Aram Melkoumov: What is an MVP, identifying a target market, useful ChatGPT prompts and more.

Hello, hello everyone. My name is Ayhan Isaacs. I'm the head of global growth from the Founder Institute. Super glad to have you here. Let us know in the chat where you're coming in from. I'm based in Dubai, UAE. It's nighttime here. So good evening to everyone. I know some folks are coming in from the US. Good morning, good afternoon. Thank you so much for joining us on your Monday. I know things are gonna be really intense this week. So appreciate you taking the time. We have an amazing session with you. Lined up for today with Aram Melkumov. He's the founder and CEO of Crowdlinkr, which is a products video. He'll kind of come on in shortly to tell you a little bit more about his company, and like, he has a really good presentation lined up for you. We're just waiting for folks to trickle in. We're at 141 live at this point. We had about 500 people register, so I think we'll touch 200 or so, which should be interesting. Let us know in the chats where you're coming from. So I see Toronto, Boston, Prague, Luxembourg.

Oh, cool.

Atlanta, Vancouver, New York, Norway.

Wow.

Very, very international crowd. Germany, Berlin, Jerusalem. Super awesome to have everyone here. Awesome. Amsterdam, Medellín.

Wow.

Very, very international crowd. I guess in the meantime, while people are kind of trickling in, Bharat, do you want to bring Aram on stage? While you're doing that, let me just go over some very, very basic housekeeping. As everyone can see, there's a chat going on. Yes, this session will be recorded. You will get it in 48 hours with all the necessary resources. You can also see underneath the chat there's another button called Q&A. So if you have a question, Q&A during the presentation, dump it there. We will review it later on. And based on the number of upvotes, we'll talk, we'll bring it on to the session. We'll get the speaker to answer them, and then after the session's done, we'll kind of see early on if you logged in, there'll be a bunch of virtual tables. You guys can network with each other. Aram, our speaker, will also be at a dedicated table so you guys can ask him more specific questions there. That's about it from a housekeeping perspective. Bharat, can you please bring Aram up so we can kind of get this show started? So I'm still seeing a lot of interesting, so New York, SaaS, sale, wow, okay, very, very cool, very international crowd. We're at 168 right now. Let's see how things are going real quick. Let me check with the team. Awesome, we have Aram popping up. Hey, okay. Hey Aram, can you turn your video? Awesome. How's it going, man?

Good, good. Just getting my screen set up. You're live, you're live.

You have 179 people ready to watch and listen. I will let you introduce yourself. Apart from that, please let us know how we can help. Really, really excited to have you on board. Everyone, this is liquid gold or content gold, whatever you wanna call it. Aram's been preparing all week to get this presentation up and running. So please, please, please take advantage of asking him questions, put it into the chat, and let's kind of go from there. I'm gonna put myself on mute, remove my video. I'll come back on stage for the Q&A, but till then I'll see you guys at the end. Best of luck, Aram.

All right, thanks, Ayan. Hello everybody, great to be here. As you all know, the reason why we're here today is I'm gonna be going through a presentation about how to turn your startup idea into an MVP. So throughout this presentation, I'll be discussing the process of validating and bringing your startup idea to life by creating a minimum viable product. So we'll be covering lots of steps along the way in terms of, you know, how you start defining the problem, validating it and building it and iterating and all the fun stuff when it comes to launching. So in the agenda today, I'll do a quick little introduction about myself. I'll talk about what is an MVP. We'll talk about the definition, identifying it, talking to customers, validating and prioritizing, Choosing the right approach from a development standpoint to actually build your MVP. And then talk about building and testing, launching, gathering, and iterating on the feedback. And I'll have a quick little summary and then we'll jump into the Q&A. All right, so quick background on myself. I'm Aram Mokoumov. I'm originally from Armenia, grew up in Canada. My background is in entrepreneurship, that's what my degree is in. I've co-founded 3 companies. I've been 15 years in the startup world. The company that I currently run and operate, I'm the CEO and co-founder of, and it's called Crowlinkr. It's one of the leading digital product studios in Canada, and my team has been responsible for building over 75 digital products to date in varying industries. And we have a lot of experience around digital creation. And along the way through our journey over the last 10 years, We've created lots of insights into the strategy, design, engineering, and marketing of successful products. So why am I doing this specific webinar? Well, first of all, Ian invited me. I'm a mentor with Founders Institute, but also I have a lot of firsthand, you know, direct and indirect knowledge of how MVPs should be built. And I wanna share that experience with you today so that every founder has the right opportunity to succeed. It's important to note that an MVP is not a final product. I'm sure you all know this. It's, it's pretty clear, and it's very much a way to validate and test idea, which you should iterate