Author: brendanmc

I’ve drunk the jobs-to-be-done Koolade and there is no coming back. Jobs-to-be-done is a framework which allows for uncovering customer requirements in more depth, so that you can ensure what you build maps to what customers want. through the process you’ll conduct open-ended interview to understand: what solutions customers are currently using how they feel […]

We’ve been using Intercom for Now Novel since 2012 and have watched it turn into the behemoth it currently is. It is a great tool that helps us communicate personally at scale. Intercom doesn’t leave a lot of extra customer value. They know the value of their service and what people’s propensity to pay is […]

Lean customer development- Cindy Alvarez My first completed book of the year was very useful. I’ve read a fair amount in this area (the book references the Lean Startup and Steve Blank), but this was a useful addition to the canon. The best thing about this book was the  practical /tactical method it was written […]

I needed to buy something from Builder’s Warehouse on the weekend and I found their purchasing flow so perplexing that I had to document it.   Step 1 of the process was that I wanted to buy an online only product: A couple of comments: Why would you have the option to “select a store” […]

In a startup you have limited resources and you want to get as much bang for these resources. As a result I wanted to recommend some rules that have worked for me: Err on the side of bold testing Its nice to know exactly what was the underlying cause of the uplift from your test, […]

Retention is a big initiative at Now Novel at the moment and I’ve been looking at speaking to paying users to understand motivation and how to improve our onboarding process. I have been sending the below message through Intercom to paying customers of our non-coached programs to try and speak to them. They get the […]

I’m a big proponent of high velocity testing, and believe the more tests you run the more effective you are. This doesn’t mean that these tests are throw it at the wall kind of tests, they still need to be grounded in research with a decent hypothesis that you validate, but the more you run […]

As I’m South African based I don’t shop on Amazon that frequently so its always interesting to look at how they manage their site. I know they do a lot of testing, in 2011 they were doing 7000 tests a year and the richest man in the world said: “Our success at Amazon is a […]

As part of the Now Novel first user experience we are constantly testing the signup process. You’ll see our thinking from a few years ago here. We arrived at the last version of our signup page through testing, but I thought it wasn’t great. There is a lot of explanatory content on the page, but […]

Last year I had some good results with some of the (many) product development tactics I  tried, and thought I would share as with CRO tips I shared. With Now Novel we consistently try to understand and test the optimum first user experience, and we spent some time this year trying to perfect our onboarding […]