Step-by-Step Instructions

Problems it Solves

This exercise will feel familiar. You've gone through a similar process with Offer Testing and Currency Testing. In this chapter, you are going to repeat the process with your Utility Test.

By the time you are finished with this chapter, you will have:

• Defined your success metric stoplight
• Outlined your failure protocol
• Launched your first Utility Experiment

The Utility Success Metric Stoplight

Take out your Utility Experiment worksheet.

To begin with, you'll pull in some information from your existing completed exercises.

Step 1

Write in your v0.1 from your Building your Utility Test worksheet. In my case, this is “Publish Step-By-Step Exercises.”

Step 2

Next, write in your time frame in the Time Box. You can pull this information directly from your Utility Testing Metric Action Plan.

For my experiment, I started on 11/16/15 and I will let it run until 3/16/16. In this stage, you are likely to find that your experiment runs longer than in the past. This is because you are actually measuring your Viral Coefficient or your Customer Lifetime Value, which require longer run-times than your previous metrics.

Step 3

Again referencing your Utility Testing Metric Action Plan, write in the metric you're measuring: Customer Lifetime Value or Viral Coefficient.

Put in your Success Criteria. In my case, this is a Viral Coefficient of .13.

For your Failure Criteria, I often enter “half” my success metric; however, in this case I’m going to choose .05, or about a third of my success metric.

That's because there are many different things I can do to improve my Viral Coefficient (e.g. create a prompt, offer sharing incentives, etc.), as discussed in the previous exercise, to help me optimize my way to succcess. In other words, if I fall short of success, I’m pretty confident I can give this metric a substantial boost, so I will be more liberal about my failure metric.

Anything lower than .05 however I doubt I can reach my success metric of .13.

With this in mind, write in your next step depending on whether you meet your Green Light, Yellow Light or Red Light criteria.

In my case, if I meet my Green Light, I will proceed to Scaling (Workbook 5).

If my results fall in the Yellow Light range, I will try a different prompt or offer to try to boost my Viral Coefficient. There are some other things that I could try as well to improve the Utility of my product, all of which will be explored in subsequent exercises.

If my results fall in the Red Light zone, I will proceed to my Failure Protocol.

Steps 4-7

Why a Failure Protocol? I’ll take this opportunity to remind you that:

We all fail.

You will fail. You’re suppose to fail.

The purpose of this entire process is to fail early: your job is to put something out there in front of the world so if it's not going to lead to Victory, you can discover that quickly and make the necessary changes.

Of course if you know failure is coming, your best bet is to be prepared. (Think hurricane, earthquake, flood: if you know it's going to happen, best to be prepared.)

In this first step of the Failure Protocol, you will think of a way to Reflect. In my case, I’m choosing to “write it out.” Perhaps a blog post to describe my experience and what I’ve gotten from it will help me process the failure.

Next, Relate. Choose two friends you can talk to about what just happened. Find your founder friends and share war stories.

Now, Re-Declare Victory. Leave this spot blank for now, but come back to it if you need to invoke the Failure Protocol. If your Victory is the same, great: write it in again and go after it again. Otherwise, take this opportunity to reflect and re-connect with what you really want to achieve for yourself.

Finally, Re-Focus. If you meet failure in this step of the process, what FOCUS exercise will you go back to for a way to re-focus and get back in the game.

In this case, since my product is a one-time payment, my Viral Coefficient is critical to my growth. If I can't get it to the level I need to achieve my Victory, I’m going to go back to Offer Design. Perhaps there's a different way to present the problem, and even its solution, that will help me achieve my Victory.

What’s Next

Once you have completed your Failure Protocol, you are ready to launch your product!

You have all the parameters you need to run an experiment. You have defined your success metric stoplight so you know what happens no matter what your data tells you. You also have your Failure Protocol in place so that you can recover as quickly as possible should things not work out as you had hoped.

Now, go run your experiment and see if you can provide Utility!

The following exercises within this workbook will help you increase your Lifetime Value and your Viral Coefficient if you don't achieve your success metrics on the first iteration.

If you need to improve your Utility Metrics, check out Increasing your Customer Lifetime Value or Increasing your Viral Coefficient.