A Minimum Viable Product Helps You Release Earlier

December 10, 2015 by LaunchTomorrow

When releasing a new product, the first step is to get a minimum viable product (MVP) released. The minimum viable product encompasses the essence of the Lean Startup ethos. An MVP helps go through one cycle of the Build-Measure-Learn loop. Eric Reis warns “Customers don’t care how long something takes to build. They only care if it serves their needs.” You also need to already have a customer chosen in order to be addressing a customer’s need. The main goal of an MVP is to learn about the customer and the market. You want to validate or reject your hypotheses.

Let’s say you want to build a software company helping people learn foreign languages. Entrepreneur Derek Sivers points out that you can get started by just scheduling a language teaching session. It’s very manual. It’s not automated at all. At the same time, it’s an extremely high-bandwidth way to learn about your customers’ needs. Most importantly, it’s useful for them. Once you have some experience delivering this type of service, you have much better chance of successfully prototyping a solution which addresses the same customer’s need.

You identify one specific need the customer already has. You learn what the customer thinks about it, how they dream they could overcome the problem. You hear them vent about their frustration. You dig deep into specific aspects. You seek out find you can address. You find out how your customer thinks about the problem. This is gold. It helps you identify where to focus your efforts, so that you address what your customer finds the most vexing.

By focusing on the must-have features only, you release a product or a service that addresses a particular need. It’s rudimentary. Yet it works. It might not even require a line of code. Must-have features are essentially all related to specific changes you want to induce. Your target customer will not consider the product valuable otherwise.

It’s also consistent with Ken Schwaber’s value burndown charts. Develop the highest value features first. If the product ends up being successful, then in fact, these are the extremely valuable core product features. They define the product. If it’s not successful, then try to repackage the core with a new set of extra features, in order to go into a different niche.

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“Beam me some money, Scotty!”

October 29, 2015 by LaunchTomorrow 1 Comment

Palm Pilot beams money from one to another via infrared

In a previous life, Elon Musk was one of the main creators of PayPal. He’s pretty open about how the initial idea didn’t actually catch on very well. When he was doing customer interviews, he’d get that glazed-over look. Yeah, that one.

At the time, the team was approaching consumers. They were saying they aimed to “replace the US dollar with a new internet currency”. Remember this was 1999, almost a decade before Bitcoin existed.

Their product allowed people to beam money from one PalmPilot to another via infrared. Journalists voted this as one of the worst business ideas of 1999.

If you’ve never heard of them, PalmPilots were like early smartphones. Except they weren’t phones.

But then the customer development led to an epiphany. Customers loved a small sub-feature the the team built just to get the PalmPilots to sync:

“Sending money to an email address!”

In 1999, “sending money to an email address” resonated with people. Not just with PalmPilot owners. At a deep level. Once the Paypal guys slapped on a viral engine of growth, that feature became what PayPal is known for.

All of this shows how critical it is to have the right value proposition, when first pitching a product. Regardless of whether you present your product in initial conversations with customers. Or on a landing page MVP.

[image cred: Rama & Musée Bolo]

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Are you making this common split testing snafu?

March 19, 2015 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment

In case you didn’t know, SNAFU is a military slang acronym meaning “Situation Normal: All Fouled Up.”

More and more, I hear founders saying that they’re working on a product, who’re concerned whether or not there will be any demand when they launch. I’ve seen it come up in surveys, in youtube videos, even during personal conversations with founders.

After all, there’s more and more noise out there. We’re all getting overstimulated by hundreds of marketing messages and notifications per day. The more we do, the less relevant this messaging is.

How do you find unmet needs, to position your product effectively? A critical piece of building the right product is to address latent demand. Often, demand exists. It just isn’t immediately obvious where.

There is a hint in the book Lean Startup. First you need to prove what Eric Reis calls the “value hypothesis”, before you try to go after the “growth hypothesis”.

