You might be over-polishing before validating your product without even realising
I've been working full time on my own projects for nearly three years but only recently did I realise how 20 years of working for clients had moved my Overton Window of what is acceptable for a minimum viable product.
Big clients want things on brand, pixel-perfect. Even if they think they're making a MVP, they're not.
As an ex-contractor, it took me a long time to realise that it's better to find the fastest, dirtiest way to validate a product idea than to add too much polish once it basically works. Instead of spending all my time in design and code, now I am putting out product ideas that solve a problem and I cover any user interface issues by providing clear usage instructions as videos and blog posts.
You don't have to fix every problem in your MVP if you can demonstrate how to use it in a blog post or video. And you can fix your brand later.
Here's an example - I had a tool I'd made for myself but it didn't feel like a "real" app. But I made a video showing how to use it, warts and all, and as a result I've already had feedback from people that will make it much easier to improve if I decide to work on it more.
Two years ago, this process was done to me without my really understanding what was happening - one of my apps, very much a MVP, took off without me doing anything, but it's taken me this long to realise that I'd got it right by releasing the bare minimum.
This means that now, all the app's features have been derived directly from conversations with my users.
It's just a better way to live. For your bank balance and your self-worth. And it's more fun!
Theres some validity to this idea that you should be constantly testing etc. However, I think these posts ignore one huge shift in the past few years: Software needs to be polished to truly GTM.
People are intolerant of janky, half baked vaporware. You will lose initial traction quickly with a product that has tons of potholes. B2B saas in particular is hyper-competitive (borderline saturated). So in order to stand out you need to not only solve a real problem, but you need to do it near perfectly today.
B2B saas is the delivery model, I don't think it's correct to say it's saturated. Yes, certain categories within B2B saas are saturated; monitoring apps, CRM tools, productivity apps etc. But there will always be niches where there is less competition and you don't really need perfect UX to provide value in those cases, at least not in the beginning.
I've been thinking about this comment @boringstartupstuff but I wonder if it might be a self-limiting belief? Yes, many areas are super-saturated but that's why it's so important to niche down (another thing I failed to do when I jumped into full time entrepreneurship). You need polish when your competitors are already solving the same problem as you are, but not so much when you're the only person providing a workable solution to a much more specific problem.
To say that B2B SaaS is borderline saturated is to imply that most of the value of selling software to companies has been captured - in these terms, I find this hard to agree with at all.
Were that true though, one common factor with Indie Hackers is that it really shouldn't matter if your competitors have carved out 99% of the market because that last 1% is most certainly big enough to sustain you (and potentially a small team) on your small solo venture.
I’d say it’s a combination. Your MVP should launch quickly with very few features. But those features need to be bug-free and look polished. A single useful feature that really sings will get people excited for more.
Great post! What's your favorite method for validating that first feature for a new product idea?
My favourite method is, once I've shared it on Twitter, Reddit, Product Hunt etc... are there crickets? If there are crickets, maybe don't spend the next two years refining the UI...
What do you mean ‘crickets’?
Silence, lack of traction
ah yes, tumbleweed 😊
Why would you share a new startup on Twitter, Reddit, Product Hunt etc and expect anything other than crickets or a meaningless like, or lots of "ooh yes it looks lovely"?
One of the things that makes me laugh is people in various Slack groups who post "hey, we've just launched in ProductHunt, please come and +1 us". So of course, wanting to be nice and hoping at some point you'll do the same for us, we go and like your launch. At the end of the day, whoopy, you are number 3 on ProductHunt. But what have you learned? How in any meaningful way have you validated your product?
MVP's need putting directly 1-on-1 in front of potential clients. This is not done on social media. It is done by contacting individuals and inviting them to discover what you have. Setup discovery Zoom calls & demo's (not sales calls) and talk with them and listen. Not Chat. Not Likes. Not Follows.
Yes it's much better to know at least one or two people who might buy your product, who you can test with. When I say "reddit" I'm thinking more like a very specific subreddit with around maybe 1k-10k members - not posting something to like r/video and expecting anything to happen. In the example I cite in this post, my reddit post resulted in a long message from another redditor who pointed me at a couple of Discord and forum communities and I was able to make more sales and learn more as a result.
ah, sounds interesting.
I've given up on Reddit because the only group I know is r/startups. Too many people, and if you even let your brain think about the name of your business when writing a post, you get your bottom smacked and you are sent to stand in the corner of the classroom. A totally weird group indeed.
Would love it if you can share any subreddits that allow it and are worth posting to for young tech startups in order to get that kind of feedback?
It totally depends on what you're building. For instance, in the case of my example in this article, I found https://www.reddit.com/r/DelugeUsers/ - 2.1K members, entirely focused on the piece of music hardware I built the app to support.
It's important to resist the urge to target a larger, less-specific subreddit. For example, r/synthesizers or r/MusicProduction have more like 200K members, but my post would quickly get lost and probably wouldn't have been seen by the people who are truly interested in it.
I'll admit that sometimes I get over-excited by something I've made and I do post to r/videos (26m subscribers) but it's always a mistake! It's always tempting because once I made something that did blow up on that subreddit, but it didn't start there.
Checking for appropriately specific subreddits with a decent audience is a really good way to judge the prospects of a niche before you even start building!
will do!
Great comment!
Definitely agree. Minimum Viable Products are often mis-understood to be "products" rather than "hypothesis-testing tools". An MVP should be testing a specific hypothesis. If it's not testing a hypothesis, then it's just an early product release. Early product releases (alphas, betas, etc) can be valuable too for early feedback, but they aren't MVPs. Often an MVP isn't even software.
We have been stuck in prelaunch purgatory and I couldn't agree more. Thankfully, we are finally coming to our senses.
Get your stuff out there!!
I can't agree more!
Launch a "real" MVP; that being said, accept the imperfections and bugs, then fix them only when you get more users.
The first thing you should do is market it; perfecting your product comes far second.
True
Thanks for sharing! It's a pretty interesting take.