Tag: fail

Your first MVP is Wrong

photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/deanmeyers/
photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/deanmeyers/

This essay is written as part of the Startup Edition project – check out the other essays here.

It would be awesome if your first iteration of a minimum viable product (MVP) perfectly addressed your target market segment, delivered great value to your customers, and you never had to change it again. However, that’s not what happens. Your first MVP iteration is the beginning of a build-measure-change cycle. When done right, you’ll deliver the product your customer wants to use for the job they want to get done. So how do you figure out how to find that customer, understand what they want, and deliver that product to them faster?

Finding your customer is the first task to making your MVP less wrong. If you’re baking cupcakes, who buys them? If you’re making software, what is the general profile of the person who should need what you’re offering. And what problem are you solving for that customer? A good problem statement for baked goods might be: “I’m delivering a donut for an underserved market that has specific allergy needs for people who like breakfast snacks once a week.”

Now that you’ve made a statement that matches what you think your customer might want, you should ask them what they want. This action can take many forms, from informal surveying of friends to more formal methods like online surveys, usability studies and tests. You need to be able to answer the question: what does your customer want? You might find they want different things than you think that target customer wants. So ask the question “do you ever eat donuts?” And also the question “what sort of donuts would you like to eat?”

You can uncover a more nuanced version of this question by asking what your customer needs. Often this need displays as a pain or discomfort that the customer wants to avoid. For our baked good example, a customer allergic to nuts might have very strong physical symptoms when eating a product with nuts – in fact, the decision could be life-threatening to some. Consider how strong that statement is: what does your customer need? Customers will display needs differently than wants, so make sure you watch what they actually do in a given situation rather than just asking them how they feel. Then, after you observe the need in action, ask them how they would feel when that feature/attribute/product is taken away. (Would they pay to keep it?)

If you can find a customer, ask them what they want, and uncover some of their needs, congratulations! You’re well on your way to developing your plan for an MVP. So why can you deliver this benefit better than anyone else? A suggestion: you won’t be able to deliver every benefit better than anyone else in the world. So focus on a small (a really small) thing that you can do better than anyone. And soon you’ll understand whether you picked the right small thing to focus on and whether your customer cares that you’re solving their problem.

You should also ask yourself – why is right now the time to deliver your solution? Try to answer the question: what’s the trigger for my customer to buy to relieve their pain by using my product? If you can deliver that benefit at the right time for the right customer better than anyone else, you’re getting closer. And if you have managed to avoid “boiling the ocean” by focusing on a small thing that you can measure, test, and learn from you’ll have an even better chance of making your MVP less wrong. At some point you also need to know whether the combination of the customer’s pain and the solution matches the set of things you can do at a reasonable cost.

How can you make your MVP better? Make sure you ask valuable questions of your prospective customers. Acknowledge their needs and their wants and respond by demonstrating that you’ve heard their needs and delivered something you believe addresses those needs. And build with the idea in mind that you will measure specific outcomes, learn from the actual behavior of your customers, and then change the MVP to make new experiments that get you closer to being less wrong, quickly.

This essay is written as part of the Startup Edition project – check out the other essays here.

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Two of the Dumbest Business Mistakes I’ve Ever Made

photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/plindberg/2872583288/
photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/plindberg/2872583288/

//Read about more mistakes in the newest Startup Edition

“Do not fear mistakes. There are none.”
-Miles Davis.

We all make mistakes.

I’ve made a few mistakes in my time. I’m not talking about the garden-variety mistakes you might make in the course of the day. I’m talking about product development whoppers, or the kind you look back on several years later and wonder, “What was I thinking!?”

You make the best decision you can based on the information you know at the time and your framework for making decisions. There are a few decisions I wish I could take back, because if I could change them now, they would be great companies (or at least, I could feel like I made the right decision 10 years later). They were ideas for products that I still want now, that still solve a concrete problem, and that people are still willing to pay money to solve. (These ideas also work because they enable the businesses that use them to make more money and get more yield out of their current investment.)

