This is part of the deck I used in the Lean Startup Workshop here in the Philippines. Know how to start up a company in a lean, cost-efficient way.

1. The Lean Startup

2. Who I am

8. case study of lean startup at work

9. qeryz

10. I started qeryz april 2014

11. It was fully bootstrapped

12. I didn’t really have a lot of money to burn in
the runway

13. I only had 1 year to build a profitable software
company

14. So we started with the leap-of-faith
assumption

15. People are willing to pay for a microsurvey but
not at the existing price

16. Our main competitor was charging $79/mo
with a 3-month minimum lock-in

17. There was no alternative during the time

18. Our value hypothesis

19. if we get the pricing model to become value-
for-money, we can be profitable in a year

20. This is our initial pricing model

22. The main difference is that we have a free
forever plan and our most expensive plan is
$79/mo

23. Granted, we did not have a lot of integrations
and features but it did one thing right

24. Gather customer feedback

25. Our growth hypothesis

26. We have a natural engine of growth so long as
users are running our product

27. This is how our product looks like

28. Notice how we have a ‘powered by qeryz’ link
at the bottom part of the microsurvey

29. That’s our main source of traffic and user
acquisition

30. After we set our leap-of-faith assumptions in
stone

31. we went ahead and built the mvp

32. This is how it looked like

33. During the time we had minimal traffic

34. We would have mostly 0 – 1 signups per day

35. Most of them were not able to use the product
and reap the benefit

36. But for those who did, they were able to let us
know their experience

37. They told us the difficulty of signing up

38. The difficulty of getting the software to work

39. And a lot more

40. From what we learned, we set measurements

41. We measured signups per day so we can
measure successful users

42. Successful users are people who were able to
activate the benefit of the software for
themselves

43. Based on those measurements, We learned
how to increase the success rate of our users

44. we made tweaks based on the things we
learned

45. We added an explainer video

46. That increased our visitors-to-users signup rate
by 84.95%

47. We added a signup form in the homepage

48. That increased our visitors-to-users signup rate
by 21.02%

49. We added a 4-step user onboarding process

50. That increased our user success rate by over
600% in 4 months

51. We reduced all friction in our user onboarding
process

52. We did a lot more experiments using the build-
measure-learn loop

53. Here is how our homepages have changed

54. And it will change again

55. We started making money 8 months after
starting - dec 2014

56. It’s a slow climb but you could see the gradual
improvement in our MRR

57. In our first year, we missed turning profitable

58. Our value hypothesis was mistaken

59. So we made a pivot

60. we cut expenses, changed our pricing model
and introduced an annual subscription plan

61. We introduced behavioral email triggers to
encourage people to upgrade

62. We lowered the free forever plan’s monthly
responses from 200 to just 50

63. We re-prioritized feature development and put
bug squishing as top priority

64. We improved our growth model to include
viral display ad re-targeting

65. Qeryz turned 2 on april 2016

66. Because of our lean operation and continuous
learning

67. we have already reached profitability

68. We were a 6-man startup company

69. We are still a 6-man startup company

70. The point is: we are as lean as possible but we
are serving thousands of users

71. I’ve burned a considerable sum in the runway

72. But I learned a lot and we’ve built a solid
product

73. My contact details

74. Thank you very much!