Escaping the Build Trap

Chapter 19. Building and Optimizing Your Solution

“As you know, one of our strategic intents is to double revenue growth from our individual users in two years,” Karen was saying to the leadership team at Marquetly. “We believe that by increasing the amount of content on our site in key areas of interest, we can double acquisition and increase our retention of existing users to 70%, resulting in a potential revenue increase of $8 million a year from individual users. Christa’s team found a big issue in getting more content on our site. Only 25% of teachers who started a course actually published one to our site, and only 10% of our teachers publish a second course.”

“WHAT?! That is insane. I had no idea those were the numbers. That’s terrible,” Chris, the CEO, exclaimed.

“Yeah, it’s pretty dismal,” Karen agreed. “The major cause is video editing. Our teachers are experts in marketing—​not in video editing. They are spending upward of 80 hours trying to just edit videos. We ran two small experiments over the last month to help solve this problem, and we were able to increase the publish rate from 25% to 75%, by providing our teachers with simple-to-use video-editing software. We’re also seeing preliminary trends that say these new courses are reengaging previously checked-out students.”

“This is incredibly promising. What do we have to do to make this happen for everyone? Can we just implement what you did for the experiment across all teachers?” asked the CTO.

“From a monetary ...