What was my biggest mistake?

My Biggest Mistake was not trusting myself to make the right decision with the information I knew at the time. I didn’t have all of the answers – how to execute, how to find the money, how to deal with the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur – and I let that feeling of being out of my comfort zone make my decision for me. The lesson for next time? Be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Trust my gut more, and be in the moment when struck by a big idea that wants to be real.

Now, you decide whether I should have gone forward.

Here are the ideas that I had and decided not to do. Read them with the knowledge that you have in 2013, and decide whether you would pursue them today: I would.

Big Idea: Make the Grocery Store Easier.

Idea #1: Imagine if the next time you went into your local grocery store, there was a way for your phone to tell you the location of every product in the store, to remember your past preferences for shopping, and even to direct you in an optimal aisle-by-aisle route to minimize the time in store? And what if you received loyalty rewards and marketing offers that pertained to you? And what if you could check out of the store simply by scanning each item with your phone as you placed into the cart. That idea sounds promising and real in 2013, and quite similar to the idea my friends are pursuing at qThru.

When I thought of a very similar idea in 1999, even though the hardware and software was off the shelf and readily available, I didn’t go and build it. I made the decision that “I wasn’t the type to do that,” and “I’m not an idea guy” and let self-doubt make my decision for me. I can’t have that decision back, and I know that what I was really feeling in the moment was, “oh crap. I have no idea how to even begin thinking about that much less how to build and monetize it.” And, it happened again.

Big Idea #2: Make Waiting at a Restaurant Better.

Idea #2: Imagine you arrive at a popular restaurant. Because they are very busy, they ask you for your phone number so that they can text message you when your table is available. At the same time, they ask you to join their loyalty program so that you can participate in drink specials, learn about special events, and play games or trivia while you are waiting in line. It exists today – it’s called TurnStar – and I’ve used it. It’s pretty slick.

Why didn’t I build my version? It was called TextMyTable, and I was ready to go with the vision, the business plan, and the execution play. It was September 2008. Then all of a sudden the economy did a flip-flop and all of our assumptions about what was a normal business turned on their head. Or did they? I was stuck because I didn’t know how to raise the money to start the business or to grow the business in such a way that it generated operating capital.

What’s the Commonality?

In both of these ideas (and in others it’s not important to share here), I had an idea for a product or a service that was innovative. The ideas capitalized on a consumer need, solved an actual problem and had a reasonable chance at being successful. We could argue about the size of the market and the relative degree of success, and the fact remains that they were good ideas. And I made a mistake in not pursuing them.

What did I learn and what would I do next time?

The first thing I learned is that you can’t find out whether you’ll succeed with an idea until you try it. (Duh.) The ideas I think that would have been successful might have been abject failures, wild successes, or more likely somewhere in between. And I don’t know because I didn’t try them.

The second thing I learned from these mistakes is that collaboration is everything. I needed to do more to ask people to tear apart the idea instead of trying to build the whole business from start to finish inside my head. Groups like Startup Edition are a great place to get feedback, learn from other perspectives, and to reframe your questions.

And finally, I learned from my mistakes that it’s impossible to know what you don’t know until you do it. (Sounds like a Zen koan, doesn’t it.) What can you do about that? Admit that you’re going to make mistakes. Try to make different ones the next time you approach a problem, and learn from the results. Trust your gut.

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Please, fix all the broken things.

FAIL stamp
photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/phobia/

You should fix all the broken things in your product. You avoided some decisions in the past or made some decisions you might now choose to change, and now these broken things are still there. Your customers see this accumulated flotsam and jetsam and don’t think “you made the best decision you could have made at the time,” they just think “why is that thing so broken?” Don’t they care enough to fix it?

When your customers ask you to fix things, you can’t always fix them. There might be a very good reason you can’t fix that thing now, or to explain to your customer why it’s complicated. And I’d like to remind you that the longer those things are out there the more chances your customers have to get fed up and stop trying themselves. So here’s a simple set of ideas that can help regain customer goodwill (or make it bigger.)

