We were working on another app and were looking for new ideas to enhance it - that’s basically how every pivot story starts, and ours is no different! :)
We know that there’s nothing like a little trip to shake things up, so we decided to organize a trip to Muhlbach for our first team hackathon. Muhlbach is a remote mountain village in the east of France. After a little detour and pushing the car in the snow, we were more than ready to take on new challenges.
We gave ourselves 2 days* to:
- come up with a new app idea
- develop the MVP
- brand it
(*the trip lasted for 3 days and we needed a skiing day!)
1st ingredient: get a new idea and/or perspective
We had one single idea in mind. Powering fun. We wanted to have a blast using our new app so our users would too.
We had a very animated brainstorming with many ideas fusing all around. After putting together several ideas we got the concept behind LiPP: remix your favorite videos super easily to create a video meme.
2nd ingredient: develop a MVP
We wanted to be as efficient as possible. Hence we couldn’t develop all the ideas we had during the brainstorming. We wanted to start with a single-feature product to test the concept as soon as possible. We chose the feature that had the most striking effect: the ability to dub your voice over your favorite videos.
The MVP (minimum viable product) would include:
- a single video list
- a webpage to upload the videos to the app
- a recorder to dub your voice over the video
- a Messenger share
3rd ingredient: brand the new product
In the startup world, branding also needs to be lean. Why? Because you need to shape the brand as you grow.
We did a very quick naming session.
- ‘Lip Switch’ => too long
- ‘Lip’ => too common
- Lipp => great
We did an even quicker logo design session.
Let’s write Lipp** as a logo. How can the logo embody our ‘powering fun’ philosophy?… Let’s make the second “P” stand for a mouth to get a smiling face. Boom. 10 minutes.
**(We decided to write LiPP later on to make the name stand out more)
Did we meet the challenge?
Yes :). In 48 hours we had a working prototype and we were having tons of fun with it.
4th ingredient: test your MVP
It was great to have created a product that we loved. But we couldn’t just listen to our own feedback. So we decided to have 300 people test it. Exit our moms, significant others and BFF’s opinions. To assess if the test was a success we would take into account two factors: user’s feedback + data. People tend to be positive in their feedback so we needed to make sure they were actually using the product (in data we trust).
5th ingredient: launch your MVP
After getting overwhelming results from our beta test (both in the feedback and in the data department), we decided to launch LiPP publicly. We worked for 2 weeks to improve the product and prepare the launch. On the night of the launch, we got the word out on social medias and…we got trending topic on Twitter in France! The following day, we were trending search on the French App Store. A week later we were #1 on the French App Store in Entertainment.
These results were the confirmation we needed to validate the pivot. We decided to focus only on LiPP to keep up with the traction.
Our hackathon spirit is still here. We are working everyday in a very lean way with one goal in mind: powering fun for our users.
Do you have a nice hackathon or pivot story to share? Tell us more about it in the comments :)
The LiPP Team
