I had done was proudly go out and get customer input. Isn’t that what I was supposed to do? No.
3. Any idiot can get outside the building and ask customers what they want, compile a feature list and hand it to engineering. Gathering feature requests from customers is not what marketing should be doing in a startup. And it’s certainly not Customer Development.
4. In a startup the role of Customer Development is to:
test the founders hypothesis about the customer problem
test if the product concept and minimum feature set solve that problem
5. This is a big idea and worth repeating.  Customer Development is about testing the founder’s hypothesis about what constitutes product/market fit with the minimum feature set. Thereby answering the questions, “Does this product/service as spec’d solve a problem or a need customers have?” Is our solution compelling enough that they want to buy it or use it today?  You know you have achieved product/market fit when you start getting orders (or users, eyeballs or whatever your criteria for success was in your business model.)
6. The time to start iterating the product is if and only if sufficient customers tell you your problem hypotheses are incorrect or point out features you missed that would cause them not to buy
7. If you’re lucky you’ll find this out early in Customer Discovery or if not, when no one buys in Customer Validation.
8.  You’ve just listed the reasons why startups are not done by accountants with spreadsheets. It’s an art.
Customer Development is not a giant focus group. At best it is a way to inform an entrepreneurs instinct and reduce risk.
9.  With that in mind, the last thing you want to do is be hard selling your idea to them. Instead, you want to interview your customers to understand their problems. You can learn how to do customer development interviews here.
10.  don’t worry about scaling right now. Just do whatever it takes to find people and the scalable methods will emerge later.
11.  Takeaways: 1) you don’t need an “idea” for a product. In fact, it can be better not to have one. 2) The best ways to choose a customer segment are access (existing relationships), market research, passion, and customer development based on hypotheses about which customer segments have the biggest problem. In this case, the customer segment was chosen based on market outreach. 3) Customer development interviews can allow you to gain extremely valuable customer insights. At this stage, you want to get your customers talking as much as possible. It’s important not to ask leading questions that get them stuck on a potential product.
12.  Takeaway: If you’re truly solving a problem for your customers, they will be more than happy to talk to you. In fact, they will be eager to help.
14.  To avoid spending time and money building something that wasn’t truly of value to our customers, we wanted to get even more data and conviction. Interviews and conversations are great, but the bias is for customers to agree with you. Asking a customer pay, and having them do so, is the ultimate form of validation.
15.  Next we created three separate e-mail templates - one for each of the three value propositions described above. The e-mail very briefly described the value proposition and included a call to action, which was a link to a landing page we created where they could sign up for early access to the product. We created a sense of legitimacy for the company by building a website using tools like Squarespace that make it easy for non-technical people to build a professional looking site in hours. We then divided the e-mail addresses into three equal groups and sent one of the e-mails to each group
16.  1) The bias is for customers to agree with you. Structuring interviews in such a way as to avoid this is important. Getting commitment for payment is a way to distinguish between bias and reality. 2) Experiment and customer interview results are rarely cut and dry. Use them to give you guidance not necessarily specific answers. Some creative thinking and instinct is still required.
17.  We then sent a second e-mail to those had signed up on our landing page to receive more information about the product. The copy in this e-mail about was about managing investment returns. The call to action was “We’re launching in two months at a price of $15 per month. Sign up now at just $5 per month to get early access.”
18.  The value of getting commitment for revenue is not the actual money, it’s the validation. We knew we were closer to finding product/market fit because users were enthusiastic enough to use their credit cards.
19.  Within weeks we went from a blank canvas to paying customers. It’s easy to throw product ideas against the wall, build them, and see what sticks. The Casual Corp process is designed to streamline the process of identifying and solving a problem for a customer, and reduce wasted time and resources.
20.  The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It’s to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.
21.  I had originally planned restaurants in Palo Alto as a proof of concept and had idly thought of simply walking up and down University Ave and asking passerby or sitting in a Starbucks and offering to buy people coffee in exchange for their time. Of course, this isn’t very effective or efficient.
22.  First, I joined all the Meetup groups with users and interests that would be interested in my startup idea and invested in its success. Second, I messaged 36 users (12 per day, as is the Meetup policy limit) and received 5 responses, or a 14% response rate, which isn’t exceptional but isn’t too bad either. I’ve stopped messaging users because I had begun getting similar, repeated feedback
23.  So I then simply focused on just messaging members who were most recently active on Meetup groups (last visited a Meetup group in the past 2 weeks vs. in the past year).
24.  your targeted audience is key. Knowing who your users are (especially getting a group of beta testers and early adopters!) and going to them and soliciting feedback should be one of your first steps in validating a market need.
25.  If you want to build an online service, and you don't test it with a fake AdWords campaign ahead of time, you're crazy.
26.  Our goal is to find out whether customers are interested in your product by offering to give (or even sell) it to them, and then failing to deliver on that promise. If you're worried about disappointing some potential customers - don't be. Most of the time, the experiments you run will have a zero percent conversion rate - meaning no customers were harmed during the making of this experiment.
27.  And if you do get a handful of people taking you up on the offer, you'll be able to send them a nice personal apology. And if you get tons of people trying to take you up on your offer - congratulations. You probably have a business. Hopefully that will take some of the sting out of the fact that you had to engage in a little trickery.
28.   that doesn't necessarily mean you don't have a business, but I'd give it some serious thought. Products that truly solve a severe pain for early adopters can usually find some visionary customers who will pre-order, just based on the vision that you're selling. If you can't find any, maybe that means you haven't figured out who your customer is yet.
29.  The harder customers are to interview, the harder they’ll be to monetize
30.  From personal experience, finding customers who are willing to be interviewed is daunting.
31.  The process of finding customers to interview is a preview of what it’ll take to sell to our customers. Will we need to stand out on the street, do cold calls, create meetups? Just getting customer interviews is a test in-and-of-itself!
32.  Don’t pitch a product, try to solicit feedback, etc. This is entirely about you earning trust by providing value – free of charge.
33.  The downside of the Webinar Honey Pot is simply that it takes time. Time to know the space, time to get the word out about your webinar, etc. That said, everything in a B2B play takes time, so it’s good to get used to it now before you bet the farm.
34.  Finding customers to interview is a challenge, but one that will immediately tell you if you’re on the right track.
35.  Since Nick and I talked, I’ve done a couple dozen interviews this way and the results have been fantastic. Nothing like “getting out of the building” at home, at midnight, with an ice cream sandwich in hand
36.  When we interview Sam, we want her to tell us what problems she has with remote coding – no cheating.
37.  So who keeps you honest and tells you when you don’t have a business? Your customers and your hypotheses.
38.  There may come a time you need to face the fact that the earlyvangelists you thought you had are actually just very polite users.  Face the fact that your product won’t be able to make money or scale.  Face the fact that your hypotheses are all wrong.  And ultimately, face that fact that it’s time to majorly rewrite your vision. The sooner you face these facts the more chances you’ll have to course-correct and win.
39.  Specifically ask the client how he/she perceives the price, the quality, the performance and the convenience of the solution she/he is currently using. The definition of these four criteria depends on the context (see example below), be sure to bring your own context to your questions.
* Price: purchase fee, setup, fee, subscription fee, license fee
* Quality: relevance of results, infrastructure availability, customer service quality
* Performance: response time, delivery time, travel speed, quantity of items, number of results
* Convenience: easy to use, easy to carry on, easy to park, easy to access, easy to order
40.  Most people are surprised when I tell them I don’t have a desire to expand the business.  I really enjoy being able to work hands on with two new startups per quarter.  If I built a large team to fill the current void of specialists, I’d be too busy managing the team.  This would mean less time learning how to improve my customer development approach.
41.

