Title is a bit provocative but I’m in the following situation:
Spent about 3 months so far and have built an application that’s a couple weeks from being ready to launch. Raised a small grant from a leading industry player and have a small but committed team all working on this.
The feedback from a first round of user tests has been generally very good about the application usability and design BUT one comment a friend of mine (whom I deeply respect) that stuck out to me:
“You’ve built something that’s arguably quite polished before demonstrating any sort of demand.”
This really got me thinking hard, and I wanted everyone’s take on it.
On the one hand, I’ve really tried to move aggressively and thought <3 months is reasonable to consider a sunk cost as part of building out an idea.
The grant was a nice endorsement, and we’ve been showing the application to friends and people we know to get feedback early on, even if not perfect. Admittedly most of the people we know have quite a bit of domain knowledge about the product area, so not really a target - we’re trying to remedy this.
On the other, I suppose I really could have been more aggressive in the MVP/PoC approach, and just gone out there with a landing page and a sales pitch. My thinking for NOT doing this was that, in the time I could have been making promises about the application at networking events, I could have just built a working application, and thus try selling the thing for real.
To remedy, we’re going to be marketing much harder to try and validate some of our initial assumptions, even if we’re not that far from launch. I’m wondering if anyone else is in the same boat, and can share some feedback on how much work you put in to validate an MVP?
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Both have their merits. If you want to create buzz, a slick app can generate more interest. But if you want to test the market quickly, a landing page might’ve been the ticket.
nah, MVP is meant to be a quick and dirty release. It’s used to build your demand. Consider the overall investment, it’s minimal so far. Selling a bunch of promises is effective but it’s a short burst strategy compared to selling your user’s feedback
It could be. Depends of the industry but probably in most of them you can validate your value proposition without a product
I agree with you. If you are skilled enough to build something polished in 3 months, then the usual advice doesn’t apply to you. The advice of building out landing pages is for founders who need a lot of help building and would spend quite a bit of time and money getting to MVP
I like to think of it in terms of risk - what is the biggest risk to your business?
For most early-stage businesses, the biggest risk is that *nobody* will care about what you want to do. In that case, building an app does 0% to address that risk. Building a landing page with signup does help address that risk.
However, if the biggest risk is, say, that this thing can be built at all, than a landing page doesn’t do much - but a MVP can do wonders.
Next time, if you are in customer discovery and you don’t want to build a whole MVP, just a Landing page, I have built a tool for that.
I ran market validation sprints for various corporations and startups. This was the debate we dealt with on a daily basis.
There isn’t a right answer. But here are some self-reflection questions I’d recommend you do at this point.
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Are you willing to kill the startup if it validates poorly? Now that you’ve spent 3 months with a team on it, can you be honest with yourself if things don’t work out? The main risk sinking time into building out an MVP is falling in love with the idea.
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What is your “validation” threshold? 10 paying customers in 2 months? What happens if you get 5 customers? Every time we were unclear we ended up post-rationalizing and over-investing in a bad idea.
I am also writing a piece about tech founders who aggressively launch new ideas and their interesting take on validation. Full disclosure: it’s not ready until Friday ,but you’re welcome to check it out here
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I created a high fidelity interactive model that I polished as much as possible, sat down with my target users, pretty much pitched them the idea, showed them the model and the pricing strategy and got them to sign a LOI that stated that if this was commercially available at a price of x$ they would sign on. I proposed free usage of the platform during our testing phase in exchange for feedback as well as a preferential pricing on commercial launch for LOI signees in order to incentivize them to sign on and demonstrate traction. I calculated the ARR that those signees would represent and went out for financing with guaranteed ARR before even launching developement.
What would happen if you simply put up a page that tries to make people buy it right now, and get it when it launches? This pre-sale would tell you something.