The value hypothesis claims that “the product delivers value to customers once they are using it.” This requires a deep understanding of:

who your customer is
what problems they have
how big of a niche they are
how much demand is growing
and most importantly….why they would buy from you specifically.

in addition to number of other factors, if you want to build a business and not just launch a product. If you aren’t sure that your customer needs what you plan to provide, then optimizing or scaling up sales is a waste of time and money.

So for example, split testing is a form of optimization of a message that already works. Running a split test before before you know that your product is attractive and valuable to your prospect is pointless. Yet many newbie founders have this belief from I don’t know where that split testing is what they should be doing.

Nowadays, to that I say…BS.

Here’s what you can and should do before you even reach for split testing or conversion optimization.

List out your assumptions, so that you can prioritize them in the order of riskiness. See if you can or want to de-risk the launch even at this stage:

About to start a greenfield project?

Have Launch Tomorrow run an in-house "riskiest assumption workshop". Remote delivery options also available. Discover where to prioritize your validation efforts, to get to market fast.

or call us now at:

US/Canada: +1 202 949 4478
UK: +44 773 952 7708
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An easy way to identify riskiest this is to work backwards from an imagined failure of the project. You’re having a chat with a close friend or collegue over beers, and you say it would have worked if it hadn’t been for X.
Once you generate a list of these, say 20 different ones, then prioritize them in a google docs spreadsheet.
Once you have this, start with the riskiest one and think of how you can test this assumption. With advertising, it’s often quite easy and quick, because you have direct access to your audience.

Apologies if this is a bit pessimistic, but it’s a powerful method to both plan a product and learn about a new market. As a side benefit, once you’ve tested the assumptions, you confront and abolish any big worries you have. It’s also completely specific to your product idea. It doesn’t matter if it worked for anyone else in any market. You generate quantitative proof of your assumptions are valid or not before proceeding.

Oh, and by the way, be prepared that a few of your big assumptions won’t be right. That’s the usual experience of most entrepreneurs with this approach. In fairness, these false assumptions are the assumptions you want to learn about as soon as possible. You don’t want make decisions still thinking they’re true.

Create an explainer video for your complicated new product. Make sure your audience understands it, without being overwhelmed by technical details.

or call us now at:

US/Canada: +1 202 949 4478
UK: +44 773 952 7708
EU: +48 692 870 297

Once you’re done that, there’s another exercise worth going into. Testing the your value proposition in your ads and your landing page MVP, so that you know what speaks to your market. People get hung up on what value prop is, but it’s quite simple. It’s the reason someone buys from you. Their (nor your) reason why. Of course, only test value props that you’d be comfortable selling and building.

See, this is where the MVP naysayers have it wrong. A landing page MVP isn’t a smoke test. If you’re using it to validate yourself and tell you how smart you are, your mirror will be more effective. And cheaper. And you’ll learn just as much.

Test your value props.

The fastest path to identifying your value prop with advertising? I thought you’d never ask.

Why, Launch Tomorrow of course. My book Launch Tomorrow delves into exactly how to do that with paid advertising and a landing page MVP.

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Is premature optimization a warranted concern?

March 2, 2015 by LaunchTomorrow 1 Comment

Here’s a wonderfully geeky question from a forum I’m on, related to lean startup:

I have a product that I want to test. I’ve built the one-pager website and set up some Facebook advertising to figure out the messaging / features that makes people sign up to determine the direction I will eventually build towards.

I have three ads: A, B, A+B
and three website versions: A, B, A+B

My question is whether I should test the advertising AND the website versions at the same time. I want to test quickly, but I’m worried that if someone clicks advertisement A and then lands on website B, it won’t be relevant and it will skew my data.