Lesson Learnt:

• 8. Startups begin with hypotheses about a customer problem or need
• Founders talk to customers to discover and validate whether the total solution solves that problem or addresses that need
• If, and not only if, there are no “buy signs” from the customer or customers repeatably point out missing features, does the product change
• Collecting feature lists and holding focus groups are for established companies with existing customers looking to design product line extensions

Core:
1.  This week I validated a market problem/need, sourced 10+ beta testers, talked to users and solicited feedback from Meetup groups and Reddit, researched and began to focus on product/market fit, found my rhythm and struggled with focus. Next week will be focused on building the MVP, product differentiation and monetization.

In order to avoid wasting effort and money on tactical growth drivers, the following steps need to be completed first:

• Validate the product/service is gratifying a reasonable percentage of users.
• Create a value proposition that will attract the right type of users and pull them through the conversion funnel to gratification (and ultimately a transaction). 
• Eliminate friction from the conversion funnel. 
• Fine tune a business model that supports scalable customer acquisition channels.  

References:
http://steveblank.com/2009/11/30/customer-development-is-not-a-focus-group/
http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-march-2009
http://notes.casualcorp.com/post/55805301226/how-to-go-from-zero-to-revenue-in-under-five-weeks
http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
http://jasonevanish.com/2011/11/27/the-lean-product-life-cycle/
http://ask.goodproductmanager.com/2011/10/11/how-do-i-set-up-customer-interviews/

Research about Founding Team

My view is the Platonic startup has a founding team of a developer, a designer and a distributor.

