# data[].attributes.body
Ash Maurya

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
bol.com | Scaling Lean, Ash Maurya | 9780241279243 | Boeken

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Scaling Lean (paperback). 'A battle-tested approach to building companies that matter' - Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup Is your 'big idea' worth pursuing? What if you could test your business model earlier in the process - before you've expended valuable time and resources?You've talked to...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Revenue is the most important metric when it comes to starting a business. But it's not the only metric you should be concerned with.

Of course some companies have gotten very creative when it comes to justifying their business model to investors, but I don't think those are the kinds of metrics you should be paying attention to, especially if you want to succeed.

In the end, it's watching and learning from the traditional metrics that will help you grow your startup into a real business. Here are the 9 most important.

Startup Metric #1 Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

CAC is the metric that matters the most if you are in the early stages of your startup growth because if you want to survive you need users. But it costs money to acquire customers. The question is how much, and is it profitable?

To calculate your CAC cost, divide your sales and marketing costs, including overhead expenses in these departments, for a given period by the number of customers you picked up during that period.

A high CAC cost means you are spending too much money to acquire new customers. To lower it you need to optimize your sign up and landing pages. Optimizely is a great tool to use when testing different variables on a web page.

We'll talk more about what's a viable CAC cost for a startup when we get to the Life Time Value metric.

Startup Metric #2 Retention

I've seen a lot of entrepreneurs get so obsessed with customer acquisition that they forget about customer retention. I've actually been guilty of it myself!

Unfortunately you need to break out of this obsession because if all you do is focus on acquisition you end up neglecting your current customers, which can mean they might eventually get frustrated and leave.

One of the most important things that I learned about retention actually helped me break my single-minded focus on acquisition, and will probably help you too. For me, it costs 6 to 7 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep a current client.

In addition, it costs me 4 times more to close a deal with new customers than it does to upsell a current one. That means you cannot neglect your current clients!

So who exactly should you focus on? There are three kinds of customers you need to think about:

Current - what can you do to make these customers more satisfied? If you don't know, simply ask. People love to talk and give their opinion, so you won't be bothering them.

Inactive - customers who've stopped using the product or slowed their use of it should be asked why. Again, they are a great source you should take advantage of to help you improve your product and customer service.

... We'll talk about the third customer in the following section.

Startup Metric #3 Churn

Churn, or attrition, is another really important metric you should keep your eye on. This is a measure of how many customers stop paying you for your product.

Some startups measure churn at 30 days. Others wait 90 days so as not to confuse an inactive customer, who may start using the product again in the future, with someone who doesn't intend to come back.

It's important to realize that you will lose customers. There is no getting around that. What you have to do is find out what a profitable level of loss is to you.

By the way, did you know that you are 2 times more likely to close with a lost customer than you are to acquire a new one? That should be a good incentive to motivate you to find out why certain customers have stopped paying for your product.

If you have customers who are leaving your product, then try to conduct as many win/lose interviews with them. You can do this by phone or email, though I recommend you do as many as you can on the phone. Make them feel like a real person.

Another great way to keep churn low is to use data to anticipate churn and then create personalized retention plans.

Startup Metric #4 Life Time Value (LTV)

What exactly is the LTV? It's how much you expect to earn from a customer during the time they are with your company.

That means you first have to know how long most customers stay with you. It could be six months, 12 months or longer. Then you multiply the monthly revenue you expect from that customer and you get the LTV.

Keep in mind that you should include any expenses related to installation or maintenance of your product.

You don't need a college education to see that a business will fail if the CAC is higher than your LTV. This is why David Skok calls CAC the startup killer.

Here are two guidelines David suggests you might find useful:

LTV > CAC. (It appears that LTV should be about 3 x CAC for a viable SaaS or other form of recurring revenue model.)

Aim to recover your CAC in < 12 months, otherwise your business will require too much capital to grow.

Obviously what you need is a CAC a lot lower than LTV.

Startup Metric #5 Product Metabolism

Product metabolism is a metric created by Dustin Dolginow, and it basically measures the speed at which you and your company move and make decisions.

Like the human metabolism, product metabolism is usually high in the early stages of a startup. As the company begins to mature, however, that metabolism begins to slow down.

Dustin argues that this is good since it could be damaging for a large company to make lots of gut-level decisions that may hurt customer retention, and because of the larger size of the company, they cannot respond quickly.

