In the MVP stage, you know the pain point you’re solving.

It’s the “how” you’re going to solve it (technically and practically) that needs refinement.

You might not need to start out with expensive custom builds to get a working solution off the ground.

For example, the MVP of GrowthMentor was built using off-the-shelf software.

Our MVP consisted of:

  • Zapier
  • Slightly styled Twitter bootstrap landing page
  • Typeform
  • Google Sheets
  • Slack

Starting lean bought us time to properly validate our idea and also find the perfect team to build the Ruby on Rails app we needed to launch the final product.

Steps we took to launch our MVP

Step 1: Define the pain point around a hyper-specific ICP (ideal customer persona)

Define who your ideal buyer persona is (here’s a free video that walks through how to do this).

The way I dealt with this stage back in 2017 was by creating a crude landing page, pushed Google Ads traffic to it, got them to submit a pre-launch form, and then asked them to jump on a call with me.

This worked pretty well, but I don’t think it’d work that well now in a post-COVID world.

Resources on how to conduct product discovery calls

It might be simpler to filter a list of 100 “hottest fit” prospects on LinkedIn, send a blank connection request. Wait for them to accept, and then a day or two after, DM them and offer them $25-50 in cash or gift card to jump on a “market research” call with them.

This step requires jumping on dozens of Zoom calls, recording them, transcribing them, and spending countless hours doing qualitative coding to derive insights from unstructured data.

At the end, you should have a problem statement canvas like the one below.

Step 2: coming soon

This blog post is under construction.

If you’re reading this, you should probably not be as it’s kind of one of those “let’s 301 redirect to not loose the juice” but then the content we copy pasted over wasn’t that comprehensive.

I’ll fill this in later.

In the meanwhile, check out the mentors here, or just like do something constructive, or better yet fun, like shoot some hoops.

 

#MVP