The perfect startup has all three founders: 
someone who understands how to build technologies and systems to solve problems;
someone who understands the human factors behind those problems, why they exist, what it takes to fix them and how to shape the experience;
someone who understands how to reach, talk to and sell to the people whose problems are being solved - and keep finding more of them

Initially Marketing vs Product: 5% to 95%
Later Marketing vs Product: 80% to 20%

The typical answer as Michael Thomas, Forbes, and Steve Blank pointed out: 
Hacker
Hustler
Hipster
(Visionary)

• The designer is responsible for desirability of the product. Talking with customers, understanding their needs, making sure the experience doesn’t suck.
• The engineer is responsible for the feasibility. S/he must determine if the product can actually be built, how, and for how much.
• The business person is responsible for the viability of the business model. S/he acts as the scales of justice when feasibility conflicts with desirability. The business person also takes care of the profit & loss statement and often manages the personalities involved.

Knowledge Sharing:

1. Designers today have to be technical in front-end development and understand human-centered design approaches. In short, it doesn’t suffice to just use Photoshop when you have an entire product to build!

2.  This role is especially important in the early days because without a product the hustler can’t sell and without a backend to tie into, the designer’s front-end is useless. Here are five things the hacker should be focused on:

3.  The case can be made for single founders as well, but I'd argue that two is best and three, four or more is too many. 

4.  A Founder is the one with the original idea, scientific discovery, technical breakthrough, insight, problem description, passion, etc. 

5.  A founder typically recruits co-founders and then becomes part of the founding team involved in day-to-day company operations. (However, in some industries such as life sciences, founders may be tenured professors who are not going to give up their faculty positions, so they often become the head of a startup’s scientific advisory board, but aren’t part of the founding team.)

6.  The founding team includes the founder and a few other co-founders with complementary skills to the founder. This is the group who will build the company. Its goal is to take the original idea and search for a repeatable and scalable business model– first by finding product/market fit, then by testing all the parts of the business model (pricing, channel, acquisition/activation, partners, costs, etc.)

7.  The two tests of whether someone belongs on a founding team are: “Do we have a company without them?” and, “Can we find someone else just like them?” If both answers are no, you’ve identified a co-founder.  If any of the answers are “Yes,” then hire them a bit later as an early employee.

8.  Key attributes of an entrepreneur on a founding team are passion, determination, resilience, tenacity, agility and curiosity. It helps if the team has had a history of working together, but what is essential is mutual respect. And what is critical is trust. You need to be able to trust your co-founders to perform, to do what they say they will, and to have your back

9.  dealistic founders trying to run a venture with collective leadership, without a single person in charge, find that’s the fastest way to go out of business.

10.  In addition, the founding CEO thrives operating in chaos and uncertainty. They deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers.  And as the reality of product development and customer input collide, the facts change so rapidly that the original well-thought-out product plan becomes irrelevant. While the rest of the team is focused on their specific jobs, the founding CEO is trying to solve a complicated equation where almost all the variables are unknown – unknown customers, unknown features that will make those customers buy, unknown pricing, unknown demand creation activities that will get them into your sales channel, etc.

10. The reality distortion field makes people believe an insane idea might come true, and they’re willing to quit their jobs and join you on a quest.

11. “With an early-stage venture, things don’t go per plan,” he explains. “If you’re not comfortable operating and leading through that, you might be a good co-founder … but not a good CEO.”

12. “A ‘founder’ is somebody who you can say, ‘Would you have a company without them?’ ‘Is this the best person for the job?’ If no, they should just be employees,” he explains.

14.  every team needs a hacker, a hustler and a designer. “These are the core skills. If you don’t have this, you’ll be at a competitive disadvantage,” says Blank, especially in the tech space.

15.  “The hacker should be someone who’s great at writing code – better than anybody else, and the hustler tends to be the CEO person, with the reality distortion field, who can run experiments,” says Blank. The designer figures out user interface, which is especially important for both the web and mobile.

16. Blank says outside the tech industry, the exact specifications may vary a little bit (“If you’re building a drone, a designer isn’t a big deal,” he says) but the fundamental message is clear: members of a founding team should have complementary skills, rather than similar attributes.

17.   “These are execution titles for companies with known business models and known customers and known pricing structures,” says Blank – very different from a startup, which has to constantly test new ideas, throw out the bad ones and figure out a solution that works. “If your founding team starts looking like IBM? You’re out of business,” he says.

18. In many cases, a startup is only as good as the people behind it. The success of a business can heavily depend on whether the people involved are doing their jobs well.

