Step-by-Step Instructions

Click to download the FOCUS Spreadsheets.

Problems it Solves

In the last exercise you learned how to build your development team. Now you will learn what to do with that team.

To do that, you will need to solve two problems:

• Which features should you automate first?
• When should you prioritize customer acquisition growth over feature automation?

In the Utility Testing workbook, you listed out a number of different potential features, and then you began testing each one in priority order. In other words, many of the features you're about to automate are all features you've implemented manually.

Now the question is, which of these manual features should you automate first?

Also, how do you assess the priority of features you haven't implemented manually, but still want to offer in an automated solution? In other words, how do you prioritize a feature that hasn't been manually verified first?

All of this will be clear by the end of this exercise.

The Feature Spreadsheet

Open up your Features to Scale spreadsheet.

On this spreadsheet, you will prioritize each feature based on a number of attributes including:

• Potential impact on your Total Lifetime Value
• Potential impact on your K Factor
• # of Customers Affected
• Financial Cost
• Time Cost
• Etc.

The spreadsheet is fairly involved, so it'll be easiest to understand how to use it by referring to this video walk-through:

http://bit.ly/ScalingYourSolution (case sensitive)

This spreadsheet will help you determine which feature offers the biggest return on investment for your time. It will show you how much time and money each feature will cost you to automate, versus how much time and money will it ultimately generate and/or save you.

Let's take an example of a feature I could automate, like "Answering FOCUS Questions." This is obviously something that I am able to do manually by answering the questions people post for each exercise.

The spreadsheet will show me...

How beneficial would it be to automate this feature?

To "automate" this feature, I could pay someone else to answer people's questions, so that I could spend my time tending to other issues of the business.

This feature - answering questions - is likely only to affect those who have already bought the product and are current users. If they have already bought the product (my example is a one-time purchase), my LTV is not likely to change. Answering customer's questions also isn't likely to increase my K Factor as doing so doesn't inherently promote sharing.

Since my LTV and K Factor will stay the same without this feature, I'm not going to make any additional money by automating it. At the same time, it could save me time, which is worth something. Before we look at that, let's look at what it would take to automate the feature.

If I paid someone $50/hour, 3 hours per week for a year to answer FOCUS questions for me, I'd spend roughly $7,500/year. I also need to account for the time I'd spend implementing the feature: perhaps 5 hours to find the person, plus 1/2 hour per week checking in on them. Over 50 weeks (a work year), this would be around 30 hours per year of my time.

What savings will I get from implementing this feature? I don't save any money, but I do save a lot of time. By paying someone else to do this, I'm saving myself 120 hours (150 hours to do it myself, minus 30 hours of my time if I hire someone else) per year.

In the spreadsheet, you'll see it also calculates the cost of that time. If I have 120 extra hours, what can I do with that time? The spreadsheet does this by using the average return of what could be done doing other things. In this case, the benefit turns into over $11,000 per year, or about $128 per hour.

View the video to see more examples and how to use the spreadsheet to make similar calculations.

Once you have done these calculations for each of your features, the spreadsheet will show you which is most cost and time effective for you to automate, both in what it will cost and what it will save.

Takeaways

You'll want to make sure that you have manually validated each of these features. If you have proof that it will increase your LTV or K Factor, you are in a better position to automate a feature, knowing that it will be a worthwhile investment.

This is what being lean is about: run small experiments to validate your data.

Once you have your data, you can prioritize your features by from largest ROI to smallest.

The power of this exercise is that it can help you prioritize all of the features you can dream up - especially helpful if those features are intellectually interesting, but may or may not have actual value towards your Victory.

What's Next

You've prioritized the list of features to automate, but it begs the question...

When do you stop automating features?

Scaling isn't just about automating a solution, it's about achieving your Victory. How do you know when it's time to stop building more features and start marketing in more customer channels?

You've laid the groundwork to answer that question, which you'll explore explicitly in Scaling your Channels.