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?
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.
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.
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