From MVP to Product-y-ish
There doesn’t seem to ever be a clear cut “okay-our-MVP-has-run-its-course-now-time-to-build-the-product.” It feels more like bleeding into the next phase of the MVP, just better than before.
Even though the term ‘MVP’ itself is a bit passe, everyone gets what an MVP is more or less — no need to get academic at this stage.
So here we are in September 2020. We launched Claimyr last month. We had a few users, but we did zero marketing. We were mainly focused on getting our website and payment out the door. So that’s kept the team motivated.
And yet…initial signs of traction are afoot. Users are coming back. Twitter followers jumped from 0 to 43 in 2 days. Suddenly 5 users joined. Some peeps in the City are calling me up asking about it — some word of mouth is going on apparently. It feels a bit like static electricity. Which feels strange because we aren’t actively searching for users just yet. Maybe we are onto something.
It’s a marathon. But we are on sprints. Enough sprints make a marathon, right?
But not everything is 100% smooth. A distributed team across the world makes it difficult to sequence builds. But all this is smoothed out as the core infrastructure and mission-critical components have now been built.
I guess the early core components that demonstrate product usability, endurance, and foundations to expand upon are the defining features of an MVP.
So now we go hustle our first cohort of 200 happy users. Why 200? Because it is more than 199 users and we could potential spray and pray and wind up with 1,000 lukewarm users (that would be a problem). Emphasis on happy users as they will bring MORE happy users. If they’re not happy, we ask them why, and build things that make them happy. Then we scale up. Simple? We’ll find out.
It also allows us a good amount of load-balancing tests we need to open the floodgates.
Until next time. Adios.