Is this a warranted concern? Should I test the advertising first, then the website version? Or should I do both and just figure that, with enough users, the data will smooth itself out faster then if I test one at a time? Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Couple of things:

Yes it is a warranted concern. When you send traffic from ad A to landing page B, you lose them. You can set up ad A to point to landing page A, ad B to landing page B, and so on. Then by rotating through all ads, you’ll implicitly rotate through all of your landing pages.This “scent” which a prospect follows is really important. You may be losing people. They land on a LP which doesn’t correspond to their post-click expectations. This may skew your results.The goal here isn’t necessarily to convert, i.e. get a lot of signups. It’s to measure user behavior and preferences. Discover where you have latent/unmet demand.
The right test depends on what you’re trying to learn and what your hypothesis is exactly. For example, why are you even split testing in the first place? If you start split testing too early, it ends up being premature optimization. Understanding why you are split testing will help you formulate a meaningful hypothesis. Split testing only tells you if option A is relatively better than option B.You’re better off first choosing a threshold for conversion, then running ads to see if you hit that threshold. It’s a different type of statistical test and way of thinking about the problem. Then you’re also learning more about demand.
You will achieve statistical significance faster focusing only on user behavior around ads. Clicks. Based on that you can “test before you test”, and find out what larger/full tests are worth doing in a full environment.

As a rule of thumb, understanding your users better will usually be more profitable than understanding your product idea better.

If you want to go into greater depth about using landing pages rigorously to learn about your market, then check out Launch Tomorrow. It clears up a lot of the confusion around new products and landing page MVPs. Why blunder your way through? Launch Tomorrow‘ll take care of ya.

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The #1 mistake of Lean Startup newbies

January 28, 2015 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment

Validating your product idea is very important.

Yesterday I was speaking with a gaggle of early stage tech entrepreneurs about Lean Startup at Google Campus in London.

They were eager to learn more about about hypothesis testing. Newbies wanting to learn about the Lean Startup approach.

Yet they were falling prey to what I call the “solutionizing bias”. They only wanted to talk and think about solutions. And making sales. It’s so tempting, easy and natural for founders to fall for that trap.

As entrepreneurs, we’re naturally optimistic go-getters. We have a solution for every problem. We want to help out.

Yet when you’re building a new product, you don’t know whether your solution is important for your customer. If you don’t prove that first, then brace yourself for a long uphill battle.

Your solution solves a problem your customer has. The customer cares about their problem, not your solution. Before you think about solutions, you need to know whether the problem your solution solves is important. In your customer’s eyes.

That’s why validating your product idea is so important. First ensure that the problem you’re addressing affects a large percentage of your target market.

If you focus on your solution only, you won’t know which problem is worth addressing. It’s blinding.

Imagine you’re reading a market research report about the biggest problems of your target market. In that report, there is a pie chart.

Let’s say your prospects have 4 different problems: A, B, C, D. 40% consider A their main concern, 30% B, 20% C, and 10% D.

Yet, you’ve already built a solution. You realize it addresses problem D.

About to start a greenfield project?

Have Launch Tomorrow run an in-house "riskiest assumption workshop". Remote delivery options also available. Discover where to prioritize your validation efforts, to get to market fast.

or call us now at:

US/Canada: +1 202 949 4478
UK: +44 773 952 7708
EU: +48 692 870 297

For the same amount of marketing effort, you’ll get 4 times less results than another founder who addresses problem A.

In my experience with building products, I’ve managed to build products that addressed problem E.

Create an explainer video for your complicated new product. Make sure your audience understands it, without being overwhelmed by technical details.

or call us now at:

US/Canada: +1 202 949 4478
UK: +44 773 952 7708
EU: +48 692 870 297

In other words, it was a problem I thought the market should have, but actually didn’t. I was dead in the water. I write about an example like that, and how to prevent it from happening to you, in Launch Tomorrow.

While it’s critical to think in terms of sales you’re going to make when you start a business, first check if you are addressing a meaningful problem first. One that a big chunk of your market thinks they have. And that they’re willing to pay for a solution. Then you set yourself up for hockey-stick growth.

Only then do you build a money-making machine.

Otherwise, you might as well be a missionary.

If you follow the one-day launch sequence in Launch Tomorrow, you’ll get a decent blueprint to do exactly that. Build what your customers want.

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