Netflix is a company that's recently made some rather dramatic changes to how it operates, namely raising prices and branching off one of its divisions into a full-fledge company. Not everyone agrees that this was a bad decision, but it's still early so time will tell.

Like a lot of these metrics, maintaining product metabolism is a balancing act. If you move too fast you create instability. If you move too slow you might irritate your customers.

One of the best ways I've found to measure product metabolism is to use KISSinsights and ask my customers two simple questions: Are we moving too fast or too slow? Why?

Startup Metric #6 Viral Coefficient

This metric measures the organic growth of your company. Usually a startup will start with inviting friends to use the product. If it is a good product, then these beta users will then tell their friends and so on.

Other ways that make your product viral is through social pushes like share buttons, email invitations and promotions on Twitter or Facebook.

Here are your inputs when calculating the viral coefficient:

Initial set of customers

Number of invites sent to each new customer

Percentage of invites that convert

That conversion rate over several cycles is your viral coefficient. A positive viral coefficient rate means four things:

1. You are giving your customers a positive user experience

2. You've found a good product/market fit

3. You have a low cost of acquisition

4. You will probably have high profitability

One way to improve your viral coefficient is to build incentives into your products.

The business app Hashable is a good example of this. As people use the app they are pushed up the leader board in rankings, and as they move up they are encouraged to share their progress with their network, leading to more users.

Startup Metric #7 Revenue

This is one of the most important metrics to pay attention to because it's all about profitability. In other words, are you making money?

Revenue is the income that your company brings in. It's usually reported as "sales" or "sales revenue" that comes when customers purchase your product, but revenue can also include other income like interest or late fees.

Revenue doesn't come easily, and you'll be paying out a lot more money than what is coming in if you are a SaaS since customers usually pay in small increments.

One way to avoid this is by offering longer contracts and requiring advanced payments.

If you have a good product, you should have a high conversion of users who are not paying that eventually become paying customers. To increase revenue, focus your efforts on turning "activated" users into paying customers, the focus of our next metric.

Startup Metric #8 Activation

Activation is a measurement of the conversion rate from when a visitor or prospect moves to becoming an active user, the signal being some kind of sign up or download.

A high conversion rate means that the visitors had a good first user experience. A low activation rate usually means that your product isn't interesting enough or they found it difficult to get started.

SaaS products usually use activation as a way to attract and gain a following in the early stages of their business, hoping that the good user experience will entice people to pay for additional benefits.

This is true with the web-browser productivity tool ToDoist.

Activation begins with entering a username and password. The free plan allows people to build a list of projects they can track, including all the sub-tasks. But you have to become a premium member if you want more robust tools like alerts and notes.

Startup Metric #9 Referral

This metric is sort of a spin-off of your viral coefficient metric, but it's truly too important not to measure as a standalone.

To calculate your referral rate just figure out the percentage of users who come from existing customers.

A good way to determine a referral that's viral versus a recommendation from an existing customer is simply to ask when a user is signing up, "How did you hear about us?"

As you might expect, the higher your referral rate, the lower your CAC is going to be and the more profitable your company will be.

A great way to encourage referrals is to program occasional reminders into your products. You'll see this often with phone apps that show pop ups from time to time asking you to send a recommendation to a friend.

Conclusion

Isn't it amazing how all of these metrics are connected? But it can be difficult to measure and monitor all of these metrics as a small startup. You just don't have the time.

I recommend you start small and focus only on the ones that affect your bottom line, namely revenue, CAC, LTV and churn. After that, pay attention to retention, referral, your viral coefficient, activation and product metabolism.

This is why I'm became the Co-founder of KISSmetrics. I felt the time was right to make an analytics package that helps track these important metrics for startups.
I want to hear from you: What other metrics should startups focus on?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
9 Metrics to Help You Make Wise Decisions about Your Start-Up

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Revenue is the most important metric when it comes to starting a business. But it's not the only metric you should be concerned with. Of course some companies have gotten very creative when it comes to justifying their business model to investors...Read More.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We have the privilege of meeting with thousands of entrepreneurs every year, and in the course of those discussions are presented with all kinds of numbers, measures, and metrics that illustrate the promise and health of a particular company. Sometimes, however, the metrics may not be the best gauge of what's actually happening in the business, or people may use different definitions of the same metric in a way that makes it hard to understand the health of the business.

