How we went from MVP to serving 18,000 businesses monthly
If you’ve ever been part of a newly formed startup or started a new product inside an existing one, you’ve surely heard about the MVP or Minimum Viable Product. To put it simply, you’re supposed to go to market with a minimum set of essential features that are valuable to your customers. This approach helps you to get quick feedback from the market for the further development of your product, a pivot, or even shutting down a product bound to fail, in the quickest time possible and with a minimum amount of resources spent.
What’s the pain?
Creating a good MVP can sometimes become a fairly complicated task for startup owners and product managers. Choosing the right set of features, and spending the right amount of time on a product may need a great balance. Too few features, or the wrong set of features, and you’re not providing any value for your potential customers, thus you can’t get enough users and feedback to develop the next stages of the product. Too many features and you’re creating a complicated and costly product that users may not even use, draining your product from budget (and more importantly) precious time. If you take too much time to go to market, you’re bound to fail.
There’s a famous quote by Reid Hoffman (Co-founder of LinkedIn): “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” And I’ve seen too many startups fail because they refused to launch their product unless they make it perfect first.
Working in Idearun Startup Studio, I saw many such startups. Sadly, they mostly drained their resources on these unnecessary features for a wrong product, and either failed even before getting to publish their product or ended up publishing a “complete” product that nobody needed. Most of these teams had a good idea with great potential but failed to create a proper MVP, and thus, were doomed before they even got to the market.
One of the startups we worked with, was building a product for managing reservations in the educations sector. Their approach to the problem was good, and they had the right team. But no matter how many times we asked them to launch their product, they would refuse because the product still couldn’t handle a very obscure scenario (which they could’ve simply handled manually for the first few months), or the submit button on one of the pages didn’t have the right color code (these are not exaggerated examples). The result? They ran out of money and the team broke up before even getting to launch the product.
Another team postponed their launch for around two months after developing their product, just to make sure that their landing page has the right design. A landing page that almost no customer got to see because they failed before getting to attract any.
On the other hand, one of our customers, an educational institute, decided to launch their product, right after the very first steps of their product were ready. Users could signup, see a list of events, and buy them. This was merely 5% of what they had planned to build, but they went on with them anyway. Although the system was clearly incomplete and had many UX and performance issues, it didn’t fail to attract thousands of users in the first month alone. They used these users to better understand their product and redesign the future steps. In no time, the results with the new product far exceeded even their own initial estimations.
How can we design a proper MVP and how can we use it to develop a successful product? Well, the hard way is learning through experience, and the easier is to see how others have done it. Here I will tell you about our journey in Formaloo and how we created a good MVP and built our company on it.
Formaloo is a customer engagement platform with more than 3 million analyzed unique customers data, and around 18,000 businesses using its wide variety of tools for collecting, analyzing, and presenting their customers’ data. It provides its customers with many different services such as data collector or customer analyzer, a vast and ever-growing set of tools, features, and plugins. But it wasn’t so vast right from the start.
MVP: Formaloo 0.1
The first version of Formaloo started off as a side project. We simply felt a need in the market and decided to do a test on it with a simple form builder. After doing the market research, we designed the simplest solution possible to answer those needs. We didn’t spend too much time on the technical details either and we developed it on what we had. We simply decided that if the product attracts the early adopters, and shows a promising market, we can rewrite the whole thing.
It took us less than three weeks to write the code for Formaloo 0.1. Just like that, we had our MVP. Although to be fair, we had spent enough time on market research and product design process to make sure we’re developing a proper MVP.
Formaloo 0.1 was a simple form-maker, with only basic fields and functionalities, and without much customization. But we didn’t forget to give the key feature to our customers: They could easily embed the form to their own website and write custom styles for it. That was what our customers mostly needed. Of course, there was a big list of features we could give them (as we did step by step) and a much more sophisticated product, with better technical infrastructure, and with a much more beautiful design (I mean look at it, one could say that it doesn’t even have a design!). But adding each of these, before even knowing of the core features have any real demand, would be a waste.
Even on the technical side of the product, we clearly knew that our current technical solution couldn’t keep up being efficient after a few thousand businesses started using Formaloo, but it didn’t really bother us that much. How could we worry about a few thousand businesses, before attracting a handful of them?
We started our MVP to see what users want, and further develop the product based on their feedback. It proved both effective and efficient for us. It didn’t take much time before many businesses started using our tool to create their forms and put them on their websites. It showed us that we’re targeting the right initial problem, and we could keep building around that. We continued Formaloo with a cycle of feedback. Our customers would tell us what more their need, and we would create and organize a backlog of these requirements/features, and add them to the system, based on their priority: The value they provided for the customers, and their role in our vision for the product.
After some time, and adding many new features to our form builder, now we had attracted a few thousand users and a couple of hundreds of businesses. Now we had a better and more complete product, but most importantly, we had a good understanding of our potential market and customers, and what they needed. Now we were ready to make a leap forward with Formaloo 1.0.
Things we did at the first stage
- Find a proper problem to solve.
- Do sufficient market research.
- Build the simplest solution to the problem.
- Go to market fast and efficiently.
- Get feedback from early adopters and build over them.
- Create a roadmap using our feedbacks along with further market research.
