Week 51 🛫 How do you build product without building product?
What we did
Product Development
This week we hit an impasse in product development. We have the structure of our product, and the main user journeys articulated. Mark has already built the majority of our back-end. How should we now build a first version for production users?
In the early part of the week we explored various ‘no code’ routes, including Bubble, Wappler, Dropsource. Ideally we would build a mobile site to then ‘port’ into Android and iOS. With each option there was a trade-off between functionality and simplicity, and none seemed perfect. Anything we built would be more ‘minimum’ than ‘viable’!
We also considered hiring a freelancer. A good engineer might cost £10,000 for four weeks of work. We would have a functioning application, but at the cost of flexibility; any iteration would be very expensive.
On Friday Oliver Kraus, our consultant CTO, came to visit. Over two hours, he straightened our thinking and helped us to chart the optimal product development plan. Rather than immediately turning to building, we should spend the next two months further refining our designs and fleshing out our prototype. This will make development, when it eventually comes, far easier, and will still allow us to get customer feedback. In the meantime, we should direct our immediate attention to our regulatory submissions, which would hold up releasing any product if not returned successfully.
George committed our plans to butchers paper and we sat back satisfied. An impasse resolved!
Customer Development
This week Matt ran a quantitative test of different formulations of our value proposition. He constructed six similar ads, each to reflect a different value proposition, to measure how much engagement each would receive. The value propositions were (in order from most to least engagement):
- Save easily for your next holiday (see below)
- Save with your friends
- Get cost estimates for your trip
- Set travel goals to save towards
- Keep a wish list to save towards
- Earn rewards for saving
I’m surprised that earning rewards, a value proposition which has tested well previously, fared so badly. #1–3 all had relatively low CPAs, which was very encouraging. One of the biggest challenges for a B2C product is acquisition; how do you reach your customers cheaply. The evidence we are gathering now will help us demonstrate this to our early investors.
Matt also travelled to Oxford on Thursday to run a focus group with university students. It was incredibly encouraging. A lot of the features which we designed during our design sprint were specifically mentioned. The overall impression was that saving and budgeting felt divorced from the trip planning process, and all of the pain points were symptoms of this underlying problem.
Big Picture
This week we began to search for our lead engineer. Immediately, we realised how difficult it is — competent engineers are in high demand! We posted our job ad (view it here) and and I wrote an article on what we’re looking for. Y Combinator says your first engineer should come from your personal network, so we’ll devote the majority of our effort to first and second degree connections.
What can we offer our lead engineer? I think we have two unique selling points. Firstly, we’ve already organised structured mentoring with our consultant CTO Oliver. We believe strongly in professional development, and we want our first engineer to grow with the company. Secondly, I believe we have a compelling mission. Sitting at the intersection of traveltech and fintech, nobody else is exploring saving in quite the same manner that we are.
What we will do next
We have four priorities:
- Submit our regulatory application
- Flesh out the design of the product
- Raise our pre-seed round
- Recruit a phenomenal engineer
I’ll be focusing on #2 and #3 while Matt works on #1 and #4. Next week we’ll be able to share target dates and milestones for these priorities.
Problems we are facing
- Meeting a ‘road trip ready’ Lead Developer ready to join us from 3 January 2019
- Filling a mountain of FCA forms…urgh!
Thanks to
Sadly, George finished his contract with us this Friday and will be starting at Babylon Health today. We first met George in June, after he saw our posting on AngelList. He immediately won us over with his gumption, technical creativity, and sheer hustle. Over the past six weeks he worked with us full-time while he was between roles, and we got to know him better on a personal level. Matt and I now both consider him a close friend.
George — we’re sad to see you go but excited to watch what happens next. Good luck!
Until next week
Oli