So, while some of this may be obvious to many of you who live and breathe these metrics all day long, we compiled a list of the most common or confusing ones. Where appropriate, we tried to add some notes on why investors focus on those metrics. Ultimately, though, good metrics about raising money from VCs - they're about running the business in a way where founders know how and why certain things are working (or not) ... and can address or adjust accordingly.

Business and Financial Metrics

#1 Bookings vs. Revenue

A common mistake is to use bookings and revenue interchangeably, but they aren't the same thing.

Bookings is the value of a contract between the company and the customer. It reflects a contractual obligation on the part of the customer to pay the company.

Revenue is recognized when the service is actually provided or ratably over the life of the subscription agreement. How and when revenue is recognized is governed by GAAP.

Letters of intent and verbal agreements are neither revenue nor bookings.

#2 Recurring Revenue vs. Total Revenue

Investors more highly value companies where the majority of total revenue comes from product revenue (vs. from services). Why? Services revenue is non-recurring, has much lower margins, and is less scalable. Product revenue is the what you generate from the sale of the software or product itself.

ARR (annual recurring revenue) is a measure of revenue components that are recurring in nature. It should exclude one-time (non-recurring) fees and professional service fees.

ARR per customer: Is this flat or growing? If you are upselling or cross-selling your customers, then it should be growing, which is a positive indicator for a healthy business.

MRR (monthly recurring revenue): Often, people will multiply one month's all-in bookings by 12 to get to ARR. Common mistakes with this method include: (1) counting non-recurring fees such as hardware, setup, installation, professional services/ consulting agreements; (2) counting bookings (see #1).

#3 Gross Profit

While top-line bookings growth is super important, investors want to understand how profitable that revenue stream is. Gross profit provides that measure.

What's included in gross profit may vary by company, but in general all costs associated with the manufacturing, delivery, and support of a product/service should be included.

So be prepared to break down what's included in - and excluded - from that gross profit figure.

#4 Total Contract Value (TCV) vs. Annual Contract Value (ACV)

TCV (total contract value) is the total value of the contract, and can be shorter or longer in duration. Make sure TCV also includes the value from one-time charges, professional service fees, and recurring charges.

ACV (annual contract value), on the other hand, measures the value of the contract over a 12-month period. Questions to ask about ACV:

What is the size? Are you getting a few hundred dollars per month from your customers, or are you able to close large deals? Of course, this depends on the market you are targeting (SMB vs. mid-market vs. enterprise).

Is it growing (and especially not shrinking)? If it's growing, it means customers are paying you more on average for your product over time. That implies either your product is fundamentally doing more (adding features and capabilities) to warrant that increase, or is delivering so much value customers (improved functionality over alternatives) that they are willing to pay more for it.

#5 LTV (Life Time Value)

Lifetime value is the present value of the future from the customer over the duration of the relationship. It helps determine the long-term value of the customer and how much net value you generate per customer after accounting for customer acquisition costs (CAC).

A common mistake is to estimate the LTV as a present value of revenue or even gross margin of the customer instead of calculating it as net profit of the customer over the life of the relationship.

Reminder, here's a way to calculate LTV:

Revenue per customer (per month) = average order value multiplied by the number of orders.

Contribution margin per customer (per month) = revenue from customer minus variable costs associated with a customer. Variable costs include selling, administrative and any operational costs associated with serving the customer.

Avg. life span of customer (in months) = 1 / by your monthly churn.

LTV = Contribution margin from customer multiplied by the average lifespan of customer.

Note, if you have only few months of data, the conservative way to measure LTV is to look at historical value to date. Rather than predicting average life span and estimating how the retention curves might look, we prefer to measure 12 month and 24 month LTV.

Another important calculation here is LTV as it contributes to margin. This is important because a revenue or gross margin LTV suggests a higher upper limit on what you can spend on customer acquisition. Contribution Margin LTV to CAC ratio is also a good measure to determine CAC payback and manage your advertising and marketing spend accordingly.

See also Bill Gurley on the " dangerous seductions " of the lifetime value formula.

#6 Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) vs. Revenue

In marketplace businesses, these are frequently used interchangeably. But GMV does not equal revenue!

GMV (gross merchandise volume) is the total sales dollar volume of merchandise transacting through the marketplace in a specific period. It's the real top line, what the consumer side of the marketplace is spending. It is a useful measure of the size of the marketplace and can be useful as a "current run rate" measure based on annualizing the most recent month or quarter.

