Startup insight: How to launch a minimum viable product as a version 1.0

Editor’s Note: Joe Procopio is Chief Product Officer at Get Spiffy and Founder of TeachingStartup.com. Joe has a long entrepreneurial history in the triangle that includes Automated Insights, ExitEvent and Intrepid Media. He writes a column every Monday on startups, management and innovation as an exclusive part of WRAL TechWire’s Startup Monday package.

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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – When you finally launch your product, will the result be traction or chaos?

Companies can spend a lot of time perfecting an MVP [minimum viable product], and when they finally release their masterpiece, the damn thing crashes anyway. Instead of product viability, growing sales, and happy customers, they’re left with a litany of complaints, a string of 80-hour weeks—or worse, indifference and silence.

In over 20 years of building and launching all kinds of products, I’ve learned that while conventional wisdom tells a startup to build a powerful launch vehicle, no one ever talks about the multiple stages of lift necessary to get into orbit to get.

In other words, a successful MVP does not guarantee a successful product. je.

After learning how to prepare for these additional steps before launching version 1.0, I figured out how to give each product I build the best chance of success.

Here’s how.

Level 1: Never start without customers

When you’re done with your MVP, you should have a lot of customers.

It is a requirement that most of these customers are paying customers and ideally some of them are regular customers.

Some of this is common sense. For an MVP to be successful, it must have completed multiple transactions. In other words, if no one is paying for your product, you haven’t proven it can be done, just that it works.

However, there’s one main reason you’ll want to jump into your 1.0 release with a small army of customers — that’s because these early adopters will guide you through your launch journey while you onboard a larger army of new customers.

To get this guidance, you should identify your key early adopters—the ones who have generated the most value for your business and for themselves by leveraging your MVP. This should be the top 1-10% of your total customer base.

Divide these early adopters into three categories:

1. Master. These are the customers who will speak the most positively and loudly about your product or business. You want to give them all the tools they need to spread the good vibes they feel, even a cut of the sales from referrals if that makes sense.
2. power user. These are the customers who use your product or service frequently, even if they don’t love it. You want to keep track of their habits and talk to them about their usage. They give you the data you need to reduce friction and improve user experience for the next big group of customers.
3. VIP’s. These are customers who can open doors for you in terms of partnerships or large future customers. Give them everything you can for free and keep them close. You don’t have to specifically ask for anything, but you hope that using them will lead to something greater.

Based on what you learn from this group of early customers, you will continue to experiment with your product or service, so you need room to move.

Stage 2: Slow down on your release roadmap

The build cycle during the pre-launch days is a wide range of possibilities. Once you launch version 1.0, these build cycles become much tighter and they are filled with hotfixes and necessary improvements.

Engineering, Production, and Manufacturing – each of the departments that develop the product you’re selling – must be gotten out of the way before moving to version 1.0. There should be no new major releases or features on the roadmap for the foreseeable future. The fire hose of innovation needs to become a trickle for a while.

It’s not just that your build team will be overwhelmed, there’s also the learning that you do before launch, and there’s a whole different type of learning that you do after launch. Critical mass always brings chaos, and chaos always needs solutions. Sometimes these solutions must be provided by the product itself.

But you also draw a line in the sand, so to speak, and don’t want to make big changes every two weeks. From user experience I can think of a number of apps where the app changed so much between regular usage cycles that regular use became difficult.

Phase 3: Automate onboarding from discovery to value creation

What happens when you exceed your wildest expectations?

I am always surprised when entrepreneurs or company leaders do not allow themselves to be asked and answered this question. Because if you don’t ask the question, the answer is always the same:

The company will experience a brief moment of happiness before the infrastructure collapses.

While you don’t need to over-prepare for every scenario, there is one step you can take to reduce most of the post-launch burn. All those small manual steps around customer acquisition and onboarding quickly add up. So if you automate as many of these as possible, you will reap tremendous benefits, whether you’re serving a dozen customers or a thousand.

When you think about how your customer discovers, buys, receives, and uses your product, any task that requires someone in your organization to type, move, or communicate should be considered for automation.

You can centralize information collection with shareable spreadsheets and other documents. You can integrate Slack with webhooks for communication. They may use third party providers to process much of your transactional data. None of these solutions require coding.

Phase 4: Create tighter marketing and sales plans and measure success

Last month I changed two words in an email and my conversions for that email increased by 300%. That percentage increase flowed all the way down the funnel to the sale and stayed there for the entire month. I’m not a marketing genius, I just learned something from my launch and applied that learning.

When you enter a larger market that isn’t shielded like an MVP, the whole marketing and sales dynamic changes. You’ll reach customers who aren’t as close to the problem, aren’t at all familiar with your solution, and aren’t as interested in your product as your MVP audience was.

You should review your sales and marketing plans to tighten the language, clear the question, and shorten the timeline.

You also need to be able to measure the success of your new marketing and sales plans at strategic points along the way. Going back to my own example, if I hadn’t been able to measure the exact conversion point for those words in that email, I probably would have changed a dozen other things that didn’t need changing before I found the opportunity.

Phase 5: Include feedback loops in support

In the previous stage, you add early warning when things are going well so you can take action to maximize the opportunity. At this stage, you add early warning when something goes wrong so you can minimize the damage.

One of the mantras I live by when it comes to support is I want to know the customer has a problem before the customer does. I would say I get there about 50% of the time, either through lots of use case or by using digital means to let me know when something happened that the customer doesn’t already know about.

This requires preparation. Build the concept of continuous feedback into every communication loop with the customer. You’re seeing this more and more often in support emails, where at the end of the support issue, or even every reply, there’s a short poll that breaks down like this: “Did that help?”

But go beyond negative experiences. If you can build feedback loops into your service policy, or even your product itself, to proactively capture positive or indifferent experiences, they can help you troubleshoot issues the customer isn’t yet aware of. If something is broken, it may not appear broken to the customer, just “weird”.

You may not know you have a problem until you ask. Just don’t be pushy.

Level 6: Keep a lot of financial powder dry

Too many companies release version 1.0 of their product without a financial plan for the launch. Don’t be the company that lets success destroy you.

Before you start, it’s important that you define what determines success and what determines failure, and how long it should take to make that decision. All numbers should be in dollars, including the cost of travel.

At some point you have to decide to spend more money to realize the ultimate success of your product. You need to know how much and where that money is coming from, especially when you realize it’s not from revenue.

You either have to keep some money in reserve or you have to come up with it. And if it’s the latter, that process should begin well before launch, not long after.

As a final warning, beware, you can grow your business or make a profit, you can’t do both at the same time. Understand how this grow-win cycle needs to flow in and out of version 1.0 in order to get to version 2.0.

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