19. If you have a strong technical background but no experience with sales and marketing, hire someone who knows that area inside and out, and vice versa.

20. 

Hustler

Every team needs a visionary that is really good at one thing: selling. Whether it’s selling the idea to investors, or pitching your product to customers, the hustler's role is integral to the success of any company. 

Many people think of this role as someone with an MBA, but nothing could be further from the truth. A hustler should be hungry, curious and willing to do anything and everything to move the business forward. Here are five things the hustler should be focusing on in the very early stages:

• Customer Development - In the early days the hustler should be talking to customers and prospecting. Your goal should be to talk to at least 10 people everyday when you are doing customer development. 
• Product Management - The hustler’s job is to relay customer needs to the technical team. He/she should be identifying “must have” features and plotting them on a product roadmap.
• Selling - After you’ve done customer development you should focus on selling your product or if you’re building a consumer app the focus should be on fundraising.
• Blogging - One of the best ways to drive adoption and build your sales pipeline is to blog about problems in your industry. Mint exemplified this strategy perfectly when founder Aaron Patzer started blogging 6 months in advance of the product’s launch. How Mint Grew to 1.5 Million Users and Sold for $170 Million in Just 2 Years 
• Recruiting - Assuming that your business is growing, the hustler should be focused on recruiting. While this person may not be able to interview for technical skills they can set up interviews and decide whether applicants are a good culture fit during the first call. 

Designer

A designer in a startup shouldn’t just know what looks good. Designers today have to be technical in front-end development and understand human-centered design approaches. In short, it doesn’t suffice to just use Photoshop when you have an entire product to build!

Here are five things the designer should be focused on:

• Building a Sexy Landing Page - I probably don’t need to tell you that the majority of people discover new products on the internet, but I will anyway. Because of that, it is incredibly important to build a landing page that shows what you’re building. The page should include a product description, beautiful images or screenshots, pricing (if applicable), an about page, a link to your blog and most importantly a place to capture email addresses of interested visitors.
• Design the Product (duh) - The designer should work with the hustler to design the “must have” features you decide on as a team. Often times this is done using a wireframe tool like Balsamiq, Prototyper by JustInMind or Keynote.
• Test those designs - Once the designer has built mockups, he/she should put those designs in front of real users or customers. 
• Branding - After deciding on a company name and brainstorming a logo that represents your team and product, the designer should create that logo and all other brand assets. 
• Get Technical - If the designer isn’t already technical (HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, JSON) then get technical! There’s almost nothing more valuable to a company than a designer that can get their hands dirty. 

Hacker

Last, but certainly not least is the role some argue is the most important in a startup: the hacker. This is the person that is most technical. The hacker loves to chat about new technology stacks, he/she has been using GitHub since it’s early days and the most visited site on their computer is likely Stack Overflow. 

This role is especially important in the early days because without a product the hustler can’t sell and without a backend to tie into, the designer’s front-end is useless. Here are five things the hacker should be focused on:

• Product
• Product
• Product
• Product
• Product

Founder, Founding team, Founding CEO all have word “founder” in them but have different roles:

Founder has the initial idea. May or may not be on the founding team or have a leadership role

Founding team – complementary skills – builds the company

Founding CEO – reality distortion field and comfort in chaos – leads the company

References:

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-perfect-startup-team

Research about Product/Market Fit

Knowledge Sharing:
1.   In many ways, finding Product Market fit quickly allows you to focus on company growth rather than spending a lot of time and money on iterating your product to find that fit.
2.   Yet we all know your product isn’t going to fit the entire market from day one! So while the MVP is critical, it’s missing its dance partner, what I call the Minimum Viable Segment (MVS).
3.   At FREEjit we’ve mapped out a primary vision but we continue to explore other huge opportunities we could pursue once we have some traction to leverage.  Each new fact adds credence to some potential pivots and reduces the viability of others.  Eventually we’ll need to focus on one vision, but the right vision will crystallize over time.  Even while we explore these opportunities, our current execution is very focused on the MVP needed to get traction.  And the MVP maps well to each of the big opportunities we’re considering.
4.  But surprisingly, app publishers were more interested in the structured insights we uncovered than the traffic we were sending.
5.   By concierge MVP, I mean that we were manually categorizing write-in answers to how people used an app.  Now that we’ve validated demand for this product we are working on a more automated way to provide it.
6.   Successful entrepreneurs are constantly collecting data -- and constantly looking for bigger and better targets, adjusting course if necessary. And when they find their target, they're able to lock-onto it -- regardless of how crowded the space becomes. When Nat and Zach first came to us with the idea for Invite Media, it was focused on algorithms for ad targeting.
7.  Algorithm.
8.  When Nat and Zach first came to us with the idea for Invite Media, it was focused on algorithms for ad targeting.  But once they got into the market the team saw a bigger opportunity -- the DSP space -- and they locked-onto that target with a successful outcome.  We funded VideoEgg back in 2005 with the goal of creating tools to manage online video -- but Matt and team quickly adjusted course and have now become a leading media network for brand advertisers.    When we first met Lance and Jia in 2006, they had a cool photo-hosting application called RockMySpace -- but they quickly found  the opportunity was much larger than photo-hosting, and RockYou has since became a leading provider of social networking and gaming applications.
9.   And while bigger markets might pose more challenges than smaller markets, the risks involved in targetting a $1B market are not 100x greater than those involved in $10M market.  Choosing the right market is critical, because the market you choose determines the targets that are available for the heat-seeking missile to hit.
10.  So today we tend to focus on a company's product vision, rather than on the specific implementation of a pre-launch product.
11.  Do they have a data-driven philosophy or a gut-driven philosophy.  Why did they make the choices they made?
12.  At the end of the day, I've really come to believe that you can't predict success based on where a missile is pointed pre-launch.  Instead you have to assess the quality of the targeting system (the team) and the density/size of targets (the market).   And hope that the missile you launch finds a true target -- rather than a decoy...
14.  This mirrors my experience at multiple successful startups.   Most maintained a very low burn in the first year, investing funds carefully to create a valuable product.  Only after early users validated that it was a must-have product, did we start loosening the purse strings.  Speed of execution to fully capture the opportunity became the primary objective.  At this point, most of the companies were able to successfully attract additional financing (often very large rounds).
15.  Perhaps the most important realization that I’ve made as a result of this debate is that: Lean Startup principles are most critical in the early stages of a startup before product/market fit.  If you have not created a “must-have product” your ability to attract future rounds of financing will be limited if not impossible.  Your best chance of survival is to create a must-have product on your first round of financing – with the overwhelming majority of funding going into R&D.  Once you have created a must-have product, it will be much easier to raise enough money to capture and lead the market.
16.  Once you can prove an ability to scale cost-effective growth for this must-have product, smart VCs will be knocking down your door to invest as much as you can realistically absorb – and often more.
17.  Your marketing spend should be very minimal until you validate that you have created a product that people want or need (an important exception is for network effect products, which I’ll cover later). I would suggest 95/5 ratio between product and marketing. You don’t necessarily need a marketing person on the team to do this early validation.
18.  Once you’ve validated that people want or need the product, you should spend as much as you possibly can on customer acquisition as long as the value of each user exceeds the cost of acquiring them.
19.  Often this requires raising additional funding, but if you can present proof of profitable, scalable marketing channels then it should be easy to raise the additional funding.
20.  Hopefully a great team gets you at least an OK product, and ideally a great product.
21.  Great products are really, really hard to build.
22.  Markets that don't exist don't care how smart you are.
23.  In my experience, the most frequent case of great team paired with bad product and/or terrible market is the second- or third-time entrepreneur whose first company was a huge success. People get cocky, and slip up. There is one high-profile, highly successful software entrepreneur right now who is burning through something like $80 million in venture funding in his latest startup and has practically nothing to show for it except for some great press clippings and a couple of beta customers -- because there is virtually no market for what he is building.
24.   A great team is a team that will always beat a mediocre team, given the same market and product.
25.  it also doesn't really matter how good your team is, as long as the team is good enough to develop the product to the baseline level of quality the market requires and get it fundamentally to market.
26.  The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.
