Kill a feature, “Fix” a feature

January 29th, 2010 by Tim Barkow
In Startups  # leanstartup, startup

Dave McClure, of Startup Metrics for Pirates fame, often recommends the seemingly drastic step of killing features, just to see what happens. If users freak out, then that’s a valuable feature, put it back in. If not, well, you just made your product better, separating the chaff from the wheat.

Now most folk are going to be hesitant to take such a drastic step, and might be a hard sell to management or the rest of the team. Here’s an alternative I think might work:

Fix a Feature

What I mean by “fix” is that you take that feature and all of its buttons and inputs, as well as user flows, error messages and edge cases, and turn it into a sensible default.

• Profile picture? A link with their name is good enough.
• 20 different social networks to choose from? Add Facebook & Twitter, and be done.
• Multiple users per account? They can share 1 account.

Most times (and I know I do this a lot, being product-focused), we believe that customers won’t love us if we don’t build in 1,000 ways to customize the product. And each time we start down that road, we create a whole mess of wireframes, workflows, tests, and feedback that we need to work through.

When customers start to balk about needing more freedom — when they’re annoyed they can’t do something they really need to do — you’ve just validated a need, and learned something about how your customers work.

5 Ways to ID Your Minimum Viable Product

January 26th, 2010 by Tim Barkow
In Startups  # leanstartup, mvp

I thought I’d try to outline some thoughts on this tweet I saw this morning.

@startupSQUARE: Someone Please Write a Blog Post about Minimum Viable Strategy http://blog.startupsquare.com/customer-development/someone-please-write-a-blog-post-about-minimum-viable-strategy/ #leanstartup #entrepreneur

Here’s a few key ideas:

#1: Pivot for continual, incremental improvement
If you’re afraid to pivot, then either you haven’t found the right idea yet, or you’re a glutton for punishment. Your loyalty isn’t to one specific idea, your loyalty is to making the world a better place. Keep poking until you find your customers’ pain point, then solve it.

In my experience, finding MVP has been very difficult, because I’m a product guy, a tinker. I look at technologies and tools and imagine what I could do with them. This leads to a lot of cool ideas with very little business potential. In fact, HeyIndie started out with one of these ideas. Thankfully, through some very basic customer development, we figured out there was no business there. But the knowledge we acquired was instrumental in our pivot, which changed not only the product features but the market focus as well. That’s a lot of change, but it only appeared after we came up with the new product idea, and we were so excited about it, we didn’t care about losing the original idea.

#2: Do something valuable for a large number of customers & do it often
This is my version of business model 101, but it’s super important. In order to have any chance at growing into a real business, your solution must have a high value, for a large number of customers, and it should occur as often as possible. At least two of those numbers should be big. If they’re all “ehh”, then it’s going to be hard to get paying customers. There’s always exceptions, of course, but you’d better be a ninja if you expect to pull it off.

For our original idea, we could argue a large, growing number of customers, but our value proposition was variable to weak, and it occurred infrequently. Not a good mix, especially online, where everyone is accustomed to getting things for free.

#3: Learn and validate your ideas via customer interviews
There’s one way to learn about a customer segment. Go talk to them. They are the only ones know what’s happening today, and what they need to move forward. There is no one else. No journalist or analyst can give you this information. You have to get it yourself.

I am a product guy, as I mentioned, so I don’t naturally tend to phone calls, interviews, etc. So, I hired a friend to help out. I can’t pretend we’re following Steve’s advice to the letter, but we’re getting in front of real customers and learning a lot of valuable and subtle insights into what they need to be successful. And it feels great to be able to inform your product strategy with that knowledge, knowing it can help your future customers kick ass.

#4: Plan to charge for your product
This one’s controversial in some circles, but the key word is “plan”. You will find that “free” or “paid” greatly affects your decision-making process and priorities. Whether you end up actually charging or not, adopting a “paid” mentality keeps you more focused on adding value.

I like focusing on a paid product, since I think it keeps the product focused. If you’re gonna charge, you need a clear value proposition, which counter-intuitively requires a smaller feature set (more features muddies the core value). We haven’t bothered to add a subscription module yet, because we don’t need it for alpha testing, which we plan on using to define our pricing strategy. We need real customers using our product in real situations to gauge our true value first.

#5 Get close to the money
Maybe this one’s obvious, but the further away from the money you are, the more difficult it’s going to be to get some of it.

Our new product is a tool for social marketing that improves your ROI. It also includes some basic analytics that can help prove it’s worth the cost. After interviewing several potential customers, we shifted our focus to an area we knew had value: we can help you sell more product — now that’s close to the money.

Iterate, iterate, iterate
In sum, I think finding MVP is all about iteration. Just assume you’re going to get it wrong the first time, but plant your flag anyway. You have to start somewhere, and it’s inevitable that customer interviews will lead you in new and surprising directions. That’s what everyone means by “fail fast”: no matter how good you are today, you should always be striving to be better tomorrow.

Lean Startup Update: January '10 Edition

January 22nd, 2010 by Tim Barkow
In Startups  # leanstartup, marketing, socialmarketing, startup

Here at HeyIndie HQ, we’ve been following the principles of lean startup development, as outlined by Steve Blank, Eric Ries, and Sean Ellis. I don’t think we’re following to the letter, but you do your best when bootstrapping. I feel good about getting out of the office to meet with potential customers on a regular basis, and being really focused when it comes to our feature set.

