How to launch a product within a week
The Lean methodology at Story of AMS
Most of you probably heard of the Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Develop a minimum viable product and go through the build, measure and learn cycle as fast as you can. Learn from experiments and implement results in the next product version.
We are happy to show you how this works in practice. Of course there are many different products, tools, customers, services and all that but the process remains mostly the same.
So where do you start?
The best ideas are born as a solution to a problem. The bigger the problem, the more impact your solution.
So start looking for problems. Then find solutions for them. They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Within your business, you’ve innovated your way out of a challenge. That innovation might be the perfect solution to similar challenges in your industry. Bam! There is a potential new product.
To give you an example…
An Amsterdam based yoga studio and one of our clients, had a problem. Their business management software which handles the online payments of customers, stopped supporting iDEAL. In the Netherlands, that is the most used method of payment. Not good for business.
With our team we looked for ways to solve this.
This resulted in a custom solution for the studio, who is now able to accept iDEAL payments again, without having to change business management software. Which can be quite costly.
So we had built a custom solution to integrate iDEAL payments into the studio’s website.
From that, three questions arose:
- Are there other businesses with the same problem?
- If so, how big is this market?
- Can we provide enough value and make it scalable?
The answer on the first questions was a clear yes. On the second one we believed the market potential was big enough to spend resources on building a Minimum Viable Product.
If we could find a way to replicate the original solution, and make it scalable, well there you have your answer to the third question.
Our minimum viable product consisted of some clever marketing techniques, UX-design and fast coding skills. That might seem like a lot but there are tools available that will get you a long way. We will cover those in another blog.
1 .Create a landing page
The idea was simple: create a landing page describing the solution and then find the people who had the problem for our solution.
2. Attract relevant traffic to your MVP
Call this a Growth Hack, marketing technique, scraping or whatever but the key is to find out where your potential customers are and how to reach them.
We had access to the database of the business management software so we were able to gather email addresses of businesses who were likely to have the same problem concerning iDEAL.
We send out a highly personalized email explaining the problem they had and how we were able to fix it. That’s how you start your Beta list of users before actually rolling out the first version of your product.
…Providing a solution and turning that into value for potential customers.
3. Confirm hypothesis
What followed was high praises and ‘thanks the lord’ kind of replies. You have to understand that iDEAL is the most used payments system in the Netherlands and it can literally cost your business revenue when your customers need to use an alternative form of payment.
The replies confirmed our ‘hypothesis’ that there was a lot of demand for what we wanted to build. Consequently, when the first version was released people from the BETA list jumped on the opportunity to download and install the plugin.
4. Build the actual product
Now that we knew for a fact that people wanted what we were going to create, it was time to build the first version.
But now comes the most important lesson, and also the mistake that usually large corporations make.
You recognize an opportunity in the market. You find a way to exploit this opportunity. Result: a nice product and happy customers.
That will stay like that forever right? Wrong.
We live in a world where new innovations happen every day. Things develop faster than ever before. With it, customer expectations. So don’t make the mistake of thinking initial success means eternal success. Keep innovating and try to find ways to provide even more value.
The iDEAL plugin solved the biggest problem currently at hand. But there were more aspects of the business software that were ready to be improved dramatically. Aspects we did not recognize immediately but were shared with us by customers. A tremendous source for opportunities to innovate.
Sometimes, customers tell you exactly what they want. You just have to listen.
And so we did.
Building on the original plugin we added more functionalities to enhance the user flow, make it visually more appealing and, increase our value delivery.
Remember the picture in the beginning?
It is a waste of time and resources to build something customers can’t use, then keep adding things until the product is exactly as YOU imagined it to be. Just to find out that nobody wants it.
5. Learn and decide when to pivot or persevere
During every process you learn. There is no perfect way to do anything. But there are certain principles to follow that allow for fast learning and fast iteration.
Our key learnings from this process:
- Validation: test your idea first
- Build a minimum viable product that provides your solution in its most basic form
- Gather end-user feedback
- Improve the product based on end-user feedback
We hope to have brought you some value with this blog. Don’t fall for the traditional process of building a product by building the final version and then test it with customers.
Launch fast, learn fast.