27.  Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.
28.  You can always feel when product/market fit isn't happening. The customers aren't quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn't spreading, usage isn't growing that fast, press reviews are kind of "blah", the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close
29.  And you can always feel product/market fit when it's happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it -- or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You're hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they've heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. You start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from Harvard Business School. Investment bankers are staking out your house. You could eat free for a year at Buck's.
30.  I believe that the life of any startup can be divided into two parts: before product/market fit (call this "BPMF") and after product/market fit ("APMF").
31.  Look for larger schools of fish nibbling at your product but not buying. Solve their problem.
32.   At this point the spend ratio generally tips toward marketing. I’ve seen it as high as 80% to marketing and 20% to product.
33.  The exception for network effect businesses mentioned earlier is for the following reason… The user experience for a network effect product improves with each additional user. You may need to reach a critical mass of users before you can validate that the product is important for users.
34.  Great products aren’t anointed by product gurus.  Only customers can decide if a product is great.
35.  Customers will decide your product is great if you can map it to their motivation for changing to your solution.  All customers change from something.  Generally they either switch from a competitive solution or from just tolerating a problem without a solution.  New products should decide on one of these markets.  Trying to serve both markets generally leads to failure.
36.  One way to decide which market to serve is to ask yourself: “when we are generating $100m in revenue, which type of customer do we think will contribute the majority of this revenue?”  Your guess is usually the market you should serve.
37.  If you decide to target “greenfield” people (those without a current solution), then your product roadmap should be focused on simple, effective execution of their desired task.  Simplicity is usually much more important for greenfield users than being feature rich.
38.  Common gripes include price, reliability, poor customer service, lack of key features, etc.  You’ll need to both message this differentiation and also deliver on the promise. A “false promise” will cause a high churn rate (people who stop using your product).
39.  You’ll know you have created a great product when users tell you they can’t live without it.  Unfortunately the “cult of great product” occasionally forgets about these critical components of building an indispensible product.
40.  the fact is marketing is not appropriate for startups in the initial stages of customer development.
41.  His recommendation is to form a customer development team led by a “head of customer development.” The team should include the CEO and spend a considerable amount of time in the field with prospective customers validating/refining hypotheses about their target customers and the problems they are solving. He says this team “must have the authority to radically change the company’s direction, product or mission and the creative, flexible mindset of an entrepreneur.”
42.  After five years in the VP Marketing role at LogMeIn, I too recognized that the initial stages of customer development are very different from marketing in the later stages of a startup or especially a large established company. In fact, I concluded that much of my success as a later stage VP Marketing (both companies filed for IPOs) was the result of momentum we had built in the early stages of customer development. I decided that going forward I would specialize in early stage customer development.
43.  I was first introduced to Four Steps to the Epiphany when I was Interim VP Marketing at Xobni during the first half of 2008. I had been looking for resources to help me understand how to drive adoption of this innovative market-creating product (a very different challenge than we had at LogMeIn which disrupted an existing market). The book provided a great framework to follow as we worked to drive early customer adoption. Since then I have helped to accelerate market adoption at two additional startups, while continuing to advise at Xobni.
44.  The second twist is that I add a customer development specialist when the Validation Step begins, which is the role I fill with startups. I belive eventually many people will specialize in this critical stage.  Without a specialist, startups waste critical time and resources deciding where to execute. It’s surprising how similiar the process of uncovering the critical information needed to drive customer adoption across different types of startups.
45.  The good news is that I’ve found ambitious, analytical recent college graduates to be ideal candidates. They are easy to find and their salary and equity requirements are also much lower than a VP Marketing – freeing up resources to bring in a customer development specialist.
46.  Once the startup has discovered how to drive customer adoption and begins building momentum, it should be easier to attract the long-term VP Marketing (or promote the head of customer development).
47. Not only are engineering marketers more capable of getting the essentials done, they can use their reserve of time and creative energy to be scrappy about building marketing experiments.  And of course the experiments they build on their own can be much more interesting than us non-engineers.
48.  One way I have worked around my engineering deficiencies has been to hire the skills onto the marketing team.  For example, in my last long-term VP Marketing role I hired a front-end designer/engineer to design and code landing pages and a dedicated DBA to build reports and run ad hoc queries.
49.  Very few people have all three skills, and even if they come close, they are rarely in perfect balance. In modern business Steve Jobs is probably the only person who even comes close, which arguably took him 25+ years.
50.  Many of these differences are ingrained - some mentally, but mostly from our education systems which stream students early and don't actively encourage the mixing of hard science, arts and commerce.