Fix. All. The. Things.

Here’s one thing you can do today: make a list of the top 10 “cringe items” to fix. You know what they are – your customers tell you about them often. You might have a rubric internally for when they become truly important, and there is another way to measure whether something is truly a “cringe item.”  Ask a new customer if they think it’s weird. If they think that part of your product is weird or confusing, it probably is weird or confusing and you should make it better.

True “cringe items” emerge from this list of merely weird or confusing items. These are items that cause significant customer pain. If these items are difficult (technically) to fix, then build different ways to hold the customer’s hand and get them through the problem. You can write a blog post; you can have a call with the customer where you share your screen; and you can configure the product for them. Any solution that gets a customer through a cringe item might save a customer. You know what your cringe items are – and if you don’t know, you should ask all the people in your business who talk to customers – they can tell you.

After you know what the pain points are, make them go away.

Pain points are exactly that: things that customers find difficult. Sometimes, pain points of a product feel so bad for a customer that the customer goes away, especially when another company determines a way to make that pain point 10x easier to deal with and helps you get there. So make the pain go away.

This is an expanded version of “make it easy for the customer” because really what you are doing is making it so no customer ever again will have this problem. Ok, it’s not always easy. But fixing a cringe item offers the most return on your customer investment possible. Fixing a cringe item makes your customers believe again if they have temporarily lost faith. And fixing a cringe item brings hope to customers who’ve been waiting for you to resolve your decision debt and to do better.

Remember Pareto and the 80/20 rule.

Fixing the cringe items to improve the customer experience is a natural outcome of following the Pareto Principle. When you find the small number of cases that cause customer discontent, you should fix them if you want to maximize the investment benefit of fixing that things. Why not start with the things customers hate most? One reason is that customers famously don’t know what they want. But if enough of them are complaining about the same things, that should signal that it’s a great thing to spend more time on, even if you can’t fix it right away. So fix all the broken things. If you can’t fix them, invent a better way to help customers cope with them without getting really upset at you every time they try to do the thing they’d like to do.

You can find 47 other ways to improve the customer experience here.

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On Pumpkin Harvesting and Startups




Thoughtful sepia pumpkin

Originally uploaded by gregmeyer

This year, we decided to grow our own pumpkins. This isn’t quite true — it should read more like “we planted a few seeds, and then they took over the entire property” — and it’s satisfying to see the fruits of the harvest. Pumpkin growing makes me think about startups. There is little to show at the beginning except for hard work and fertilizer; some green shoots show up but it’s very hard to tell which ones will survive; and the end harvest is wonderful (and not always what you planted).

Hard work and fertilizer at the beginning: that sounds like the recipe for a successful startup. There is no shortage of either of these things at the beginning of any business venture (or any project, for that matter), and it can sometimes be a challenge to find the right thing to focus on and nurture. Here, as in gardening, having a plan, making some rows, and planting complimentary ideas can help in case of bad weather, blight, or rodents.

After the seeds are planted, green shoots come up. (In the case of our pumpkins, everywhere.) The initial success of business ventures often obscures the fragility and newness of the initial growth. Some of these green shoots won’t make it past the first hard rain or blinding sun. But some of them will, and careful weeding will improve their chances.

At the end of the process, you get to practice 20/20 hindsight. Of course you knew which green shoots would survive and make fantastic potential jack o’ lanterns — because those are the ones you harvested — and it’s easy to forget the blossoms that failed along the way. The key to this knowledge is to enjoy the harvest and not get hung up on the pumpkins (or ideas) that didn’t survive.

We found 31 pumpkins this year. That’s enough, probably, to forgo a trip to the local pumpkin patch. It should also provide us with enough raw material to make roasted pumpkin seeds and, of course, pie. May your pumpkin picking and your startups provide such sweet results.

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