Things we didn’t do
- Make the product too complicated.
- Spend time on developing less-needed features.
- Going on without enough research and feedback.
- Over-worrying about the technical problems that we may face in the far future.
Formaloo 1.0
Now that we had successfully tested our MVP, and had an initial user base, a good understanding of our potential market due to the feedbacks, and a good vision for the product, it was time to take the leap of faith. You can’t keep going on by just playing safe, and it comes the time to take some risks. For us, it came after our MVP had done its’ purpose. Although with features, we had developed over time, it wasn’t an “MVP” anymore, but it was the time to launch a more sophisticated product if we wanted to grow properly. We knew to whom we wanted to market our product, and we knew the important (and not just essential) things they wanted. Not it was time to build the product that we could call Version 1.0.
Many teams try to start their work right at this stage. Instead of customer feedback, they rely on theoretical market research (e.g. surveys) and their own speculation of the customers’ needs (as if they’re the ones to decide what the customers need). Instead of testing their ideas with as few resources as possible, to find the right place to invest, they want to go to market “powerfully”. But no matter how powerful their product is, the market is always much stronger in ignoring their unfit solutions.
Formaloo 1.0 started with re-writing our MVP. Now that we had our customers and we knew what they want, it was time to do the thing more properly, because you can’t keep your customers with “sufficient” solutions for a long time. Or product needed new UI and UX, and a lot of new features (that were already validated). On the technical side, we had to actually write a proper solution, now that we were planning for a product with a potentially big user base. We basically changed our architecture, adopted new technologies and languages, and re-wrote the whole thing.
Building the Formaloo 1.0 took us much more time and resources than the MVP (obviously), but we could afford the risk now that we had a user base and a validated product. The result was great. Our users loved the changes, because it kept what they wanted from MVP, and added many new solutions they needed. We started attracting a lot of new users and faced great growth. The great thing about attracting so many new customers was that now our feedback cycle was working much more powerful than before. Our new customers brought a lot of amazing ideas with themselves, both in direct feedbacks (e.g. feature requests) or behavior (e.g. their use-cases). Sometimes, we were simply amazed by how creative the users were in using our product. It helped us to know our customers better than ever, and to keep on building the system based on the customers’ needs.
Formaloo 2.0
After publishing Formaloo 1.0, we never stopped analyzing our customers and market research, to find out what should we do next. But even in adding the new features and services, we kept the MVP approach in mind: If we wanted to add a big feature to the system, we would start by adding the feature in its simplest viable form. If it was successful, we would develop it further, and if not, we would deprecate it.
Our next big step was publishing Formaloo 2.0. After observing our customer’s behavior for a good amount of time, and getting enough feedback from them, now we knew that our customers are mostly small and medium businesses, and we had a good understanding of their needs. Now we were going to provide them with much more than just new features, we were going to provide them with many new services that would help them grow their businesses, with the same approach we grew our own. That was our Customer Data Platform. We were going to create a platform for the businesses, to better connect to the customers, and understand them, with the same approach we used in Formaloo and our other projects. But we were going to do it automatically, so the customers wouldn’t need to hire a data analytic team to do it for them, because this approach simply would be too expensive for the SMEs.
Formaloo 2.0 too was far more successful than even its predecessor, and our customer’s growth skyrocketed. The reason was that we simply followed the very principles we started with: A strong and active feedback system, Incremental growth, and putting the customers’ needs before our own judgment.
Formaloo’s journey is still going, and we might be just at the beginning. We keep growing both in market size and in the product, and we always keep our main goal to grow as effectively and efficiently as possible. Our customers will always have new needs and we will always help them to grow. Keeping a close relationship between us and our customers, and providing them with the best solution to their needs, is the most important strategy for us to keep growing.
What did we learn?
Formaloo wasn’t our first and only product as a team, but it was one of the most successful ones. Working on Formaloo and our other products, and working with many different startups in Idearun Startup Studio, helped us to learn some lessons that have helped us to keep our product growing:
- Always listen to the customers. Not just their tangible feedbacks, but the intangible ones as well. How do they use the system, how satisfied they are with the different parts of your product, how is your product helping them to solve their problems, etc? All these observations and analyses, along with proper market research, helps you know what their customer what now, and what they need in future.
- Always start simple. Be it your product, its new services, or big features. Don’t drop big changes on your customers, unless you’re well aware of the risks and you’re well sure that they will want them.
- Be agile. Being efficient in your product development, by avoiding producing any unneeded features, you can keep your product from going out of hand. And more importantly, you can keep up a good speed on producing what your product really needs.
- Don’t overthink the far future. Short-term-ism is bad, but being unable to show a proper response for today’s problems, because you’re thinking too much about what might happen in the future, can be worse.
- Your technical team can become your Achilles’ heel, either by overthinking the technical solution, thus being unable to provide your current needs with proper speed, or by overlooking the complexities and failing to scale (in product and in size) at the proper time. (You can read more on this in my article Why Should Your Startup Avoid the Edge of Technology?)
Each product has its own story, both in success and failure, and knowing more about them will help you to make better decisions for your product and avoid other people’s mistakes. I hope the story of Formaloo’s growth will help you to better understand to grow a product right from a mere Idea.