and improve on until you get to product-market fit. So first slide I have is what is an MVP, right? Minimum Viable Product. So there's a textbook definition here. And I have some content here around why is it important. Now, the funny thing in today's time, a lot of people I come across really still struggle to identify what is an MVP. You know, over the past years I found and people told me different names of what they call it. Some call it a minimal marketable product, MMP. Some call it an MVJ, minimal viable job. You can call it whatever you want, but what you have to really understand is that what is that one job or that feature that your product needs to deliver on, or what is that one thing that will make your product marketable to your target market? Very, very simply put, you know, this is, I think, the key part here is that an MVP is the first thing you can give to the very first set of users you want to target to see if you can deliver any value at all to them. I'm going to go through some examples of some successful MVPs here, and you're probably going to be all very familiar with all the names and brands of all these companies I'm going to be going through, but I wanted to go through with you because at the beginning they all started off with something very, very, very, very simple, and this is the way that you should think about when you go about building your product. So the first one here is Dropbox. I have a video here actually which you could get after when we send out the content, but in this video Drew, who's the CEO of Dropbox, wanted to figure out a way to go and validate or, you know, see if there's any interest of this type of solution. Now building Dropbox itself was very cumbersome, it's very difficult from a technical perspective at the time to do it, And he's like, well, I'm not gonna go and spend the time to do it. I'm gonna create a video. And this video presentation basically became his MVP when they were wanting to develop any interest in the market. By the time the product was actually ready, they had already thousands of people ready to use it. This is a great example of one, and I'll talk about what are the different types of MVPs later on. Uber, all of you guys know Uber, very, very famous company, right? But a lot of what a lot of people don't know is that when Uber started, and this is actually the earliest screenshot I could get of it, but it actually started off even simpler. It was essentially a message-based car service. So what that means is that the founders tested the MVP in San Francisco by calling car services manually and dispatching them to cars, dispatching those cars to customers. So what this basically did, it allowed them to validate the concept of on-demand car services by doing these things behind the scenes. Eventually they did this enough times where they figured out, okay, what, you know, how do we actually make this work properly? Uh, Airbnb, um, originally Airbnb, uh, was just a website called airbedandbreakfast.com. Um, so The founders initially came up with the website to offer accommodation for attendees attending a design conference. I think it was in San Francisco. What they did was took pictures of their own apartments and used them to create the first listings. Now, what's interesting to note is that when they launched Airbnb, it had no payments. So it was in-person transactions when people came to actually, you know, stay at your place. There was no VAT view and the CTO was part-time. So, Great example of like something that was done well. The Instagram MVP, also a really, really successful example. It had basically 3 features. You can put filters on your photos, you could crop them, and you could share it. That was it. And they tested the MVP with this really small group of users before launching it widely. Twitch. This is one of my favorite ones. A lot of people don't know, but Twitch before it became Twitch was actually Justin.tv. And so Justin.tv was basically a website where you could go and you could watch Justin, one of the founders, 24/7. It was just a live stream. If you didn't like Justin, too bad, this is all you see. But what they learned was people are interested in seeing what other people are doing. So that was the actual initial MVP. All right, MVP 101, very, very basic kind of things to, to keep in mind. With all the examples I just shared, they all had some very relatable takeaways. One, they all launched something super quickly and it looked bad, right? So don't be ashamed of whatever you ship. If it's— if it looks bad, it's fine. Just get it out in front of your customers. Second one is obviously get in front of the customers. Get anyone who you think is a user using it, get it in their hands. Third is talk to the customers and get feedback. So important thing to take away here is that you wanna hold the problem you are solving and the customer really tight, but do not hold your solution, you know, that tight. It should be loose because it's gonna change. Fourth, they iterated on all their MVPs. To get to where they are. Now, there is this constant fear of founders I come across, uh, when they're afraid of shipping something that's not complete. You know, a while back we had a customer who refused to share what they were building with the customers until it was perfect. This was kind of my first reality check, I think, working with founders who had an innovator mindset dilemma. They spent half a million dollars building it, and then they launched it and nobody cared. It didn't solve their issues because they didn't, you know, get in front