In 2017 I wrote a series of articles journaling the creation and development of my start-up metsitaba, now Voxgig - we survived and thrived! In this series of newsletters I’m revisiting some typical advice entrepreneurs receive, if and how I took that advice on board, and how the resulting decisions played out.
An adage in start-up world: “eat your own dogfood”. For the uninitiated, spend time being your own customer. Use your service. Really use it. We may have taken this to the extreme. I started out with a newsletter for conference speakers on the tech conference circuit, setting a target to reach 500 subscribers in about four months back. By October I was behind target.
The reason for setting the target at 500 subscribers to a newsletter for tech speakers was to validate the hypothesis that we should focus on speakers first for the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). We are about to start building the MVP and cannot ignore the fact that this target now looks unlikely. It is already time for that most tedious of startup clichés, the “pivot”? A startup should pivot to a new business model when it has no traction, when nobody is buying what it makes.
Like so many decisions in business, we must make this one without good information. Should the MVP remain focused on speakers? Direct feedback from readers of the newsletter has been very positive. We have 144 subscribers with almost no promotion, apart from a very small online ad campaign, some infrequent irregular tweets, and a few LinkedIn posts. I have been doing a lot of other customer discovery work, mostly meetings with people in the event and tech industries, and have good indications of current business needs when it comes to speakers.
But we don’t have a slam-dunk. More data is not going to magically appear. It is time to make a decision. I’m going to sit down and analyse what I have, and design an MVP feature set based on the data at hand.
There could always be more data, but I was confident I had tried all reasonable actions to grow the newsletter more quickly, and I had discovered another newsletter directed at tech conference speakers, a personal project, which had 3000 followers on Twitter, thus proving our market did actually exist. Competition is good. It’s essential. It proves there’s a market.
Armed with renewed confidence, I explored another adage: you should aim to solve a big, frequent problem for your market.
Our second adage of this column: Solve a large, frequently occurring problem. Here, I disagree.
Is the problem large or small? Does the problem occur rarely or frequently? This gives you four combinations. A large frequent problem is the best place to be. Large rare problems and small frequent problems are also pretty good. A small rare problem is the one to avoid.
This is good advice so far as it goes, but I beg to differ on strategy. In the spirit of this article series, here’s an explicit decision: starting with a small rare problem is the best way to build a successful MVP. Why?
Let’s be clear on the strategy. In the business-to-business market, which is where I am, of course you want to find large problems that occur frequently. Such problems are expensive and painful, and you can charge good money to solve them. It’s the finding that’s the trick. This is where the MVP comes in.
It was time to chow down on our dog food. We were a group of professionals with differing skills but extensive, shared experience in the events sector. We had a network of similarly diverse people with the same shared experiences. We could identify little, niggling problems that we could fix.
Our MVP would capture market research… and give us a shiny coat.
A small but loyal user-base is defensible. If you already have users, they will incur switching costs to move somewhere else. Thus your MVP should deliberately target a small rare problem that nobody else is bothering about. In my case, making life easier for tech conference speakers is a small rare problem. The pain points it solves are not mission critical, but they are just painful enough to need some automation: finding good conferences to speak at; organizing your submission and attendance calendar, sending your talk details, bio, and photos to the conference organizers, publishing your talk portfolio, and so on. These hurt just enough to pay the price of registering with a (free!) website that can help you complete these tasks with less effort. That’s our MVP!
In the next installment, we’ll see how that worked out.
Going through this article archive, prompted us to revisit our podcast archive and explore ways to republish our little treasure trove. Voxgig is now developing a YouTube channel where all of our previous podcasts will soon be available to listen to via YouTube. You’ll be the first to know when we go live!