The $100 MVP

Creating a startup is, well, hard. It takes a lot of time, a hoard of resources, and a healthy bit of luck and good timing. Given the investment that it takes to get one of these things off the ground, it makes sense to check and see that it’ll fly before you commit.

In the startup world, the concept of an Minimum Viable Product (MVP)has arisen over the past several years. The idea is this: build just the smallest amount necessary to have a working, viable product, and release it, so that you minimize the upfront investment and get to the market as soon as possible. At the end of the day, it’s about controlling risk, and making sure your product direction is driven by the actual market, not your idea of it.

I’m a fan of the idea of an MVP. But, I want to push it further. What if you could get to MVP for $100, in under a week? Wouldn’t that allow you to be as nimble as possible, while effectively eliminating risk?

Running an Experiment

A few weeks ago, I wrote about needing to write about products before you do anything, to make sure you understand your own ideas, and to do a gut check with the world. I did this exact thing with an idea I had a couple weeks ago.

The idea was this: instant, disposable chat. It had occurred to me, while working with some colleagues on a project, that I needed the ability to strike up a chat session with some teammates instantly. The problem was, we didn’t work together often, and so, didn’t have a centralized place where we could quickly discuss something.

Setting up something on Slack didn’t make sense, as it was going to be disposable. We didn’t need a long term communication solution — we just needed to chat, in real-time, for 10–15 minutes, then be done with it.

So, the idea was born. Create a service for creating instant chatrooms that don’t require participation in any other service, where you can create a room, chat, and destroy it in a matter of minutes with zero configuration or instruction for the attendees.

Idea in hand, I spent a couple weeks talking with others about it, to gauge viability. The next step was to put it in front of the world, and see if it flies or dies. I wanted to do this for a little money as possible, and as quickly as possible. After all, if no one wants it, I sure as hell don’t want to build it for sport.

That brings us to today.

Idea to Validation in 7 Days

Today, I launched a validation campaign for this product, which I’m calling ZipChat. The goal of the campaign is to attract sufficient attention to the product, and gauge interest by users — ideally people I don’t know.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Domain

First things first. To look and feel like a working product, this thing needs a name and domain to live on. ZipChat popped into my head almost immediately as a name, and as it turns out, zipchat.io was available as a domain. $32 later (.io TLDs run higher than typical .com’s), I was the owner of the domain. Easy peasy.

Total cost for the domain: $32.

Step 2: Logo

Real products have real logos, and if this is to be believable, it needs one as well. Logos, these days, are easy and cheap to come by. My first stab at this was turning to Fiverr. For $5, a logo was mine within 48 hours. Super quick, super cheap.

But, it sucked. Like, really bad. As in, had the entirely wrong name of the product in it. Unusable.

No worries, $5 wasted. Cost of doing business.

I dusted off Adobe Illustrator and quickly put together a logo on my own. Now, I’m NOT a graphic designer, but you know what? Doesn’t matter. No one’s going to not use the product because of the logo (unless it has the wrong name, in which case, yeah, that’s a problem). An hour of tinkering around, and BOOM, a logo was born:

Total cost for the logo: $5 (could have been $0).

Step 2: Build a Landing Page

The next thing to do was to build a landing page for the product. The idea here is to create a place that looks like the product is a live, functioning product, with a clear call-to-action. In my case, that’s a button that says “Create a Room Now”.

The reasoning is this: if people come to the landing page and a good amount click the “Create a Room Now” button, it tells me that users are interested in using the product, or at least giving it enough attention to see how it works. If enough do this (and defining “enough” is something I’m still working out), I know that there’s interest.

Next challenge: how to do that quick and cheap.

Here’s the deal. I’m a web developer. I’ve been building things online for close to 20 years at this point. But, I didn’t want to build this. Too much time. Instead, I decided to find a template somewhere, tweak it slightly, and throw it online.

A trip to wrapbootstrap.com gave me what I needed. Landing page template procured, I changed out some text, added my newly created logo, and threw it on Github Pages to host it for free.

I added in some basic Mailchimp integration for collecting emails, and linked to this post to explain why the product doesn’t actually exist yet.

Just like that, a website:

Time from no site to live landing page? About 2.5 hours.

Total cost for the website: $12.

Step 4: SHIP AND VALIDATE!

This is the exciting part. Now, with website up, it was time to go validate this thing. Frankly, this was about putting it out to as many channels as feasible, and driving people to the site. Remember, this is about faking like it’s a real product — NOT asking people to “tell me what they think”. We’re simulating the real deal here, it’s the only way to truly validate if they’d become users.

Validation is a pretty straightforward marketing exercise. Posting on ProductHunt, reddit, Twitter, Facebook, to my various Slack teams, and other outlets. Additionally, since I have some money left in my $100 validation budget, I used the remaining funds to run a few ad campaigns (Twitter, 4Chan and Reddit, specifically).

Total marketing cost: $51.

What Happened?

Frankly, I don’t know. I’m writing this post before I’ve even kicked off step 4, so it’s all a guess at this point. But you know what? It really doesn’t matter. It took less than a week (actual hours, probably less than 10), and cost me $100. If it turns out that it resonates with people, I’ll move forward to build the product. If it doesn’t, trash it and move on. Cheap insurance to ensure I don’t spend a year building a product that no one wants.

The Moral of the Story

Here’s the takeaway. There are a lot of people who want to start a startup, bring a product or service to market. In fact, it’s highly likely you’re one of them.

I work around a lot of startup folks regularly, and frankly, I hear mostly excuses. Excuses why they can’t get their product to market, excuses about why people won’t use it. This is typically compounded by a bunch of bitching and moaning about how much time and money they’ve invested.

The point is, you don’t have to invest that much time and money, you just have to be smarter about how you go about things. Chances are, your idea sucks. Chances are, people don’t want it. But, they might want something like it, and that’s your opportunity. No product launches out of the gate and stays true to the original vision — our users help mold our products into what they need to be, so they have the best chance of success.

Getting your product in front of people — even if it’s just an idea — is the absolutely best way to find out if it’ll work. You can analyze it all you want, but until you ask someone to use it, and see if they do, you’re just guessing. Putting in front of their faces as early as possible lets you save money and time making sure you’re building the right product, which is infinitely valuable.

I realize that what I’ve put together doesn’t match the true definition of an MVP, but the fact is, it probably doesn’t matter. What it does do is show interest, engagement and product-market fit, the absolute first requirement that you need for a successful product.

So, go for it. Create your $100 MVP and test your idea. Listen carefully to feedback, and decide if you’re close, or completely off the mark. Don’t be precious about your idea. It’s just an idea. It’s worth $0. Find out if it has the ability to be worth more before you put more into it.

Now go; start.

(Also, thanks to my buddy Josh who’s also been working on this in tandem with me, including driving a lot of this validation work.)