of them early on. And they also weren't flexible with their solution. They realized that, you know, if you think what you want is what the customers want, you're gonna, you're gonna, you know, succeed. But that's not unfortunately the case. So having come across enough founders over the last 10 years, I want to highlight some winning founder attributes that I've come across. Now these aren't like You know, I don't swear by them, but it's just like, here's what I found. So like simply they have a deep understanding of the industry and knowledge, either they come from it, they're subject matter experts, or, you know, they just studied it. Second, they have a clear obsession. Third, they have a clear gap that they have uncovered. Fourth, they have a strong mission and vision, which then helps them attract great talent. They have a passion towards the problem. So tying back to the whole obsession part, The next one is they have easy access to their target audience, right? So it's either maybe they came from the space or they know people in that space, but they can access these people pretty easily 'cause that's really key. Next, they're not ashamed to ship their product if it looks bad and they're comfortable with risk. They have strong selling skills. Ideally they have a co-founder, you know, don't do it alone, it's hard. Being a lone wolf is very difficult, you need support. Also, at times scratching your own itch is also a great way that I've seen people build great, build great MVPs. Another one, which I think is super key, is that they prompt their audience to pay at a very early on stage. So until they probe and probe and probe until they figure out what is somebody willing to part ways with their hard-earned cash, that's when they identified that they have something. All right, moving into the definition of the problem. So this is kind of the first step. So obviously the first goal in MVP is that you need to define what the problem is that you're trying to solve. Write out your problem statement. Write it out because most likely it's going to change and you're going to keep coming back to me and be like, oh, you know, I'm not solving the same thing that I was solving when I first started. Start off with a good hypothesis. A good hypothesis has 3 qualities. One, it can be tested, it's precise, and it focuses on one thing at a time. Now, identifying your target market. So this is when you need to think about, okay, who is my target user and how will I reach them? Where are they? Like, where do I access these people? Understanding the needs and pain points of your users is like priority number one at this this early stage. The number one best option to dealing with this is talking to them. Yes, talking to them. I think unfortunately this skill set has diminished over time now with our current society, but that's the best way to get access to them is talking to them. If they're on the street, go outside and speak to them, find them. Interact with them. Conducting market research obviously is key. There's primary market research that you could do. This is surveys, doing interviews, focus groups, online research, because you want to understand kind of what their, what their needs are, what their behavior, what their pain points are. Uh, you actually want to also create buyer, uh, buyer personas, right? Write down exactly who you think your buyer persona is. This will help you understand who are they, what's the demographics, what's the psychographics, what are their needs. And then around this time, start thinking about, okay, now that I have my problem, now that I know who my target users are, so what is my riskiest assumption? And what is the smallest experiment I could do to test this assumption? So this comes— my opinion, this is talking to customers is the key thing, right? So how do you do it? So there's a very famous thing called the Mom Test. I can't remember who came up with it, but look it up. It's a great book that really goes to this in a lot of detail. But really the goal of any customer interviews or interview is to extract information that will help you improve product or the positioning. It's not about selling them on your product. Really, really important. You wanna learn about their life. You don't wanna talk specifics around their problem area. You know, don't talk hypotheticals. Don't ask questions like, if we built this feature, would you be interested in paying for it? Talk about specifics that have already occurred in the user's life. Extract information on how they arrived at that problem. So 5 great questions to ask. First, what is the hardest part about doing the thing that, you know, I'm trying, uh, what the problem is? Tell me about the last time you encountered this problem. You wanna, this is a good probing question to extract content. Third, why was this problem hard for you? So here you can uncover specific things that they uncovered. Fourth, what if anything have you done to try to solve this problem already? Now this question helps you really understand what are they doing to solve this problem, what are the gaps in that, and who their other competitors are that, uh, sorry, who are your other competitors that you need to start looking out for. And the last question is, what don't you love about the solutions you've already tried? Now, this is a great time to then just shut up and just listen to what they say. There's also another technique, which is the 5 Whys technique, which is basically you start when somebody tells you something, you ask why, and you keep going, you keep asking why, why, why, why