Okay. So what do you do once you've created the landing page and you've demonstrated that people are interested 1
in it? 2
Do you go ahead and pour in you know 30 grand 40 grand to build the app? 3
Or do you, you know, go ahead and spend six months or a year of your time and build a full blown version straight 4
away? 5
Probably not. 6
So the next step after you've demonstrated interest in your product is actually building what's called 7
a minimum viable product. 8
And this comes from you know the lean startup kind of methodology where you really don't assume anything 9
about your users or about your buyers and let them guide you in your development cycles. 10
So I'm going to bring back this example of Great little Place which is an app that allows you to discover 11
essentially cool things to do in London. 12
And it's I think it's user submitted with a little bit of curation as well. 13
And the reason I want to talk about it is because we saw earlier on how they collected emails through 14
their landing page and gathered interest in this app but they didn't go straight away 15
jumping into building the app. Instead what they did was spent you know five 10 minutes maybe building 16
a Facebook page. 17
And what they did was they use this to validate the concept even further. 18
So by having a page called "I know this great little place in London..." they publish posts on discoveries 19
or places, let other people of the community join and publish their own little tidbits of local knowledge 20
and they can look at how many people are interested in this. 21
How many people are reacting to the post, 22
how many people are liking the page, following the page and really being able to build a community around 23
this concept, being able to demonstrate that it works that people are interested in discovering these 24
little bits of no local knowledge. 25
It's very easy sometimes as a founder to get really carried away with your idea and believe that the 26
whole world needs it and it's obviously going to be a huge hit before you've demonstrated any of this. 27
Instead, the sort of more careful way of demonstrating interest by looking at sign ups, gathering those 28
sign ups those emails for later use and building a MVP or minimal viable product just to test out if 29
the concept works 30
and if people would actually use in real life. And sometimes you can see that people guide your product 31
development. For example on the Facebook page you've got people saying "Do you have an Apple app or do 32
you have an Android app?" 33
And by looking at how many people make these kind of requests, you can see how much interest there is 34
because they actually you know gone off their own back to write this. 35
So they're clearly interested in something like that 36
if it were available. Now your MVP will differ depending on what kind of product you have. 37
So usually for a lot of these kind of services or data orientated kind of products, Facebook page 38
is actually a really really easy way of doing your 39
MVP. Now this is another company called the Jamie app which the concept is very simple. It allows you to 40
meet other professional in the sort of startup adjacent world. 41
They could be designers, product managers, certainly interesting people. And the company sets you up with 42
a 30 minute meeting every Friday morning and even though they're called the Jamie app, they actually 43
don't have an app. 44
Instead what they have is an MVP. 45
So the beginning of every week, the app will send you an email asking for your availability on Friday 46
at 10AM and you can say yes or no. 47
And if you say yes, they'll set you up with a random person to me and you say no 48
then they leave you alone for the week until next week. 49
It's basically an interesting person that they found for you and allows you to really settle on a date 50
and time that you're both available and then essentially meet up and meet this random person. 51
So instead of jumping down the route of building a really complex app or you know putting in a whole 52
bunch of features, this is actually the core of the product. 53
It's just about setting up random people to meet once a week. And doing this via just sending emails 54
means that there's no infrastructure, there's no investment. You don't have to build anything. 55
It's just a MVP. 56
And by doing this they've actually gathered you know tens of thousands of users and they've demonstrated 57
a real need in this kind of product. 58
So the next step of their product development cycle I presume is actually getting a bit of funding and 59
being able to demonstrate that traction using your MVP. Being able to show look at how many weekly users 60
we have and how many people we've set up already, 61
this is clearly a need that people have 62
you're far more likely to get the interest of VCs or angels and people who can help you build this into 63
a real fully fledged product. 64
So before you really jump the gun and you know build the product of your dreams, think about what it 65
is that other people want and try to build a core version, a stripped down version of your idea so that 66
it really is just one concept. 67
Very often when we do these large talks and when we do some of the larger courses you hear lot of people 68
saying you know "I have an idea that's basically like Facebook meets laptop meets Twitter and I want 69
to launch it in like a week and it's going to be a huge success." 70
Well that will take quite a lot of building time to make 71
right? 72
Why not test your idea first? 73
See if people actually want it. Build a you know really really stripped down version and then see how 74
it goes. See what other features people want instead of presuming them because no matter how hard you 75
try, you can't know what the-- 76
You can't really know what the hive mind wants or what it is that you know will be a success. 77
So build an MVP. 78
Think about having a product where have all the features that you possibly want and take out one feature 79
at a time and keep asking people you know, would you still use this? Would you still use this? Would you 80
still buy this? Would you still buy this? 81
Until you get to the point where you have barely anything in this product and people are still willing 82
to use it or buy it. That is your core product, that is your core concept and build an MVP around that 83
and then test out and see how people respond to it. 84
Look at your growth, look at your traction, look at how many more sign ups you're getting every week, 85
look at how often people are engaging with your product whether it's on Facebook whether it's through 86
email. Doesn't really matter 87
just keep it really really simple. 88
Now this is a really good story. 89
There's a company called Gimlet that essentially makes these really great podcasts about startups about 90
the tech community etc. and have a whole bunch of really really good episodes. 91
One that I would highly recommend is a is a hour long interview with some of the previous employees 92
of Grooveshark which was this music streaming service. 93
And it's kind of a really sad story about how Grooveshark was run and how it eventually died. But the 94
sort of you know de-brief and analysis is really really interesting and I'll link it in the video below. 95
But another thing I'm going to link is on their episode where they built a minimum viable product which 96
is just a I think it was like a five minute video showing a prototype. 97
So it's not a real app, like you can't download it. It's just a bunch of images that's narrated with a voice. 98
And they showed this video to a bunch of listeners of their podcasts to see how many people would want 99
these features, which features they wanted, and they had this Google form at the end surveying essentially 100
what do you think is good, 101
what kind of features do you want 102
in this app, is an app even necessary? 103
That's always a question you should actually ask yourself before you build any app. 104
Should I be making an app? 105
Can it be a website? Can it be simpler? 106
But essentially they used the survey to gather feedback on their minimum viable product. And it's a really 107
good story or description on how the whole process works. 108
And I would highly recommend if you have a few minutes to spare 109
have a listen to that.