Start-up Wednesday – Recipe for success

The way to success consists of 3 phases – creating a good product, user base development, and selling the company. However, to create a product that has good potential, with functionalities which are on point and that has great market potential, it takes a lot, too much luck for us to rely on. The first step in solving that problem is user feedback which leads entrepreneurs in the right direction and functions as a mechanism for correcting activity. However, user comments should be taken as advice, and not command, and the changes introduced as soon as possible.

A Startup Wednesday was held on Wednesday, April 27, organized by the Croatian Business Angels Network (CRANE) and the Croatian Chamber of Economy, where Marko Linke, co-founder of Repsly, held a lecture. The topic of the lecture was “A/B testing and pivoting,” and the participants of the event got to know about the most common mistakes and successful examples of these methods and how to apply them on the way to success.

In the process of product development, pivoting represents rough and structural changes in the company, while the fine tuning is done with the A/B testing. As the main reasons for pivoting Marko cites the target market change, significant changes in the market and discovering a big chance for business improvement, and in order for the process to be successful it is very important that all employees participate and understand the pivoting process.

The A/B testing method helps us select the best out of two options, the one rated best with users, and it usually refers to app and web page improvement. The testing process consists of 3 phases – preparation of test, experiment and result analysis, and in practice, the binary approach is most commonly used, i.e. the winning option is constantly tested against the new versions.

Through A/B testing it is possible to make a decision on different things, such as price, functionality and other marketing elements, and Repsly has used this method to define the optimal length of the trial version, the best message to welcome users, and whether the users react better to pictures or videos. The most important conclusion derived from the testing is that personal preconceptions should be discarded and that the focus should be on the research results.

The next Startup Wednesday will be held at the end of May, and in order to receive the information about the lecture on time, you can sign up for the Startup Wednesday newsletter.