until you get to the very base root of what their core problem is or what the reason is that they're struggling with. Super important, don't ask users what features they want and don't try to sell them on your product early on. Don't talk, listen. I just wanna make sure that's a good takeaway. All right, so there are 3 main times you will speak to your customers, at the idea stage, the building prototype stage, and then when you're about to launch. So in the idea stage, you wanna find first the people who will be willing to provide you information. You could start with yourself if it's a problem that you're trying to itch, go walk through kind of the scenario. You could speak to your friends, your coworkers, find these customers in person and speak to them. Second one is the building the prototypes part. So here you wanna really make sure that you're speaking to the right customer based on the following questions. So how much does this problem cost them? What's like the dollar value association to, what this impacts them. How frequent is the problem? How large is their budget? Now I'll get to product market fit a bit later in the launch stage, but basically the next stage is, you know, you launched and you're gonna iterate towards finding product market fit. All right, so question, so this one is about how to validate. Now first you wanna kind of make sure you have very clear and objective success metrics that you're gonna be tracking against. Step 1. Then you wanna look at validation activities. Now there's many, many validation activities. You know, customer interviews for me is number 1, but you could also go and create landing pages, simple prototypes to get the target audience to look at what you're trying to promote and, you know, gather interest that way. You could run paid traffic to a landing page to test messaging and value proposition. You could do AP testing to validate your assumptions further. Social media surveys, pre-selling, like on places like Kickstarter and GoFundMe, you could try, try, try those options. You could email potential users. You know, this is ideal if you already are in a company that has already access to an email user base. That's a great way. You already have access to these people. You could do explainer videos. You could blog, you know, those are some of the validation activities. I'm gonna go through a lot more in a second, but sample success metrics here, you know, again, dying back to that goal, you wanna look at the number of people who sign up. Maybe you wanna look at the average revenue potentially per user, people reading your blog posts, amount generated in crowdfunding campaigns, you know, looking at what the cost of acquisition is gonna be like. You know, there's many. It really depends on the business, but those are just some examples. Now I really like this slide because this talks about the different MVP types you could have. On the left side, you have basically nothing. It's like no product. There's nothing, you know, of, of that exists all the way to something that gradually becomes a minimal product. Before I forget, I wanna call it something about something called heavy MVPs that I came across as a term. So heavy MVPs are basically when you are, say, building rockets like Tesla and SpaceX, right? You're building something hard or you're insurance and banking. Sometimes you just are in a lot of regulation that you gotta actually spend more time building it. But if you're not, here are some things you could do. You could do smoke tests, as I mentioned, launching those AdWords campaigns to landing page to see if people are interested. You could sell before you build, you know, crowdfunding campaign. You could do a concierge service. You know, you could carry out the service completely manually for every client to generate ideas to determine how you could scale it. Then you could do a Wizard of Oz approach. So you fake the supposed-to-be automatic features of your product by doing them manually to test your product hypothesis. And then further along you have the single-feature product, which is that Uber example I talked about. Now there's like low-fidelity MVPs, which are basically simple or no dev, and then there's high-fidelity MVPs, which is not simple obviously and requires some development. So the fake door example, there's a link here to the Dropbox one, which is when he created that video presentation, that effectively was his MVP. Now the goal of a fake door MVP is validation without implementation. A landing page MVP, like what Buffer did, is very similar to a fake door MVP, and there's no actual app where you explain the main features of the app you wanna do and you get people to join on a mailing list. An email campaign is obviously, you know, you inform users of a potential idea to kind of gauge interest. A marketing campaign is kind of all three put together. Then under high fidelity MVP, you have the single feature with the Uber example that I mentioned before. You have the piecemeal one, which is Groupon. So when Groupon initially launched, they had, I think it was their, they were running on a WordPress site. They also were connecting to some third-party systems on the backend in order to power it. So it was like kind of like a little bit of here and there using third-party tools. Wizard of Oz, the Amazon example, that's how Amazon started. And then the concierge one, which is the Airbnb and the Instacart. With Instacart actually, they did a great MVP because they were taking orders and just going and fulfilling it manually at the back and then just delivering