Minimum Viable Audience: Your MVP’s Pre-game
If you read our last two articles, you know we are advocates of the “MVP” way, a lean approach to building a product/company based on the book “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries. The first few months of a startup, the ones leading to a product launch, can be stressful. You have a budget to respect, limited runway, deadlines to hit and multiple hats to wear. Mobile development, just like any software development, is expensive, and everyone wants to have the most out of their money.
Before even starting to build your product, there is a way to increase your chances of success and kickstart your traction once your product is launched. How? By building your MVA, or Minimum Viable Audience (I promise this is my last article about something that starts with “MV”). By building an audience or community for a product that is yet to be developed, you get a lot of benefits, such as: allowing you to make better guesses as to what your users will want, having a user base that will start using it on day 1 and great feedback while working on your application, not after.
Setting up your communication channels
The first step is to create and organize your community. You want to have clear communication channels to reach your audience, where they can also initiate conversations with you and between themselves. You want them to discuss what they would like to have in a product such as the one your are building, what they are currently using and what is missing. A community can be built with a Facebook Page, a Subreddit, a Blog, a landing page paired with an Email List, etc... All of these channels have pros and cons, so it is a good idea to have at least two. (For example, it is hard for your audience to communicate with each other when using an Email list!) Those communication channels will also allow you to get more insight about the people interested in your products. When using a landing page, you should use Google Analytics to have more information about the people who are viewing it, how many of them subscribed to your email list and the time they spend reading your content. Content? What content. This brings us to the second step…
Creating value for your audience
Of course, your audience won’t grow by itself! While building your product, you need to test the water. The goal of the first content you create should be to gage the interest around what you want to build. Let’s say you are building a product related to lawn maintenance. You can create a targeted ad campaign in a small neighbourhood of a city directing them to your landing page that explains what your service is, where they can subscribe to get updates. Or even better, make it a Wait List where they have to wait their turn to have a chance to buy your product! Sure it isn’t ready yet, but when it is, they will have first dibs!
If you manage to validate your idea and come to the conclusion that there is a demand for what you are building, you then need to keep your audience engaged. Start building your brand and image before you even have something to sell. If we once again use the lawn maintenance idea, create useful content for homeowners who want green, lush lawns. You could create a 5 days course outlining the steps one should take to have a great yard quickly after the winter. You could create a list of the “Top 10” grass seeds for shady yards. You can create an infographic explaining why fertilizing is important. There are hundreds of possibilities, and they all bring value to your audience. Position your brand as an industry leader, a reliable source of information when it comes to your domain. When you will be ready to sell your services, your potential customers will already have a strong opinion of your brand, which will facilitate the sale! It can also greatly increase your customer satisfaction rate. A better customer satisfaction rate means more promoters for your brand, which leads to referrals, which leads to more recurring revenue! (For lawn maintenance at least)
When you have an engaged audience, you are one step ahead of most of your competition, in any given field. The content you create will attract more people interested in it’s subject, making it easier to convert those people to paying customers. The content you create will also encourage discussion, from which you can pull valuable information. Building a company is hard enough already, we should better our odds at success shouldn’t we? 😁
