Comments on: What is the Magic Moment for your Startup?

By: What Is the Magic Moment for Your Startup? - LA TechWatch

What Is the Magic Moment for Your Startup? - LA TechWatch — Thu, 07 Jul 2016 18:28:00 +0000

[…] Reprinted by permission. […]

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By: What Is the Magic Moment for Your Startup? - AlleyWatch

What Is the Magic Moment for Your Startup? - AlleyWatch — Thu, 07 Jul 2016 15:27:28 +0000

[…] Reprinted by permission. […]

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By: Khizer Hayat

Khizer Hayat — Mon, 04 Jul 2016 05:28:47 +0000

Thank you for the reply Alex. Yes that is what we’re currently doing, dedicating one of our team member to keep working on the consulting side in order to use the cash generated to develop our product for the customers demanding the core product. So far it has been working okay, although it does tie up our resources sometimes.

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By: Alex Iskold

Alex Iskold — Sat, 02 Jul 2016 15:19:13 +0000

It sounds to me like you want to build one company, but is working on a consulting project. Maybe the thing you can do is to take $ from your consulting and focus on building a product that you can sell to other customers.

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By: Khizer Hayat

Khizer Hayat — Tue, 28 Jun 2016 11:53:42 +0000

Alex,
Great article and extremely useful. How do we apply this to early stage-startups though since the data points are fairly low? It seems that the hypothesis would have to constantly be evaluated after each customer acquisition. What do we do if a few customers are actually not focusing on our core business and using us for random tasks?

For example, our company is focused on automation of lean six sigma for asset management but our main source of revenue right now is a customer who is more interested in paying us to do tasks like web development and marketing plans plus some technical consulting. It brings in pretty good paychecks to keep the operation running while we keep developing our original system, but should we keep working with this customer in the long term?

We have been considering dropping this client to focus on multiple other clients who are more interested in testing our core product but there isn’t any revenue being generated from them currently.

Now LTV is an interesting concept here because for the paying customer he clearly wants our team to keep helping him develop his business and is willing to pay however working on those projects restricts our resources, mainly time, to work on developing our product which we know is going to be very useful for other clients as they have expressed a lot of interest after seeing our initial prototypes.

Would greatly appreciate your feedback on this! Thanks.

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By: Mattermark Daily - Monday, June 6th, 2016 - Mattermark

Mattermark Daily - Monday, June 6th, 2016 - Mattermark — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 22:01:27 +0000

[…] Alex Iskold of Techstars highlights the path you can use to find your product’s ‘magic moment’ to increase customer retention in “What is the Magic Moment for Your Startup?” […]

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By: Alex Iskold

Alex Iskold — Thu, 02 Jun 2016 02:03:46 +0000

Thank you!! Just made a bunch of fixes 😉

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By: Laurence Ion

Laurence Ion — Wed, 01 Jun 2016 23:50:59 +0000

Also Alex Schultz gave a talk at Stanford’s CS183b and said the magic moment they first discovered was “10 friends in the first 7 days” I believe

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By: Laurence Ion

Laurence Ion — Wed, 01 Jun 2016 23:44:49 +0000

Alex, you repeated a phrase in one of the last paragraphs: “Once you figure out what the Magic Moment is, you then need to figure out how to optimize the funnel that gets every single customer to that state”. It’s an important one though, so it shouldn’t hurt 😀

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