it to people. There was no really crazy product behind it. All right, MVP validation 360 assessment. It's important to obviously test your MVP with a wide variety of different users from different demographics because, you know, if you start thinking about scaling, you need to think about what are some of those later-on issues that you might have. But when you're testing your MVP, you know, you really wanna understand, like, is the MVP solving the problem that it was intended to solve? Is the MVP easy to use and understand? What features or functionality are missing? And are users willing to pay for it? There's a bit of a— there's a diagram here which shows about desirability, feasibility, viability. And so what you wanna do is, for— well, first of all, you wanna get to— you wanna get your MVP in front of your users as fast as possible. You do not wanna skip desirability, which is, you know, not speaking to customers and, you know, dealing with that innovator dilemma. All right, prioritizing MVP features. There's many different things online, but I, I, I pulled out 6 of the MVP prioritization features that I, I've come across. I've used my top 3 that I like are the RICE method. RICE basically stands for you're prioritizing features based on reach, impact, confidence, and ease of implementation. So features that have a high reach, high impact, high confidence and high ease of implementation are prioritized. There's a lean canvas method, the Moscow method, which is like must have, should have, could have, would like. Um, so that's a different type of method. And then there's the Kanban method, Eisenhower, and the Pareto principle. But you as a founder should really prioritize your MVP features based on what your customers will pay for right away. Everything else should just go into the roadmap. So make sure you're prioritizing on that, if anything. All right, how to build your MVP. So my next few slides, I'm gonna go through some different tools and solutions that you currently have access to, um, in the market to help you with this. So first step is you wanna outline how you will build your MVP. So like what features you will include, what technologies you will use, and what resources you would need. So that's your development plan. There are many kind of approaches, but here are like the 4 main ones that, you know, I, I come across a lot. So you could find a rent— sorry, you could find a ready-made solution, something off the shelf, something that's pre-built, it's ready to go. Problem is, you know, I mean, the good thing is that it's a low cost, but it's not flexible. So you got to work within the confines of that. And for an MVP, that's fine. Because you should be focusing on something small and it doesn't need a lot of features. The next one is using open source solutions, open source libraries, frameworks to build your MVP. Now it's cost effective because most of the time it's free, but you do need resources to build them. So you probably need a developer or somebody to help you with that. The third one is custom development. This is, in my opinion, the last approach you should take, you know, if you've exhausted all your options. And I'll go through some examples momentarily. Customer development is expensive and it's time-consuming, uh, so I don't really recommend it for an MVP because most likely it's going to be a throwaway. Just keep that in mind. Anything you might build in MVP, it's going to change. And, you know, don't spend too much time falling in love with what you build in MVP because it's most likely going to get replaced pretty quickly. The fourth approach is a hybrid. So it's a mix of doing it custom and it's a mix of using third-party off-the-shelf solutions, kind of what Groupon did. It was a bit of a piecemeal approach. Or you could always hire a company like us. We're a product studio. We work with a lot of founders. Things to keep in mind there is ensure transparency to the work. Really, really important that you get frequent demos in terms of what's being done. Ideally, you have visibility into the work in progress, what's in the sprint. You could have access to the Figma board to see what's going on, what the status of things are. You have access to a staging environment. So make sure you get frequent demos. Doesn't have to be weekly, but find a good cadence that works for them where the partner that you're working with doesn't feel too pressured to constantly ship something that is worthwhile for you to see. Another key thing here is whatever budget you set for building, you should match that budget one with 1 to 2x a budget for marketing. Now oftentimes, you know, I've been in this situation where a founder can spend a lot of money on building it, but then they don't have any budget saved up for actually marketing the solution. That's a, that's unfortunate because like if you can't properly market it, you know, nobody's going to see your product. So make sure you plan for this type of, uh, budgeting. Okay, so this slide is gonna focus about solutions to building your MVP. Now, I'm sure everybody on this webinar, uh, has heard about OpenAI, has heard about AI, has heard about different kind of no-code, low-code type of solutions that exist in the market. Now this is great because you as a founder now have access to really cost-effective, really well-structured solutions that can help you get your MVP from months to days. Okay? So we didn't have this technology, you know, 10 years ago. We have it now. So make sure you're using it. So there's basically no-code, low-code. Some great examples of