Lean AI

Chapter 17. How to Win Together with AI

The reality is that startups face many challenges in hiring the right people, acquiring and keeping customers, and optimizing for revenue growth. While every startup would like to be the next unicorn, it’s only those who are prepared to overcome these key challenges that end up becoming successful. Actually, the financial pressures and constant resource constraints that beset startups are really some of their most significant advantages, because they foster a creative, agile environment where teams are encouraged to experiment, learn, and outmaneuver incumbents and the competition. Startups have a very low probability of success, so anything you can do to increase your chances of success or decrease your rate of failure is huge.

One of the make-or-break questions for any startup is to determine if your product and market fit your customer acquisition efforts. An amazing product and brand alone isn’t a guarantee of success. To be successful, you have to be great at customer acquisition. The best growth teams look at the entire customer funnel as an object with many working parts. They see it as a place where they can experiment with messaging at the top of the funnel and do down-funnel hypothesizing and testing to increase customer acquisition rates, while trying to keep customer acquisition costs under control. For most companies, growth marketing is the way of the future, leveraging data and agility to scale revenue and increase customer ...