20lines: lessons learned

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Lessons Learned Pietro Pollichieni, Cofounder 20lines

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Lessons Learned

Pietro Pollichieni, Cofounder

20lines

The Story

20lines is the best place to write, read and share short stories.

Our goal is to connect readers with thousands of free stories, written by talented emerging authors who want to build and

improve their reputation.

The Story

June ‘13 Seed Round Dec ‘13

BigJump

ExpandingTesting and Fundraising

Apr ‘14 iOS App June ‘14

Android App

Dec ‘14 Android + iOS 2.0

Oct ‘12 Pre-Seed

May ‘12 Beta

Launch

Web 1.0Web 2.0

MultilanguageFeb ‘16 Sale to Harper-Collins

Publishers

The Story

The launch: Turin bookfair, May 2012 (MVP)

3k early users

200 collaborative stories

Validated interest f r o m q u a l i fi e d audience

The Story

v1.0, October 2012

Developed full product from mvp

15k users by fall ‘12

1st investment achieved

The Story

v2.0, June 2013

Launched English version

Developed product’s v2

2nd investment achieved

The Story

BigJump! December 2013

The Story

v3.0, June 2014

Web iOS Android

Lessons Learned

People Matter

Product Matters

Time Matters

Lessons Learned

Before the product, start building a great team…

Alessandro Pietro Marco Francesco

Paolo MarinoMartina Nicolò

Federico

Gualtiero

Lessons Learned

Of talented professionals with the right mix

CEO COO / Product CTO Design

iOS AndroidDesign Community

Back-end

Front-end

Lessons Learned

Because: 1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1 = 12!

DNA match between founders and the mission of their business is crucial. There’s now way out.

Cofounding is like getting married. Cofounders must know each other, share their passions, ideas, and enjoy every moment spent together.

Veronica Belmont

MassimilianoMagrini

TV host and writer; Advisor at

Goodreads.com, About.me

Riccardo Donadon

Founding partner H-Farm

Founding partner United Ventures; former Google

Italy CEO

Engage yourself with the best advisors and investors

Lessons Learned

If your business requires external funding, aim at the best professionals to help you. Cash is not a commodity!

If you have funders with you (Angels, VCs) always b e t r a n s p a r e n t a n d develop the right empathy with them.

Focus on your users!

Lessons Learned

Your users are everything. Your are their servant and your ultimate goal is to make them happy and satisfied with your product.

Caveat: pursuing users’ request is dangerous. Only you can really understand what should be done, and what not.

Invest in creating a sense of community, and a feeling of identification with your brand and product.

Starting from a single, specific target of people who’d love your product

Lessons Learned

Mobile users

15-20 years old

Female readers

Make scientific use of analytics, coupled with continuous, transparent and direct contact with your users.

Test with MVPs, be fast in deploying improvements

Lessons Learned

An MVP is the perfect tool to test your ideas and va l i da te you r assumptions.

However, this is to be thought as the first step of a long-term development strategy l e a d i n g t o a n outstanding product.

Keep a multi-platform approach

Lessons Learned

Web iOS Android

In 24 months, we delivered 20lines as a website, iOS, and Android App. Always with a native approach.

As well as multi-language

Lessons Learned

Different languages and Countries mean different trends, and different tastes. But also, different customer acquisition dynamics (and costs).

If you can test your product in different geographies, you’ll be able to find out where your best customers are. The earlier, the better.

Be the best-in-class for most-advanced users

Lessons Learned

iOS App is featured by Apple as Best New App, Best Social Networking App,

and Best Books App in 96 countries

Early adopters are a hard category, but they’ll teach you lots of things, and they’ll be eager to pay premium prices.

Build a product that is ahead of competition on most-advanced platforms and devices.

Don’t copy, study

Lessons Learned

You’ll always be tempted by copying from competitors or from companies that have achieved outstanding results. But that won’t help you building your own success.

Indeed, by studying and learning from the same why they undertook their key decisions, and how they plan and act, would turn to be very helpful to yourself and to your team.

Book contest in partnership with Amazon & RCS Publishing Group550+ books enrolled

4 winners: 20lines authors won a contract with Rizzoli Publishing

Lessons Learned

Create success cases

Lessons Learned

Two ideas of time

Time is your scarcest asset, so making good use of it is fundamental to achieve your goals. At 20lines, we learned, at our own costs, that the best way to use this asset properly was through accurate planning.

Time, as ‘timing’, relies on understanding if and when to act. This must happen accordingly to what you’ve planned and to the business environment. Under this point of view, timing is part of the ability of execution.

Lessons Learned

Time as an asset, the importance of planning

Time’s scarcity, though difficult to perceive can hit your projects as hard as funding scarcity.A detailed planning of product releases and growth goals should be performed and shared at team level. You’ll have to consider both Endogenous and Exogenous factors, among which I learned the following as being the most relevant:Endogenous: Team, production capacity, location Exogenous: Market dynamics, technological evolution, investors landscape

Lessons Learned

Time as ‘timing’, the importance of execution

Right timing can be harder than planning. It is a mixture of intuition and preparation that allows you to identify when to act and when to stand still.

Nevertheless, the same endogenous and exogenous factors affecting your planning process, will also affect your timing and execution.

While there are many ways in which you can set and track your execution process, we learned to use Google’s OKRs methodology, and manage timing on a monthly base.

Lessons Learned

Last but not least…

HAVE FUN!!!