no-code, of no-code solutions I broke up between websites, and apps. So I've done my due diligence on all of them, tried them all. They're all good. I don't have any kind of preference one over the other, but there's Editor X, Webflow is very famous, Wix. And then there's a whole bunch of new up and coming ones that I really like because they're just really visual drag and drop. You don't need to be a developer. And I'll talk about some in my next slide in terms of how you could actually use things like ChatGPT to create your copy, use these tools and it just automagically creates a website for you. For apps, there's, these are the best and most used ones. So there's Bubble, Adalo, Trackbit, and FlutterFlow. Now low-code examples, you know, similar to what I talked about in my last slide, but low-code examples, there's a few out there. They're typically more used for enterprises. They use them for maybe internal products, but you can also use them, you know, to build out your MVP. Now keep in mind, they're not, you know, no, they're not no-code. You need to have some development knowledge to use it. But there's Mendex, OutSystems, APN, and Retool. Now in terms of open AI platforms, you know, as I mentioned, a lot of you know there's GPT-3, GPT-4 is coming out like in a month or two. So if you're not familiar with that, really, really start learning that. I'm gonna have a slide on that in a few minutes. So with GPT-3, you can use it to generate your website copy, use it for chatbot dialogues, or even create like product names. With DALL-E, which is also part of OpenAI's portfolio, you can use it to generate images for your MVP or to train machine learning models. Then last is the actual API itself. This you would need a developer or somebody technical to help you implement it, but you could have access to that modeling engine. Now, there are also AI-based platforms. Now, you might not need this, it really depends. Maybe if you're doing machine learning or building out any recommendation engines, you could start looking into this early on to start training your model. Most popular ones are Hugging Face, TensorFlow, and OpenCV. Now, they already have a bunch of pre-trained models already available out there for like natural language processing, computer vision, and many more. All right, I put together this curated list of various useful tools and resources that I wanna make available to everybody here. So I've broken everything out based on different categories. So you have everything from app builders, like I'm naming a few more here compared to the, from the prior slide, e-commerce, databases, process management, marketplaces, forms. Like I use Typeform, it's a great solution. And then the further you get, like the more interesting it kind of gets because like with videos you could use something like Pictory AI to automatically take your products, create them into a video, and then you could use something like Synthesia to have somebody do a video explanation of it. And it's a person that, you know, is talking and it's all AI and they're walking through your product. Crazy. Under the writing side, there's a ton, a ton of up and coming startups using things like OpenAI. To go and draft copy. So like for SEO, check out Surfer SEO to help you think about from an SEO standpoint how you should structure things. You could use that content then to feed it into any one of those options out there to then generate your entire website copy, whether it's for the blog, whether it's for your homepage, whether it's for your feature page, anything. It could do all this for you. You don't, you need to hire a copywriter anymore. Now, Nothing against copywriters, but what I wanna say is a lot of people are fearing these, you know, AI solutions coming outta the market, but you shouldn't. If anything, you should start thinking of them, how do I use these to my advantage? How do I leverage them? Don't be afraid of them. How do I make myself more effective and more efficient? It's all about working smarter. So this will be shared with everybody later. but there's awesome directories and repos. Uh, one is Future Tools, another one is Futurepedia. If you go on there, you could literally find an, an AI startup that's probably doing something that you need fully automated. All right, now I wanna talk about ChatGPT. Like I've been using it for a while now and I wanna stress how important it is because, you know, I think it was Jason Calacanis who mentioned this in his podcast. Where he said the skillset of a command prompt engineer is something that's gonna, you know, be required at a lot of companies. And so, and the reason why it's important is because, you know, this is an interface. This is how you can interact with an AI system currently through a command prompt. And so I wrote out some examples here of various prompts you could do for ChatGPT. You could write it to create your website copy. Yeah, you, sorry, you could write, you could, sorry, you could tell it what your website copy is currently and it could tell you 5 ways to improve it. You have an issue with a customer, it could tell you 10 solutions to give you ideas or like some paths forward on what you could do. Anyway, there's many examples here. It's, you know, it's constantly learning, it's constantly evolving. Like leverage it, don't be scared of it. All right, things you should test when building your MVP. Now, uh, the objective here is really to gather the feedback and measure interest, uh, in your product before investing in a full launch, right? That's like the main goal. Now, it's an ongoing