 pretty much everybody right. So, how many of you know exactly what is lean startup ok. So, how many of you are aware of the definition of lean startup at least as quoted by Steve Blank ok. So, that is great. So, what we will do is like we will quickly start off with some context and then I will move on to what my talk is about. So, a startup is a temporary organization which is set in place to find out what is that business model which is repeatable and scalable. So, this is a startup. A startup navigates through uncertainties to find out what are the different variables. It can be who is my customer, who is the what is the problem I am trying to solve, what should my product be. So, all these variables are very uncertain when you start off with an idea. So, when there is uncertainty, this temporary organization is called a startup. When you apply the lean principles to this startup, what you basically get is the lean startup and lean is all about reducing waste and lean has been applied in manufacturing and likewise it is been applied in startups. But the nature of how you apply lean is changes quite a bit because there are a lot of different aspects to a company like a startup versus a factory like cost of change is too high in a factory versus cost of change in a software product is too low and using these basic principles what you get is a lean startup. So, that is what a lean startup is about and my talk today is about how we applied lean startup in a yoga product that we have that we are building and what are the challenges that we faced. My name is Manish and I am a product manager at Multunus. So, let us get started then. So, like I just mentioned when you have an idea what you basically have is a plan A. It is still just in theory and most often than not your plans will change. The moment you release your product into the world it might not work the way you expect. So, it is all about going from plan A to a plan that actually works and so this is our story. So, we are building a product in a yoga space and what comes to your mind when you hear the word yoga? Right, meditation. Anybody else? What is that? Fitness. Yeah. Postures. Peace. Right. So, like you see like yoga means a lot of things for a lot of people. Yoga has a lot of forms and a lot of a lot of us seek towards yoga for different reasons. A few of us might look at yoga for being fit and be like staying in shape. A few more of us might look at yoga for mental stability, dealing with stress and things like that and a lot more people look at yoga for spiritual well-being. So, yoga solves a wide variety of problems for a lot of people. Right. So, that is about yoga but yoga is a business today is more than about 80 billion dollar industry and what this has also done is like a lot of yoga teachers are being trained in really good institutes and in recent years folks like Baba Ramdev and Modiji have not left their stones unturned in terms of evangelizing yoga. What this has created is a gap between how many of how many people want to learn yoga and how many credible teachers are available to teach yoga. Right. So, all these yoga teachers actually love teaching yoga. They are deeply invested in yoga but unfortunately like when they go ahead and start yoga studios it does not fill up all the gaps of starting a company. Right. They are not well versed with things like how do you do marketing, how do you do, how do you manage operations, finance and things like that. So, that is where good karma comes in. So, good karma is the suit of products that we are building at Maltunas. So, it is supposed to help yoga studio, yoga studio owners manage their studios better. Starting from how do you get customers to notice you, how do you get them to sign up with you and how do you manage your day to day operations. So, I would not go into a lot of details about the product as such but I will just give you a very quick example of what are the kind of things it does. So, currently let us say any one of us just decide that okay I want to do yoga from tomorrow. I know that it is very beneficial and I am very excited like I want to join a yoga class. What do we do? Right. Like we Google yoga studios around us on our smart phones and we are probably provided with like a 10 or 15 yoga studios. Like we look at like what is nearby, like how much trading they have and things like that. And then we go on to some of them have websites but unfortunately what happens is all of these are just that websites. They are not designed or optimized for conversion. Right. Like you go to their website you get a few questions answered but that is about it. They are not designed for conversion. Later on you might decide that okay let me give these yoga studios a phone call. I will ask them like okay what kind of yoga do you teach? Do you have available slots and things like that. But even then what most likely happens is you do not really get a response. A lot of these studios are very small studios and they cannot afford like having a lot of people just taking phone calls. So it is just the yoga teachers themselves who have put up their phone numbers. Right. So you do not get a response. Then what happens? So I am really excited but by the time like I go through all this I just decide okay let me come back to it next week. Next weekend I will think about it and that is about it. Right. Like I just do not come back to it ever again and the yoga studio just lost one of their leads. So what we are trying to do is bridge this gap. Like one of the product is like helps studios bridge this gap and our objective here is how can we get this person who is right now at this moment very excited and he is motivated to join a yoga class to get him to book a trial class a free trial class. So that is one of the one of the product that we built and we have been able to get people who contact a yoga studio to booking a trial class in under three minutes. So that is an example. So let me quickly give you a back story of how this all came to be. So the team is sitting in a conference room. We are having a Skype call with another yoga founder and we are discussing about the product features and we are discussing what are the problems they face and how the product can solve the problems. We get to discussing about what will be the pricing. Previously some founders found that the pricing was too high and this time the founders said like this is great. I like the product. Let us go. Let us try it. And so the call ends. We all high five and what just happened was like we signed up the fifth customer who was willing to