Challenges:
1.  So many startup theories come to play
2.  So many unproven process.
3.  There is no rule to succeed; Everything is possible, and not regulated.


Signs of Product/Market Fit.
1.  A pipeline of supplies are coming and waiting
2.  The AAARR is working from end to end.
3.  Customers are happy
4.  We are making money

Signs of Product/Market Not Fit:
1.  Have difficulty to get customers
2.  The product is not getting viral
3.  Customer doesn't care.


References:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070701074943/http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the-pmarca-gu-2.html
http://www.startup-marketing.com/the-startup-pyramid/
http://www.startup-marketing.com/category/vision/
http://www.startup-marketing.com/vision-synching-in-a-lean-startup/
http://redeye.firstround.com/2010/08/heat-seeking-missiles.html
http://www.startup-marketing.com/category/product/

Research customer engagement

Knowledge Sharing:
1. Two well written, highly relevant mails every week might leave your customers wanting more. It’s all about who you’re speaking to, what you’re saying, and when you’re saying it.
2. At Intercom, we believe personalized messaging is and will remain the most effective type of messaging, and that’s core to our mission of making web business personal.
3. The most effective messages we see in Intercom either educate or persuade customers.
1. When you know what you are trying to achieve, the people you are trying to change the behavior in become obvious
2. Experience has taught us generic content is rarely as impactful as a personal note from someone.
3. Wherever possible address people by their name – we’ve all been annoyed when we received a message from a business we’ve been dealing with for a long time and it opens “Dear Sir/Madam”. At Intercom we start most of our messages “Hi <first name>” which falls back to “Hi there”, if
for some reason we don’t have their name.
4. Here at Intercom, when we’re selecting what style of message to send to our customers, we most often use our in-app chat style message or a simple plain text email, because they feel handwritten and direct.
5. Not everything should feel 1:1 and personal. For example if you want to announce a new feature and put your best foot forward, then it’s best to do it with beautiful screenshots, engaging copy, and a remarkable design.
6. No one likes false friendliness from folks they’ve never met. Right buddy ;-)? Our success team joke that a good tone is akin to leaving a voicemail for an aunt you’ve never met. Warm and friendly, but respectful about what you don’t yet know.
7, For example if you receive a lot of email you’ll be offered new types of inboxes. If you receive very little email you’ll be told how you can do voice or IM chat instead
8. A powerful feature for creating personalized messages is to include custom attributes in each message
9. This was set up as an auto-message so any customers who failed the SPF check in the future would also receive it.
10. Once we knew what users were asking, we were able to update our message (and the related docs) to include answers to these questions.
11. Depending on the nature of your app, they are there to enjoy themselves, complete a job, or save time – not to hear about what you’ve been doing or what you want them to do tomake your life easier.
12. DON’T SHOUT at your customers. And it’s not just all caps; extreme fonts, red text, and overuse of bold, all feel too in-your-face. As a simple rule write to your customers in the same way you would talk to them face to face.
14. Avoid all business-y robotic-type language. You just want to sound friendly, natural, and personal.
15. Or put even simpler business communications should be actionoriented, clear about what action it wants to take place, and quickly explains what that is.
16. If you want users to complete a certain task that is desirable to them but at the same time is daunting, education is the way you make it seem simple and easy. If a task is easy-to-do but of low value to customers, then persuasion is how you get it done.
17. Every user decision is a cost-benefit trade-off. How much time and effort do they have to invest? What will they get in return?
18. Honest “growth-hacks” simply alter this trade-off so that the cost is decreased, or the perceived benefit is enhanced.
19. For any given task in your product you have to understand how much a user actually wants to do it, and how hard they find it when they attempt it. Until you understand the cost-benefit analysis you can’t target effective messages against them.
20. It’s said the job of advertising is to get a consumer to try a product just once.
21. This is a good way to think about new feature announcements – your goal is to get the recipient to try the new feature or app just once. After that, it’s the role of the product or feature you are releasing to generate regular usage.
22. What is the key thing that is going to convince them to give it a try – is it going to improve their social life, save them time at work, make them more money?
23. Unless you’re selling to developers, no one cares that you’ve re-written your app from scratch in the latest programming language. No one cares what you did, or often even how you did it. Your customers care about what they can do with the product.
24. You also need to think about the barriers that might prevent people from trying the feature. Is it available on their price plan? Is it available in their country? Does it require an integration with another product or service they may not be using?
25. The goal of your survey is not to get lots of responses, even if you think a big number might impress your boss, your investors or some other third party. What you are after is quality, actionable data that will help you improve your product or service.
26. We all get asked to fill out lots of surveys, so you need to persuade customers it’s in their interests to complete this particular one. At the very least you need to make it clear the results of the survey are going to be acted on – no one wants to feel like they are wasting their time.
27. You can also provide a carrot in the form of a prize or reward. But just remember a reward related to your service e.g. upgrading a package for a short period or providing a discount voucher, will be far more effective at getting loyal users to respond than the latest shiny gadget such as an Apple Watch.
28. If quality data from a loyal user is not worth a month of premium service, should you even be asking customers to give up their valuable time to respond?
29. What’s in it for me?
