Over the past few years and especially since I wrote “How to start a startup without ruining your life”, I’ve received hundreds of emails from people wanting to start a new company. Lots pitch their big idea to me — what the business will look like in 3–5 years time — that’s great but it skips out the detail of how to actually get to that point from now. In this article, I’m going to talk about how to simplify your Minimum Viable Product (the first version of your business that your customers will interact with — I’ll call this MVP from now on) down into something a lot more attainable and a lot less expensive. This may not work for some ideas but it may for yours.
Most people’s MVPs are not minimums. They add in too many features or think too big. But the main problem is they need people from outside the startup to help them do the things they want to do. For instance, in tech startups these people are usually developers or designers. A lot of these startups could start without needing a developer but they need to reduce what they’re trying to achieve with the MVP.
Remember that a MVP is to test the business idea. You want to do this as quickly and cheaply as possible. You don’t have to look like a 30-person company at launch and if anything your early-adopter customers will appreciate that one-on-one feel you get with a scrappy, brand-new company.
One of the emails I received was from a man who wanted to create a marketplace for supper clubs — “Airbnb for food with new people”. He had already planned out what payment platform to use and how all the pages on his webapp would look. However, he had never tried to organize a supper club before.
What I suggested was to drop the plans for the whole platform until he knew exactly how to do this — how would he know what his customers need if he’d been through the same problems?
What I suggested was to put up a quick holding page using something like SquareSpace with a link to a Typeform form to collect more information from users, then email those users directly inviting them to his own supper club. Figure out why those users want to come to a supper club and ask them if they’d like to host their own. If not, why not? If so, would they do it on his site if he organised it?
This approach is lo-fi but it means that you’re testing your idea for next-to-nothing and you don’t need a nerdy coder. The man was prepared to spend thousands on this idea without testing what users wanted. Most potential startups don’t need to build their own tools — they can start with tools already available to them, get that MVP out there quickly, test and then move towards that end goal.
Another email was from a woman whose startup was to create an app where users review restaurants for credit. Cash-back for reviews essentially. Great idea but do users want it? She had saved money for years to be able to afford an iOS developer to make her app and she was now ready to spend that tens of thousands without truly knowing if it was going to work.
My suggestion was similar to before. Don’t hire an iOS developer and instead, use the tools available until you know it works.
I told her to find 20 people on Craigslist in her area (this could be Gumtree if you’re in the UK, etc), get them to review restaurants via a Typeform and pay them manually for their reviews via bank transfer.
It’s harder work than automating the whole process but it will save her tens of thousands she was willing to spend automating before she knew it was the right thing to automate. You can use tech without having to build your own tech.
If those people don’t review, she will have saved thousands or something in her idea needs to be fixed. If those people do review and continue to review, that’s a great sign, she can iterate on the idea based on the feedback and then consider spending her money.
This doesn’t work for all startups. Some startups do have to start by spending a lot of money, but if you can get by without having to hire other people to do urgent parts of your business, then you should. This system works for not just the tech industry but many others too.
I’m guilty of not testing quick enough too. When starting SuperHi (which still hasn’t launched at the time of writing), I didn’t test it for 10 months. I was working on it a lot but no user had even seen it. To get over this, I gave away free code lessons to try out what I’d been working on. For the customer, they received free lessons. For me, I received a ton of feedback. Win win. It was the most valuable thing I’d done in the first year of making the site.
That exposure to real people meant that I could see what wasn’t working and gave me deadlines to fix it by. If something wasn’t working well, I had 7 days to change it. Then in the next lesson, does that change fix the original problem? I had 16 guinea pigs to try out changes with, which is infinitely better than 0 guinea pigs.
This continual exposure to users has meant that the MVP is continually getting stronger. One of the reasons I haven’t launched SuperHi yet is I saw fixable problems within the MVP. I could have launched without testing and had all the problems open to the public — instead I can now fix obvious problems before I launch.
I doubt there’s many startup founders that regret getting their ideas sooner than they did. The quicker you can get your idea out of your head and give it exposure to real people, the better it will be. That exposure to real life use-cases and iteration will make your MVP way stronger than keeping your initial plan and hoping for the best. Get your idea out there as quickly as possible and learn from your potential customers.
The ideas in this article have been changed and tweaked to protect the owners identities. If you have any idea you’d like to run past me, email me at rik@superhi.com or tweet me at @riklomas.
