The previous post describes the “inception” of the idea behind Cirrus Insight and how I developed the problem thesis.
In this post, I’ll describe the first steps I took to validate the idea, arrive at our first MVP, begin coding, and finally give this thing a name.
Idea Validation and MVP Definition
I had an idea and could articulate the problem I was trying to solve. But I knew that I might be bringing in my own unconscious biases, and I needed to see if other people thought it was a good idea as well. I knew many Salesforce consultants ( Scott, David, and Jon, to name a few, not to mention Brandon, who was at that time just my BFF from college), and I put some rough Photoshop mockups together to illustrate what I had in mind.
Initially, this trusted group of consultants (let’s call it an advisory group) was small — perhaps only six people. And while I gradually expanded the group during this stage and up to our eventual beta release, this small group of advisors was sufficient to understand the needs of 80% of the users we would initially target.
As long as it’s representative of your target audience, a small group of users allows you to iterate quickly without facing diminishing amounts of unique feedback.
I spent weeks showing the Photoshop mockups to the advisory group and listening to their feedback. They suggested features I hadn’t thought of, gotchas I needed to be aware of, and go-to-market channels I hadn’t considered. As I iterated on the mockups, a vague product roadmap began to take shape.
I made a risky mistake here. While I collected feedback from Salesforce consultants that represented a lot of Salesforce customers — I didn’t ever try to speak directly to the expected customer and get first-hand feedback. Obviously it worked out, but it was an unintentional missed step that could have had costly consequences.
Minimum Viable/Sellable Product
As feedback started rolling in and I started to understand the pattern and theme of that feedback, I began to understand the priorities of our advisory group. All the ideas coming in validated my idea and proved that there were a lot of possibilities, but it was important to get started (and launch) ASAP — after all, I was still paranoid that someone else was working on this idea.
Defining the scope of the MVP was critical. One important factor was that this needed to make money; I was funding this on my own. So not only did this initial launch have to be viable, it needed to be the minimum scope possible to be sellable.
This is the first time I’ll reference Jason Lemkin, but it won’t be the last. His answers on Quora were GOLD — clear, concise, on-point, and eerily timely. If you’re here and you haven’t read SaaStr and literally all his Quora answers, do it (immediately after reading these articles).
Our MVP/MSP scope was:
- A Chrome extension that added a Salesforce sidebar to Gmail and showed Leads and Contacts when you open an email.
- Create a Lead, Account, and/or Contact from the sidebar.
- Save an email to Salesforce.
That was it. Importantly, we didn’t worry about required fields, page layouts, record types, validation rules, or a billion other customizations people would make. Each one of those features would add time to the schedule. If a record couldn’t be created because of some other required field, tough luck. Some people in that advisory group were disappointed about one thing or another that was left out of this — after all, these were Salesforce power users — but they weren’t the ones paying for this. It was my call to make.
First Code
I’ve always been anxious to start coding when starting a new project. I don’t recall exactly, but I’m sure I had started writing something before the scope of the MVP was “finalized.” But the coding didn’t start in earnest until I knew where I was heading. Also, I’m not a front-end developer. I knew the Salesforce API blindfolded, but I couldn’t stand UI work, so I hired another team to design and build the UI using the APIs I would build. I think it took between 8–10 weeks.
As soon as we had something I could demonstrate live — bugs and all — I shared it with my growing advisory group. And, of course, they would find issues I hadn’t found. Once it was at an “ alpha “ stage, I started wanting to share it with more people. And before I could do that, I needed a better name than “this-salesforce-sidebar-thing-in-gmail.”
What’s in a name?
I named my Salesforce consulting company Cirrus Consulting Group. I had a thing with cirrus clouds and thought I’d keep the theme going, so I decided to call this “Cirrus Connect.” I had a logo designed and everything. Then I realized that the Twitter handle was already taken, so I changed it to “Cirrus Insight.” The designer was upset because they had incorporated the “CC” into the logo, but I thought it also looked like an eye; eyes have “sight,” and that was that.
Originally published at https://www.fractionalfounders.tech on April 1, 2023.
