Your MVP Fell Flat. Now What?
3 Directions to Take When it Fizzles
You had a brilliant idea for a product. You read the Lean Startup and about the cupcake/bicycle MVP framework, and figured out an ingenious low-cost way to test whether or not your fundamental hypotheses about the market are true. You understood that before you build a wedding cake, you need first to build a cupcake to test it before incurring the cost.
Maybe your product idea was Uber for Dog Walking, and your hypothesis was that dog owners want nearby strangers walking their dogs every day for a subscription fee.
You managed to get a web app up where users can log in, find local dog walkers in the area, and sign their dogs up. That, or maybe it was an even simpler MVP. Maybe it was just a landing page describing what the product could do, so you could see if anyone even liked the idea before building anything (smart!).
Regardless of whether your MVP is a machine learning crypto AI biometric doohickey or just a plain old landing page, once you get it out there to the market and you start measuring people’s reactions, that’s when the real fun begins.
If your MVP took off and exploded in all directions, leading you to unstoppable traction and investors drooling at your door, then fantastic!
More likely though, if you’re reading this article, you didn’t get an astronomical response and want to figure out where to go next. In that case, here are the 3 results of a meager response and what you should do in each case:
Result 1 — The cupcake was missing the icing to make it great
Uber for dog walking — it’s amazing, and people just don’t get it!
…so you think to yourself.
Everyone likes to talk about a product’s “killer feature” — Snapchat’s filters, Slack’s channels, Medium’s text editor, but they forget that a product is not a feature. Though most people will use your product because of a feature, they will never use your product for only that feature.
The fact is, if you can’t invite colleagues to Slack, you still won’t use it. If you can’t take photos with Snapchat, you’ll find filters elsewhere. If the reading experience is terrible on Medium, you won’t use it to write.
A product is the sum of its parts. You’ll often be drawn to it for one feature — but if it doesn’t check off a bunch of other features as well, you still won’t find the whole package appealing. That is, if your cupcake is tasty but you have no icing, it’s less likely that people will buy it.
Unless you’re one of those people who prefer their cupcakes with no icing.
Strange folk.
What the exact feature mix should be is going to be your call to make and to try — just know that if you’re not achieving the results you’re looking for, you may consider that you tried to sell a cupcake with no icing.
Result 2 —You served the cupcake to people who hate sugar
You drove 1000 people to your landing page. You explained that it was Uber for dog walking, and why this is a 10x better solution than anything else that anyone is doing in the market. And yet — only 2 people signed up. It doesn’t make any sense!
This begs the question — where did those 1000 people come from? If you paid for ads that advertised a babysitting service, it’s only natural that most of them would bounce. I know this sounds like a trivialized example, but the problem occurs more often than you think.
Perhaps you’re marketing to startups but your product is actually more useful to solopreneurs. Perhaps you’re looking for suburban moms but you actually should be marketing to urban moms.
These nuances can be subtle, but are not to be underestimated. A slight shift in market positioning and segmentation can make all the difference on your journey to product/market fit.
Result 3 — The cupcake just wasn’t very tasty
Unfortunately, sometimes we all have duds. We bake a cupcake and swapped the flour with baby powder. We built a brilliant idea that just wasn’t that brilliant. The smartest people don’t necessarily come up with better ideas — but they always know when they’re wrong and when they should try another direction.
Is your cupcake simply not tasty? If you feel that your feature mix is the right one, and you surfaced it to the people who would most benefit from it, and the response is still muted — perhaps it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
It’s never easy to do, but remember that the most important finite resource we have is time. The longer you spend down a rabbit hole that goes nowhere, the less time you have to spend it on one that goes somewhere.
Your first job after you feel that you’ve gotten some good feedback is to decide which of the 3 results applies to you. Did you serve the cupcake to dentists? Was it missing a paper wrapper and picking up dirt everywhere you set it? Or did the mango/guava/chocolate/ketchup mix you used simply not turn out?
Once you know what the cause is, you can move forward and take decisive next steps towards achieving product/market fit. But until you do — you’re just shooting in the dark.
Hopefully this framework helped give you a point of reference to use when evaluating your idea. Best of luck and see you on the other side!
The #1 reason startups fail is they build things nobody wants. I’m trying my own experiment where entrepreneurs can ask questions to random people to test their crazy ideas before sinking thousands of dollars into building them. If you want an affordable way to test ideas, ask a question on Scoops here! For $12 you can ask a question to 100 people, and then follow-up with people who respond a certain way.