Revenue is the portion of GMV that the marketplace "takes". Revenue consists of the various fees that the marketplace gets for providing its services; most typically these are transaction fees based on GMV successfully transacted on the marketplace, but can also include ad revenue, sponsorships, etc. These fees are usually a fraction of GMV.

#7 Unearned or Deferred Revenue ... and Billings

In a SaaS business, this is the cash you collect at the time of the booking in advance of when the revenues will actually be realized.

As we've shared previously , SaaS companies only get to recognize revenue over the term of the deal as the service is delivered - even if a customer signs a huge up-front deal . So in most cases, that "booking" goes onto the balance sheet in a liability line item called deferred revenue. (Because the balance sheet has to "balance," the corresponding entry on the assets side of the balance sheet is "cash" if the customer pre-paid for the service or "accounts receivable" if the company expects to bill for and receive it in the future). As the company starts to recognize revenue from the software as service, it reduces its deferred revenue balance and increases revenue: for a 24-month deal, as each month goes by deferred revenue drops by 1/24th and revenue increases by 1/24th.

A good proxy to measure the growth - and ultimately the health - of a SaaS company is to look at billings, which is calculated by taking the revenue in one quarter and adding the change in deferred revenue from the prior quarter to the current quarter. If a SaaS company is growing its bookings (whether through new business or upsells/renewals to existing customers), billings will increase.

Billings is a much better forward-looking indicator of the health of a SaaS company than simply looking at revenue because revenue understates the true value of the customer, which gets recognized ratably. But i t's also tricky because of the very nature of recurring revenue itself: A SaaS company could show stable revenue for a long time - just by working off its billings backlog - which would make the business seem healthier than it truly is. This is something we therefore watch out for when evaluating the unit economics of such businesses.

#8 CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) ... Blended vs. Paid, Organic vs. Inorganic

Customer acquisition cost or CAC should be the cost of acquiring users, stated on a per user basis. Unfortunately, CAC metrics come in all shapes and sizes.

One common problem with CAC metrics is failing to include all the costs incurred in user acquisition such as referral fees, credits, or discounts. Another common problem is to calculate CAC as a "blended" cost (including users acquired organically) rather than isolating users acquired through "paid" marketing. While blended CAC [total acquisition cost / total new customers acquired across all channels] isn't wrong, it doesn't inform how well your paid campaigns are working and whether they're profitable.

This is why investors consider paid CAC [total acquisition cost/ new customers acquired through paid marketing] to be more important than blended CAC in evaluating the viability of a business - it informs whether a company can scale up its user acquisition budget profitably. While an argument can be made in some cases that paid acquisition contributes to organic acquisition, one would need to demonstrate proof of that effect to put weight on blended CAC.

Many investors do like seeing both, however: the blended number as well as the CAC, broken out by paid/unpaid. We also like seeing the breakdown by dollars of paid customer acquisition channels: for example, how much does a paying customer cost if they were acquired via Facebook?

Counterintuitively, it turns out that costs typically go as you try and reach a larger audience. So it might cost you $1 to acquire your first 1,000 users, $2 to acquire your next 10,000, and $5 to $10 to acquire your next 100,000. That's why you can't afford to ignore the metrics about volume of users acquired via each channel.

Product and Engagement Metrics

#9 Active Users

Different companies have almost unlimited definitions for what "active" means. Some charts don't even define what that activity is, while others include inadvertent activity - such as having a high proportion of first-time users or accidental one-time users.

Be clear on how you define "active."

#10 Month-on-month (MoM) growth

Often this measured as the simple average of monthly growth rates. But investors often prefer to measure it as CMGR (Compounded Monthly Growth Rate) since CMGR measures the periodic growth, especially for a marketplace.

Using CMGR [CMGR = (Latest Month/ First Month)^(1/# of Months) -1] also helps you benchmark growth rates with other companies. This would otherwise be difficult to compare due to volatility and other factors. The CMGR will be smaller than the simple average in a growing business.

There's all kinds of churn - dollar churn, customer churn, net dollar churn - and there are varying definitions for how churn is measured. For example, some companies measure it on a revenue basis annually, which blends upsells with churn.

Investors look at it the following way:

Monthly unit churn = lost customers/prior month total
Retention by cohort
Month 1 = 100% of installed base

Latest Month = % of original installed base that are still transacting

It is also important to differentiate between gross churn and net revenue churn -

Gross churn: MRR in a given month/MRR at the beginning of the month.

Net churn: (MRR lost MRR from upsells) in a given month/MRR at the beginning of the month.

