The Lean Startup: The Million Copy Bestseller Driving Entrepreneurs to Success

by Eric Ries

Even after ditching the IM add-on strategy, it still took months to understand why it hadn’t worked. After our pivot and many failed experiments, we finally figured out this insight: customers wanted to use IMVU to make new friends online. Our customers intuitively grasped something that we were slow to realize. All the existing social products online were centered on customers’ real-life identity. IMVU’s avatar technology, however, was uniquely well suited to help people get to know each other online without compromising safety or opening themselves up to identity theft. Once we formed this hypothesis, our experiments became much more likely to produce positive results. Whenever we would change the product to make it easier for people to find and keep new friends, we discovered that customers were more likely to engage.