Building In The Open
Our approach to being in beta.
While being on Bethnal Green Ventures, we felt like we had all the time in the world. We joined the program with a prototype built in 48 hours, so we were pretty confident we could just about do anything in 6 months.
It’s now 7 months on and we have a very minimal version of a product. whatleads.to has limited browser support, barely any of the features we’re excited about building, and is even liable to the odd loading bug.
It does have something more important than any of that though: Real users. We actually had people using a version of whatleads.to back in February, but we were absolutely crippled by their feedback. After spending the first 6 weeks of BGV doing customer development, we felt like we knew exactly what would make it easy to help solve problems. We designed the interface, made a paper prototype using PoP, and got feedback from our target market of campaigning charities. All fine so far, but then we spent 2 weeks building what we thought was our “MVP”. It really wasn’t.
We’d done what’s basically a rite of passage as a startup: We’d not understood what a Minimum Viable Product actually is. It was only after we did our homework and read The Lean Startup that we understood that we needed to be testing a hypothesis. We had designed and built a system for democratically deciding on a strategy that could work cross-organisationally, and then built a fully-featured version before we’d tested it on anyone. It was basically useless because of fundamental usability bugs that we would have found with proper user testing.
The funny thing is, we actually were testing at the earliest possibility. Our awesome cohort at BGV were brilliant user testers, and gave us some great feedback, but when we tried to act on it we drowned in issue backlog. We kept changing our mind every couple of days on what to focus on next and never really learnt anything. It was only when we stripped everything except the most core feature (stating your aims, and visualising what leads to them) that we got really useful feedback. That’s not our test user’s fault — It’s ours for giving them too much to feed back on.
Now we have a product out there, we can focus one step at a time on realising the vision. In our minds and in our sketchbooks is a platform that will help organisations and their supporters work together to create change. We feel on track to get there now, not because what’s on the screen resembles it, but because it actually works as a tool. People are using the tool, giving us feedback everyday and finding that whatleads.to is the quickest and easiest way to visualise their aims. Now we can start helping people achieving them.
