Conversion + Customer Lifecycle

Note: This is a SIMPLIFIED version -- there thousands of papers written on this and people much smarter than me who have made entire academic careers out of this.

You have an MVP. Now what?

Even if you're already experiencing network effects and exponential growth, ask yourself, "can we be growing faster?"

For a new (immature) product or market, the answer is almost always: "Yes."

Great -- how?

Understanding the customer lifecycle allows you to methodically maximize growth.

• Awareness: How many people know about your product?

• Conversion: If they know about it, how many people try it?

• Active Customer: Are you able to keep the customer coming back or extracting more value?

• Retention: Was customer churn preventable or unpreventable? Preventable means they went to a competitor / stopped using your product. Unpreventable means the customer died, or something. It sounds macabre, but it's true.

• Resurrection: For the customer that has left for a preventable reason, how do you get them back?

It's easy to go deep on any of these topics.

Leave a comment if you'd like a post on any of the above topics.