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