The Problem
Welcome to my problem of trying to build a network effects start-up from Singapore. Before you can apply Lean, you need to solve a more fundamental problem: Scaling with no money and shaky product market/fit, or as I like to call it, “Lean Scaling”. How do you scale (for free or at a very cheap rate) in a way that it allows you actually test your assumptions?
Here are some stuff we are experimenting with:
1. Segmenting as narrowly as possible. There’s no way around user acquisition and sometimes you just have to spend the money, but by segmenting tightly, you can control your user acquisition costs to a very tightly targetted segment. Segmenting geographically means we are targetting only Singapore, and segmenting demographically means we are targeting a particular user profile. A double bonus for tight segmentation is that if you manage to “burn out” a particular segment through invalidated assumption testing, you can start fresh with a new segment, asuming of course that you still have the resources to keep things “Lean”.
2. Building two bridges at once, and hopefully they meet at the middle. In our case I wrote extensively about how we tried to simulate one side of a network in order to test some assumptions on the other side of the market. You can read about it in detail here.
3. Generate buzz. User acquisition is expensive, you can make it cheaper by generating buzz, for example I can do a guest post and in the middle of the post ask for signups for our iPhone app beta here. We have experimented with generating micro-buzz in very tight segments.
I wholeheartedly agree with the Lean approach to building products. However, the majority of discussions right now are centred on case studies from products that do not require strong network effects. But for start-ups that require a substantial user base before users can enjoy the product benefits, the Lean start-up concept may not work as well.