So far, we’re learning a lot about how our customers work: what their needs and pain points are. There’s a lot more to customer interviews, of course, but we’re not quite there yet. In addition, being bootstrapped means we’re still working on other projects, and sometimes, progress can be slow. But extra time can also be your friend, allowing ideas to ferment and the best ones to bubble up to the top.

At the center of all this, we want to build a great product. Something that’s clearly useful and fun to use. Riffing off Andrew Chen’s post, Minimum Desirable Product, I can see where we are mixing and matching strategies to suit our situation. We are very focused on design and user experience, for example, since that’s our core competency. This is a bit dangerous, because we’re reacting to our own tendencies, not the market, but again, if possible, you always want to make the best impression possible. It’s a balancing act.

We’ve been working on this product for about 4 months now, 3 if you don’t count December, which was pretty much a wash given the holidays (again, bootstrapping has its minuses). But I feel like we’ve been focused on our initial product vision and getting to alpha testing.

So, what haven’t we done?

• No payment processing. It’s definitely our goal to launch as a subscription service. But we have to make it through an invite-only alpha first, and we don’t need to charge anyone for that. We have a couple possible subscription management vendors in mind, both with simple RESTful interfaces, so integrating payments when we need to will be a snap.
• No “fun” features: We have some great ideas to give the service some extra “kick” in the fun pants. But those are complicated feature sets that we don’t fully understand yet.
• No advanced analytics: We’re collecting a lot more data than we’re displaying right now. But we know we don’t want to be Google Analytics, so we want to be very strategic about adding new stats.
• No mobile support: We’re going to need this at some point, but until we gather some data, we won’t know how important this feature really is. Better to wait and see.
• No platforms: It would be easy to get caught up in building plugins and interfaces, but we’re going to wait until we know who our customers are.

Lean Startups Launch with Nothing

October 14th, 2009 by Tim Barkow
In Startups

Just read this nice little article on TechCrunch by Seth Sternberg, founder of instant messaging startup Meebo.

His basic point is to partner up with people who can get your product out the door, ASAP.

Right now, we’re busy duct taping our initial product together, with a really minimum set of features. In fact, it’s killing me that we can’t show it off just yet, but we’re only a few weeks into actual development (part-time), so that’s probably to be expected.

I will say this: we had a working prototype last week, and though it was broken in places, it did clearly demonstrate the basic concept (it worked — mostly). And, damn, if it wasn’t exciting. When you see an idea roughed out and it delivers — even a tiny bit — on what you’ve promised, well, that’s pretty exciting. I can’t wait to use it myself.

But as a lean startup, we’re just as concerned with finding our customers, so while we’re working on the product, I’ve put together some background on what the company is all about, and a short presentation about what we’re trying to do, and we’re searching for people to talk to. Even though we don’t even have a product anyone can sign up for.

Now taking your ‘baby’ out and discussing it publicly this early is really hard. Sternberg recounts the advice he gives startups, that they’d better get to launch ASAP because 10 other people had the same idea at the same time, and whoever executes to market first is probably going to win.

Now, your natural inclination is to get secretive when you realize you’ve got competition, but what Sternberg actually said is that the race has already started. You don’t see Usain Bolt wearing a skirt so nobody can see how his legs move. Nobody’s secretive during the race. If the race has begun, it’s too late for that. If people seem secretive it’s probably because they’re busy.

The nice thing about sharing your idea with people is that they’re generally interested in what you’re doing. They’re probably friends or acquaintances, so they’ll probably be very supportive and offer criticisms constructively. The truth is that people aren’t sitting around waiting to steal your ideas. And even if they did, you’d both end up with two completely different products.

What I’ve found so far from my research and talking to people is that we’ve got an interesting idea, and that it’s going to be challenging to get people to pay for it (what else is new?). But more importantly, I’m learning about potential customers and what makes them tick. And hopefully, we’ll be able to turn that knowledge into a compelling sales proposition.

It’s still early, but I think we’re creating more value having conversations and sharing our ideas, than blindly building a product we don’t know if anyone really wants.

First Post: Trying to Be Lean

September 18th, 2009 by Tim Barkow
In Startups

So I thought I’d start this whole blogging thing early, and try and not only get in the habit of writing but sharing some thoughts on our process, too.

We’re big fans of the lean startup here (want to see my problem presentation?), so as we’re building out the initial, extremely rudimentary version of our service, we’re trying to collect as much customer feedback as possible, to understand the kind of service that will prove valuable enough for people to pay for.

It’s just too difficult to build something on the promise that some VC sugar-daddy might come in an invest hundreds of thousands of dollars, especially when really, we don’t even need or want that right now. I mean, yeah, it’d be cool and all, and we’d spend the money, but I suspect our days would be filled with conversations about office rents, desks, hiring, and lots of impressive whiteboarding — and we’d have a lot less time to sit down and talk with people to try and understand whether we’re missing some key ingredient in our approach.

I want to try and share as much as I can about the daily decisions we’re working through. I’m hoping it helps us walk the walk, and maybe you’ll find it interesting as well.