Beginning of the End or End of the Beginning?
Once you’ve learned what it takes to deliver your value proposition, there’s no longer a need be minimal. Once you’ve validated the value you are creating and for whom, it’s time to expand your product somehow.
We’ve heard startups dramatically declare, “We’re not doing lean startup. We have lots of momentum and our users will leave us if we do an MVP.” Exactly!
Or rather, exactly, you should not be minimally viable after achieving product-market fit. Build out the product, but continue to test and release quickly:
Build within the demands of your target market segment.
Build to experiment with adjacent segments.
Build to block competition, if necessary.
Build to create passion.
Don’t inhibit the core value proposition!
The idea of the whole product is that there may be more to your value proposition than you first thought or first built into your MVP. You might have to provide additional products, features, or services; support different platforms; or make the product available through other channels.
The gap between the initial product and the potential product is made up over time or might be fixed in the near term with partnerships. In the end, the customer’s experience with the whole product may represent the difference between a satisfied customer and a passionate one, or what moves you from early adopter customers to early mainstream. There are many aspects of the whole product that you cannot know until (1) you have validated your customer and (2) you have validated what solution will work. It’s ludicrous to plan, let alone implement, a whole product if you have not validated your core value proposition, your must-have use case. There are too many unknowns:
How does the customer expect to use the product?
How does the customer expect to buy?
Will other ecosystem entities be necessary to my business model?
Is there anything beyond the early adopter?
Case Study: Social Impact Lean Startup
Roozt is a marketplace that connects cause-oriented retail brands with online shoppers who want to buy fashion-forward products that “give back.” Rather than build out the platform in 2009 when he first envisioned it, founder and CEO Brent Freeman sought to prove that such a market existed first. Like most consumer-facing businesses, their primary risk was, “Do people care?”
Brent Freeman: Almost everyone says they want to support socially conscious, causes-related, responsible brands, but we wanted to prove that people actually would shop that way.
Their first MVP was just an e-commerce website released under a different brand. “We knew the name sucked but we just launched it anyways,” Brent says.
They barely knew where to start, building a simple website that leveraged Amazon in a way such that they could pick out the cause-oriented products they wanted to sell, embed them into the site, and create the shopping experience they envisioned. When people went to purchase a product it simply linked out to Amazon.
“We were a glorified affiliate portal, but for products we wanted to support.”
They started their marketing efforts in learning mode as well, reaching out to family and friends, running small-scale Google AdWords and Facebook ad campaigns; enough to measure market response and see if their hypothesis would actually be supported by customer dollars.
Freeman: We knew the product wasn’t perfect. We knew our concept wasn’t perfect. But we also knew that if we threw enough stuff against the wall and talked with our customers, we’d see what really sticks. Most importantly, we knew that progress was better than perfection, and that if we tried to come up with the perfect idea before we launched, that we would sit there for a long time.
Iterating constantly based on learning, they eventually built out a product that acted as a virtual marketing machine for cause-related brands, which today boasts over 100,000 users, 200 brands, and 5,000 SKUs.
The key to success has been providing easy-to-use tools that teach and enable brands to engage with the customers Roozt brings to the marketplace, primarily through highly engaging e-mail newsletters. Their learning is now concentrated on testing other customer-engagement vehicles, like apps, and seeing how they can reduce the conversion funnel to a one-click experience.