Ideology Venture PartnersEmpowering the CommunityKnowledge and Power become distributed throughout the network

Members only want to buy from sellers with high ratings;Sellers gain a huge incentive to stay honest and trustworthy.

Expert’s Reviews / User-generated ReviewUGR: Friendlier and more accessible, like talking to your neighbor about your favorite ______.

Track how many people find a user’s reviews to be useful.Trust begets trust.

Fundabel Start-UpEarly adopters use their imagination to fill in what a product is missing. They prefer that state of affairs, because what they care about above all is being the first to use or adopt a new product or technology.

In enterprise products, it’s often about gaining a competitive advantage by taking a risk with something new that competitors don’t have yet. Early adopters are suspicious of something that is too polished: if it’s ready for everyone to adopt how much advantage can one get by being early?

As a result, additional features or polish beyond what early adopters demand is a form of wasted resources and time.

Sentinel bot vs. SkyNetAppreciative Inquiry, draws upon knowledge from the edge of the network.

SkyNet conducts regularly sessions, offering members the chance to try something and then measures members behavior.

SkyNet maintains a constant effort manifesting value-creation moments. The opposite would be wasteful time.Learn to see waste.

Through beta launches SkyNet may continue to learn and iterate.

Which customer opinions should we listen to, if any?

How should we prioritize across the many features we could build?Which features are essential to the product’s success and which are ancillary?What can be changed safely, and what might anger customer?What might please today’s customers at the expense of tomorrow’s?What should we work on next?

2017 #table13sfHard work goes into mining what members really want and adjusting our product and strategy to meet those desires.

SkyNet way-to find a synthesis between our vision and what members will accept.

As SkyNet better understands it’s members, we are able to improve our products.

Working smarter means, aligning with our members’ real needs.

Productivity measure in terms of how much validated learning we’re getting for our efforts.

Our hundreds of experiences accrues into learning which members would use the product and why. Which means, each bit of knowledge we gathered suggested new experiences, which moves our metrics closer and closer to our goal.

Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem.

SkyNet Story Auxiliary Logistics ManagementThe ideaology is to cast a wide net and leverage each partner’s individual network in a given region.We are creating breakthrough new products-disruptive innovation-that can create new sustainable sources of growth.

Learning is the essential unit of progress for SkyNet.

Validated Learning-always demonstrated by positive improvements in SkyNet’s core metrics.Because it’s easy to know what members want.It’s too easy to learn things that are completely irrelevant.Validated Learning is backed up by empirical data collected from real members.

SkyNet methodology reconceives our efforts as experiments to test its strategy to see which parts are brilliant and which are crazy.

We begin with a clear hypothesis that makes predictions about what is supposed to happen. And then test those predictions empirically.Guided by SkyNet’s vision. The goal of every experiment is to discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision.

SkyNet finds opportunities for a small number of members to volunteer and then look at the retention rate of those members.How many of them sign up to volunteer again? When a member voluntarily invest their time and attention in this program, that is a strong indicator that they find it valuable.

For the growth hypothesis, which tests how new members will discover a product or service, we do a similar analysis.Once the program is up and running, how will it spread among the members, from initial early adopters to mass adoption throughout the Club?

A likely way this program could expand is through viral growth. If that is true, the most important thing to measure is behavior: would the early participants actively spread the word to other members?

Simple experiments involved taking a very small number-a dozen, perhaps-of existing long-term members and providing an exception volunteer opportunity for them.

Our point is not to find the average member but to find early adopters: the members who feel the need for the product most acutely. Those members tend to be more forgiving of mistakes and are especially eager to give feedback.