pay. Now this story does not seem very interesting as such. What's a big deal like customers. But what's interesting is we hadn't built a product yet. So we wanted to validate that. Does the problem exist? Do yoga studio owners find a fine value in a product like this and are they willing to pay. And to answer these questions we really didn't have to build a product as such and that's what we did. Now this story seems exciting and all that. But we've been very focused on de-risking what is the most riskiest and so far at least for that example that I spoke about. We've had the studios have at least 226 bookings so far. This is a very big win for these very small studios who don't have a lot of firepower like the moment you walk out. I'm sure like you'll be presented with all the billboards of flip car Tuber. You're very aware of all these products but yoga studios nobody's aware of who are the good ones out there and things like that. So there's not much attention towards your studio. So this was a very big deal. Whatever leads are coming in let's convert them. So the mantra we went with here is don't sell what you can build. Build what you can sell instead. So this is the first key takeaway that I want you guys to take home. So the story so far seems a little very nice like okay things worked out pretty well. But it almost seems like the drop box story that you might have heard. And so whenever we hear stories like this the feeling everyone gets is okay lean startup. So let's just start selling and think about the product later and things will just work out. Well not really. So we had a whole range of failures before we even got to this story. Like this was just the most recent pivot. We learned our lessons and we learned how to do how to do this better. But let's go all the way to the beginning and now I'll take you through the journey of what are the kind of challenges that we faced. So it all started with our founder. So it all started with a founder who wanted to join a yoga class and he finally found one that was unlike the other yoga classes. Like most yoga classes promise you that okay you'll lose weight, you'll stay fit and things like that. This was a little different. They focused on what the completeness of the yoga and he was very excited and very quickly he realized that to get value from yoga what he had to do was be very deliberate at his practice and also be very consistent. Both of these very difficult to do. How many of you have like started new year resolutions that I'm going to exercise and who are still doing it? Anybody still doing your exercise? So it's very difficult. Just staying consistent is difficult. Now add on top of that how to be deliberate. Like this was very difficult. So we thought let's try and solve this problem. And before we started building a lot of things what we thought was okay let's answer a few questions. How badly do people face this pain? How many other people face this pain? How do we solve this problem? And okay whatever we come up with as an idea will it work in the real world? So these were some key questions that we wanted to answer. So we decided to kick things off with the design sprint. How many of how many people here have heard of design sprints? Okay so very quickly a design sprint is a very structured process which which helps you brainstorm different solutions, build a prototype and also test that prototype with real users all within five days. It's a very time box approach to doing something to answer critical questions. So this is what we did and what we found was when we interviewed people showed them the prototype. There were a few serious people who were interested in you know solving this problem and the way we presented it to them it was also interesting to them that they wanted to give it a try. How do we solve it? So we have come across a few behavior science models so to speak and that is what we were intending on applying it. The problem with the design sprint is that it only solves for the surface. So what we get at the end of the design sprint is basically a series of mock-ups stitched together but nothing is functional yet. So you get a sense of you know how much it's resonating with users but it doesn't really validate long-term behavior change. That's why we decided to build a MVP and test it out. So we built an MVP, launched it with a few people, like also got more people from the same studio. What we saw was initially a lot of people were very engaged but then it started tapering off. Like this is what we wanted to test and the feedback was that okay something wasn't working. So we continued experimenting. So we changed something like see saw if that was working or not. So we did a series of experiments a lot of them failed, a few of them succeeded and we were getting very frustrated. The data was telling us that okay this is not working and this is a scenario that you all will run into very often. Not only your experiments will fail very often but the data that you get will be very muddy. Like they won't be black and white, they will be grey and you have to take a call. While we were doing these experiments we continued talking to people one on one. Like we spoke to beginner practitioners, we spoke to serious practitioners. We also spoke to teachers and founders to get more insights from like multiple perspectives. And this is where we found the next big insight which is a big unmet need which I spoke about way in the beginning. So this was a major pivot for us. We learned this, we learned about this unmet need because we were out there talking to people and yeah we discovered that there is a opportunity to solve and create a big business here. So the next takeaway is get out of the building. This is a very common phrase we all hear but what ends up happening is basically like we hear this and then say like okay let's build an MVP. We'll put it out there and we will rely on data to tell us like okay it is working or not working. We tend to shy away from actually stepping out and talking to people one on one. And this is very hard as well. Like if you have to talk to people, in our case it was yoga studios. How do you talk to people? How do you get in touch with these founders? So it's very hard. So we decided to go on this journey and start building the product and the moment you start and start getting a little bit of traction what it starts seeming like is like you're juggling a lot of things. Like okay on one hand you have to get new customers, you have to onboard them and then you have to make sure they are happy, they are getting the