Transitioning to Lean once you already have a product in the market (with some success) is inherently hard because you have to revisit the past and question that success against your original goals. Then make the hard “pivot versus persevere” decision. At this month’s Austin Lean Startup meetup, Tim Gasper, Jim England and Dhruv Bansal from Infochimps shared a great case-study on just that.
Infochimps is a data marketplace and API provider. They collect, format, and sort information from various sources to make it easier for others to use. High-level concept: Amazon.com for datasets.
Until recently their vision has been driven by technology. However, they realized that in order to become a world-class company they must adopt a more customer driven/Lean approach.
This talk is broken into 2 acts.
In Act 1, Tim Gasper leads the discussion and covers how they used customer interviews to find problems worth solving, and now that they have some real facts, how they are diagnosing whether to pivot or persevere.
In Act 2, Jim England and Dhruv Bansal talk about how they re-architected their existing user flow for maximum learning and how they tweaked Google Analytics to allow them to measure their customer lifecycle.
Enjoy!
Founder of 
Essay Reply:
March 24th, 2012 at 11:23 am
This is a nicely written post by the author.
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