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What is a Lean Startup?
Wikipedia says: “Lean Startup initially advocates the creation of rapid prototypes designed to test market assumptions, and uses customer feedback to evolve them much faster…”
Here is our story:
A friend wanted to customize his Facebook Page to grow his Facebook Followers and advertise his business. He shopped around and companies where charging $500 – $1500 or more to create a Facebook Page for him. They mentioned something about some Facebook Coding needs to be done. He has a small business (he was running lean himself)and there is not way that he can afford $1000 to Customize his Facebook page. I was always interested in the Facebook Platform and had a quick look at what was available and helped my buddy to get his Facebook Page customized and ready to go.
I then realized that there must be loads of other small businesses (and big ones) out there that would like to create a Facebook Presence and customize their pages to suite the look and feel of their existing business. These guys also want to be able to edit their pages on an ad hoc basis. They basically want to be able to upload a new advert or display their special of the week.
We started out by putting a very simple system in place. We had one template and allowed users to basically upload a single image, connect a link to it and publish this to their Facebook Page. My friend has the skills to edit an existing image on his mac, but he can’t do Facebook Code. This is all my friend required. To test market assumptions we started doing targeted Facebook Advertising (We basically targeted a similar demographic to my fried that I built the first page for) to find small businesses that needed Facebook Pages.
From there we started getting requests to for more complex templates and templates that allows our users to post videos to their Facebook Page. If a customer asks for a change, we can often have it implemented the same day or at least within 48 hours. By the way: We deploy straight from our Version Controlrepository (which is free and Open Source) . We also started charging for more complex templates and templates with more complex functionality, like the ability to handle video.
One thing our users have been asking for consistently is for a way to display content from their existing website on their Facebook page to be able to keep the two consistent. We are in the process of testing this solution and will have it ready in the next week or two.
TabTrick runs 100% on Free and OpenSource Software. We use PHP, MYSQL and the Facebook Platform.
If you need a help with you Facebook Page, please let us know.
Thanks for listening. I am off to go enjoy a green beer.
PS: The inspiration for this story came from the Appsumo Lean Startup Challenge
PPS: Please Vote for us in the Lean Startup Challenge