The difference between the two is significant. Gross churn estimates the actual loss to the business, while net revenue churn understates the losses (as it blends upsells with absolute churn).

Burn rate is the rate at which cash is decreasing. Especially in early stage startups, it's important to know and monitor burn rate as companies fail when they are running out of cash and don't have enough time left to raise funds or reduce expenses. As a reminder, here's a simple calculation:

Monthly cash burn = cash balance at the beginning of the year cash balance end of the year / 12

It's also important to measure net burn vs. gross burn:

Net burn [revenues (including all incoming cash you have a high probability of receiving) - gross burn] is the true measure of amount of cash your company is burning every month.

Gross burn on the other hand only looks at your monthly expenses + any other cash outlays.

Investors tend to focus on net burn to understand how long the money you have left in the bank will last for you to run the company. They will also take into account the rate at which your revenues and expenses grow as monthly burn may not be a constant number.

Downloads (or number of apps delivered by distribution deals) are really just a vanity metric.

Investors want to see engagement , ideally expressed as cohort retention on metrics that matter for that business - for example, DAU (daily active users), MAU (monthly active users), photos shared, photos viewed, and so on.

Presenting Metrics Generally

#14 Cumulative Charts (vs. Growth Metrics)

Cumulative charts by definition always go up and to the right for any business that is showing any kind of activity. But they are not a valid measure of growth - they can go up-and-to-the-right a business is shrinking. Thus, the metric is not a useful indicator of a company's health.

Investors like to look at monthly GMV, monthly revenue, or new users/customers per month to assess the growth in early stage businesses. Quarterly charts can be used for later-stage businesses or businesses with a lot of month-to-month volatility in metrics.

#15 Chart Tricks

There a number of such tricks , but a few common ones include not labeling the Y-axis; shrinking scale to exaggerate growth; and only presenting percentage gains without presenting the absolute numbers. (This last one is misleading since percentages can sound impressive off a small base, but are not an indicator of the future trajectory.)

#16 Order of Operations

It's fine to present metrics in any order as you tell your story.

When initially evaluating businesses, investors often look at GMV, revenue, and bookings first because they're an indicator of the size of the business. Once investors have a sense of the the size of the business, they'll want to understand growth to see how well the company is performing. These basic metrics, if interesting, then compel us to look even further.

As one of our partners who recently had a baby observes here: It's almost like doing a health check for your baby at the pediatrician's office. Check weight and height, and then compare to previous estimates to make sure things look healthy before you go any deeper!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We have the privilege of meeting with thousands of entrepreneurs every year, and in the course of those discussions are presented with all kinds of numbers, measures, and metrics that illustrate the promise and health of a particular company.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Speedboat: Innovation Games at Munich Scrum Gathering

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Tobias Mayer does a great job of describing "Speed Boat" - one of Luke Hohmann's popular "Innovation Games" we played at the Scrum Gathering in Munich. Facilitated by Paul Culling with tremendous help from Tobias, this game aimed to identify "anchors" or things that were slowing down the Scrum Alliance as an organization.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Heather Lee - Innovation Team, Accuity - Buy A Feature Game

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Uploaded by RBI Customer Insight on 2014-11-20.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In this video I show you how to define, measure, and communicate the one thing that we all want -- TRACTION.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
4 minutes read

'Buy a feature' is a simple and effective design game for getting people to choose the features that they would like to be available for a given product. It's a great means of teasing out of people which features they would like and why. In this article I outline how to play the 'Buy a feature' design game and provide some useful templates for the game so that you can get started straight away.

What is the 'Buy a feature' design game?

As I've already mentioned the 'Buy a feature' design game is a great way of getting people to choose the features that they would like to be available for a given product. Like all the best design games it's very simple to play, but provides incredibly useful feedback. Features are given a price depending on their complexity to implement, and players are given a stack of cash (not real obviously) with which to buy features with. By being mean and only providing enough cash to buy a limited set of features players are forced to choose those features they most want.

'Buy a feature' is a great means of exploring which features people are likely to find desirable in a product and why. Will someone blow their entire budget on a few monster features or instead buy lots of smaller ones? It can be useful for helping to determine which features to include for a product, for prioritising a product backlog (i.e. feature set) and for exploring the initial requirements for a product. After all, there's no point in designing a fantastic new feature if it's never going to be used by people in the first place. Sounds interesting? Here's how 'Buy a feature' works.

