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 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.