20lines: lessons learned
TRANSCRIPT
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
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.