Preparing your features

Before you can play 'Buy a feature' you of course need a list of product features. I won't go into exactly how you build this list because every product will be different, but the list might include:

Features that have been suggested by users

Features that have been implemented by rival products

Features that have come out of user research

Features that have been identified as desirable during a phase of market research.

Features should be user focused, you wouldn't for example want to include optimising SQL queries as a feature because the benefit might be unclear to someone (although you could rebadged this as a speed enhancement feature). Each feature should include a name and short description outlining what the feature is and what the benefits to the user are. You don't want too many features for people to have to go through, about 30 is probably about the maximum you would want to present. If you find that you've got more than 30 features it probably means that you need to trim the feature list down before evaluating it with people, or that they are too fine grain and need to be a little bit more high level.

For each feature you will also need to assign a price related to the complexity to implement the feature. Prices should be relative, so for example a feature that is twice as complex (and hence costly) to implement as another should be twice as expensive. A good way to determine prices is to play something like Planning poker, although you don't need to be too precise as really it's just a ball park figure that you're after. Having determined the price for each feature it's a good idea to create feature cards. These are simple cards outlining the feature name, what it does and how much it costs. Players generally find it easier to go through a set of feature cards, rather than a long list of features as it allows them to create things like a 'maybe' pile and to discard features they don't want. You can download a nifty template for creating feature cards below.

Show me the money

Once you've priced features and possibly created feature cards you'll need to determine how much money you will provide. Too much and people won't have to think too hard about the features they buy; too little and they won't be able to buy the features they need. I've generally found that providing enough money to buy between a half and a third of the features works well because it really forces people to consider which features they most want.

Having determined the amount of money you will provide you need to create your notes. I'd recommend not using a denomination, such as pounds or dollars because you don't want people equating the cost of implementing a feature with the cost (or impact to the cost) of the product. Using something like Monopoly money works well, alternatively you can print out a stack of 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 and 500 notes using the template below.

Playing 'Buy a feature'

'Buy a feature' can be played as a group (e.g. 2, 3 or 4 people), or one-to-one. I wouldn't recommend playing the game with a very large group because things can become unwieldy and you will be forcing a lot of consensus when it comes to buying features. A good size group can however make for some interesting discussions. The time it takes to play the game generally depends on how many features there are. Generally the exercise shouldn't take more than about 30 minutes, but expect things to take a little longer with bigger groups.

Having outlined how the game works and dished out the money you can then either present the features in price order (low to high, or high to low) or in a random order. If there is quite a price difference between features then you might want to think about ordering by price (to make it easier for people to determine how much can be purchased), although of course this might slightly bias the results. With the money dished out and features presented players can then start buying features. Because features often require a bit more explanation, and of course because you want to find out why something has been bought, it can be a good idea for you to play the role of shop keeper during the game. The shop keeper sells the features, answering any questions and taking payment when a feature is purchased. In order to buy a feature players should give the shop keeper the money required and outline exactly why they want that feature. The game continues until all the money has been spent, or all the features wanted by players have been purchased. Make it clear to players that it's OK for money to be left over at the end because you don't want people buying features just to get rid of their unspent cash.

If getting time with people is very difficult then you could also set-up a features spreadsheet to send out. This isn't as useful as playing the game face-to-face because you're not able to fully explore why a feature has been purchased. It can however be a useful alternative. You can download a nice little template for a 'Buy a feature' spreadsheet below. Enjoy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to play the 'Buy a feature' design game - UXM

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
4 minutes read 'Buy a feature' is a simple and effective design game for getting people to choose the features that they would like to be available for a given product. It's a great means of teasing out of people which features they would like and why.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Lean Agile Games voor het hele Innovatie proces

# data[].attributes.body
Alistair Croll

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
bol.com | Lean Analytics, Alistair Croll | 9781449335670 | Boeken

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Lean Analytics (hardcover). Whether you're a startup founder trying to disrupt an industry or an intrapreneur trying to provoke change from within, your biggest challenge is creating a product people actually want. Lean Analytics steers you in the right direction.This book shows you how to valida...

# data[].attributes.body
Luke Hohmann

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
bol.com | Innovation Games, Luke Hohmann | 9780321437297 | Boeken

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Innovation Games (paperback). Innovation Through Understandingsm The toughest part of innovation? Accurately predicting what customers want, need, and will pay for. Even if you ask them, they often can't explain what they want. Now, there's a breakthrough solution: Innovation Games. Drawing on hi...