30. You’ll do more damage than you’ll fix. Provide as much information as possible about what happened, why it happened and what action, if any, the recipient needs to take. The damage has already been done – don’t make things worse with an apology that annoys or insults your customers.
31. It’s even more important here to have a compelling subject line – after all you are trying to get people to open their wallets and the first step to doing that is to get them to open your message. Don’t make it about you or your amazing product. Sell the benefits to the customer – if they take advantage of this offer how will it improve their lives?
32. Why does it matter when and where someone receives your message? It’s all about context.
33. The context in which your customers receive your message has a major influence on its effectiveness.
34. But for most people the rapid rise of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Line and other messaging apps has all but killed SMS.
35. At Intercom we’ve begun sending a thank you note to customers when they hit certain significant milestones.
36. At Intercom our approach with push notifications is conservative. Again, the more personal you are the better: if Facebook sends me a generic push notification to tell me to add more friends, it’s spam. But if they tell me that Brian has replied to my message, I’m interested.
37. If you are trying to elicit some change in behavior within your app, what could be a better time to ask customers than when they are in the app and can take immediate action.
38. We’ve all received
messages from services congratulating us on hitting a milestone such as being a user for six months. But just because I’ve been a user for six months doesn’t say anything meaningful about my usage of the product, such as whether I’m a regular user, power user, or even use a particular feature.
39. At Intercom we’ve seen that messaging customers after they hit key milestones in our product is far more effective than relying on calendar time as a proxy for engagement
40. Major anniversaries and milestones e.g. one year as a customer, can be a great time to remind people of the value your product has given them.
50. If you’ve never created a message schedule, the good news is that there’s loads of low-hanging fruit and quick wins. To start with, there’s a basic set of messages every business will immediately benefit from sending to their users.
51. They should feel like they’re receiving one unified and coherent flow of information, not sporadic unbalanced bursts of communication. Thinking of it like this will help you avoid conflicting messages and create a schedule that’s much more effective.
52. Targeted, behavior driven in-app messages are the best approach here.
53. The onboarding period is sacred. Only send messages that are designed to turn your new users into loyal and active customers of your product. This is not the time to be pushing your new feature, asking for feedback, or promoting your super-interesting new blog post.
54. This means we can focus on getting customers engaged with Intercom in all the right ways, without them feeling like they’re being spammed with content irrelevant to their needs.
55. You’ll never get a second chance at welcoming your customers to your
product so make the first message count. When new users sign up, introduce yourself, let them know you’re there to help, and set a positive tone for the relationship. Why not include a smiley, happy photo of yourself? It really does help increase engagement if your users are reminded there are real people behind the software.
56. Should you welcome new users in-app or with an email? Probably both. Right after they sign up is one of the occasions when a user is expecting to receive an email from you – so make it count.
57. There will be times when a user signs up, but fails to take the first steplike completing registration, or adding their teammates. If two days after signup they haven’t carried out that next step, it should automatically trigger a message. Make it an email, or possibly a push notification, rather than an in-product message as you are trying to get them back into your app. The message needs to clearly outline what the next step is that they need to take, and the value to them of taking that step.
58. Once onboarding is almost complete and users have settled in a little bit, it’s a good time to ask how things went. Your message should be short, to the point, and personal.
59. Of course, milestone messages can be behaviorally based too e.g. you could send a message congratulating them on achieving power user status after they create 1,000 tasks in your time tracking app.
60. When you’re looking for feedback on a feature, you need to message your users inside your app, in context. You’ll get more replies, and they will be much better quality.
61. Some will churn because your competitor is cheaper, some because they no longer have a need for your product; that can’t be helped. But some will churn because either they never understood your product, or they felt that you never cared about them. These last two issues can be solved by regular customer contact.
62. Just as constant growth turns exponential, and is great for business, constant growth in churn rates turns exponentially bad.
63. Activity churn is the leading indicator of account churn
64. (At Intercom, we’ll message our users after 30 days of inactivity). The message should thank them for being a customer, and give them a compelling reason to return to your app, such as the launch of your new features.
65. We firmly believe real customer engagement comes from communications with the people who are using your product
66. They need careful planning – from establishing your tone and voice to drawing up a message schedule.
67.

Anatomy of good Message:
Subject Line
Convey a sense of urgency and uniqueness
Avoid looking like a spam
Sell the benefits
Spell them out clearly
Call to action
Obvious link style
Predictable location for links and CTA
Design for Screen Reading
The postscript
Footers

Different Types of Message:
Product Announcement
Survey
Feedback

• If you want to improve your onboarding, only talk to people who recently signed up.
• If you want to improve a feature, only talk to those who use it.
• If you want to understand why people aren’t using a feature, only talk to those who don’t use it.
• If you want to find areas of concern, only talk to active customers who use all your features.

Invitation
Apologies
Promotions


Promotion:
Discounts
Coupons
Points

Right Way:
Phone/Voice Call
Text Message
Post "snail mail"
Twitter
Facebook
Push Notification
Email
In-app message