value, they are paying us and a lot of things. It starts becoming very chaotic and that is where we resorted to like Ash Moria and what he writes in his books. So one key thing that I would like to share with you which will be very beneficial is something called a customer factory. So a customer factory's role is to take in unaware visitors and convert them into paying customers. Like but how do we do this? So you can track a lot of metrics but there are five key metrics that you should be looking at. First one is acquisition. So unaware visitor, how do you make sure that okay now they know about your product and you can identify them. Next is activation. Like did they use your product? Did they find value in it? Third is retention. Okay, they used it once but are they continuing to use it? Are they continuing to get more and more value from the product? Then comes the revenue wherein okay, they are using it but eventually they have to pay otherwise your business is not going to be sustainable and referral. Are they happy enough that they are getting in more customers also? So these are the five key metrics that you should be looking at and now you might say that okay these are five key metrics but it still feels like juggling to me. What do I improve? That is when the theory of constraints comes into picture. So the best way to leverage this model is to set a goal. Like set a goal like I need 50 paying customers in the next week. Now you can analyze like where is your bottleneck in this flow? So is the bottleneck that okay, are you even getting 50 customers in the first place? If you aren't, obviously the bottleneck is that your acquisition is the bottleneck. So let's say you're getting 500 customers but nobody is paying. Now you have to again determine like are they activated or are they just not paying? So having this kind of a goal and then analyzing where is the constraint helps you at least have the clarity of mind that okay where do I focus? So a typical thing that we all tend to do is like have a huge backlog of product ideas and then start building them. Instead, this is an alternative approach wherein you focus on where is the constraint and solve that constraint for that week and continue to create experiments and see if that constraint has moved away and are you closer to the goal than before. So similarly in for good karma our first constraint obviously it starts from acquisition and acquisition was our constraints and the way we started was to get initial customers we wanted to test the product out. So we resorted to okay we knew one or two yoga founders and we asked them for referrals and parallely that wasn't enough. So we also resorted to cold calls. We got a list of yoga studios through Google and like we just started calling them. So the process looked very typical. You prospect a list of customers. You call them up and try and set up a demo and during the demo your goal is to get them to sign up for a try. So that's what we did but a key challenge here is basically you need to have very thick skin because you're going to hear a lot of noise. A lot of people just do not want to hear your or are just going to plain tell you like okay why are you calling me. So at this moment you need to stay focused and think about being curious about what is it that you can help them with and how do you solve their problems. So very soon like once we got that figured out we had a few customers coming in like our next problem was activation. We hadn't had the product yet. That's when we started building the product. So when we were doing these cold calls we also happened to have a good relationship with one or two studios who were very willing to experiment with us. That was a very big win for us because now we could try different ideas and they were willing to help us out with that. So that is what we did. All of these experiments you cannot rely plainly on data. In early stages what ends up happening is you will not have enough data to make a statistically significant decision and that's why you need to take a call on more qualitative information. Qualitative information is basically like me talking to users like getting their experience. Are they delighted? Was it just satisfactory? And we also used a combination of tools. We did not use Google Analytics and Mixpanel at this point of time. All we relied on was tools like Hotjar which allows you to track what are the steps that the user took. So you just go through that and you know that the user is clicking here but he is not understanding what to do next. So you kind of are able to take those feedback and optimize the product. So very soon we solved for activation but retention started becoming a problem and most companies, the mistake that they do is the moment they are able to activate a few people, they go on an accelerated mode of getting a lot of customers on board. Now if you saw that we had only 226 instant bookings that might seem like a small number because we did not focus on getting too many studios on board very quickly. We wanted to make sure that the studios that come to us, we can also retain them. So here is where we used some behavior science models like the BJ Fogg's behavior model and the hooked model. So using a combination of these we are still continuing to do some experiments to make sure that we have a very high retention rate. So this is the while we are applying that behavior to our products, the behavior also applies to us while we are building these companies and what we feel is you cannot really control the outcome of the business but what you can control is what you do on a day to day basis and in our opinion your focus should be on that because those will become the leading metrics of your product outcome. So measure how often are you talking to customers, talking to users one on one. Also measure how many times are you finishing your experiments. A lot of times what we do is we start experiments but then we keep on delaying the dates like due date is next week but I do not have enough data so let me postpone it to next week. So you keep delaying these experiments but you do not learn fast enough. So if you can just keep a measure of how many times you are talking to customers and how many times you are experimenting these will become your key metrics to make sure that you are actually learning fast enough. So these were the four key takeaways that I wanted to leave you guys with and if you have any questions I think I am over time I will be outside and we can talk about even if it is design sprint or lean startup any questions. Thank you.