process until you get to product-market fit. Now, here are the things that you could validate. You could validate the problem, the validation, and value proposition. So through the value proposition exercise, when you're going to be testing it you wanna know how well is it addressing the pain, my, you know, the pain points and how well it delivers on the process. On the monetization side, you're gathering feedback on pricing and the revenue streams, you know, and customers' willingness to pay, super important. Don't make your product free, you know, I mean, for sure you could, but I mean really start thinking about how do I make money off this product? You know, and how do I— what do I need for the customers to start paying me for it? Next one is around functionality and performance. So here you really want to test the core function of the app, you know, get users to go through specific tasks. This will help you identify any issues. You could use various A/B testing tools and user behavior analytics software in order to track what people are doing. I'll talk about that in a second. You know, you wanna, under the analytics side, you wanna determine the areas for improvement. And then last one, I mean, this is I think lower priority depending on the MVP that you're building and what industry. Obviously if you're building something in a regulated industry like banking and insurance, security, data protection, and scalability are pretty high on that list, right? So make sure you know who you're speaking to. All right, testing tools for your MVP. All right, so I put together a list here of great, great tools, um, that you could all use, um, that I've curated here for you about user testing. So usertesting.com, Lookback, and UserZoom are three of the best solutions that I've used in the past, which help you do user testing. So you could take your prototype, whatever it is, clickable prototype, you could put on that platform, you could find the users relevant in the target audience, you could present it to them, you could ask them questions that they would answer in a recorded manner, which is all asynchronous, it's not live, but they do it on their own time. So definitely look at those when you wanna do testing. Analytics software, highly recommend Amplitude, really, really powerful. In terms of surveys, I talked about Typeform, there's also SurveyMonkey and UserVoice. When it comes to A/B testing tools, Optimizely is really good. Google has their own called Optimize. Under crash reporting, so when you're building out your MVP, you wanna make sure you're hooking up things like Crashlytics, Bugsnag, or Sentry. We typically use Bugsnag or Sentry in our products. You could catalog everything, you could capture all the bugs so that you then have the clear things that need to go one fix. User behavior tracking, Hotjar, Kribo. Kribo is something I just came across recently. Really, really cool. It's like a combination of like Hotjar and Crazy Egg altogether. Customer service, so Zendesk, Intercom, and Help Scout are like the industry known ones. So check those out when you wanna integrate any kind of support or customer service. All right, next one is launch, gather, iterate on feedback. Okay, so before launching your MVP, you know, as I mentioned already before, it's really important to prep— prepare for launch by testing your MVP, creating a launch plan, and setting up any necessary analytics and feedback tools to make sure that you have data coming in that you could action on. Now, highly recommend, like in some examples I talked about at the very beginning of like past MVPs, what companies did is release to a small group of users. right? Um, keep it small, keep it focused. These are your, like, evangelists. These are people that you're gonna be coming to probably a lot. Don't launch to your market all at once to do a big splash. You know, that's not recommended. Um, avoid that. You know, figure out all the things with a small group of people before going big. Gather feedback. You know, this is an iterative thing. You're constantly gathering feedback, whether that's through like the Software, which I talked about on the last slide. You're doing more surveys, you're tracking user behavior, you're seeing, okay, where are people not understanding when they're clicking on this? Like maybe I need to change the flow. You need to analyze the feedback, categorize it, identify common themes and trends. You could use the RICE method that I talked about in terms of prioritizing the feedback in terms of what you should be focusing on next. Iterating on the MVP. This could include iterating on the value proposition, on the user flow, you know, test new versions of the MVP through a bunch of A/B testing to see which changes have the biggest impact on the MVP success. And test, you know, rinse and repeat. I mean, you know, it all comes down to like you getting something in front of somebody, they use it, they give you feedback, you go and fix it, you come back to them, keep doing that until you get them paying and there's enough value for them to pay for it. Now I really, really like to end with, uh, with this one actually before I get to the summary, but product-market fit. So, uh, I read this online and I wanted to use it here because I think it's the perfect way to explain it. A lot of people talk about metrics, a lot of people talk about, you know, specific things, but You will realize that you've hit product-market fit when the product is being pulled out of you and you don't need to do any more pushing. It's just starting to pick up by itself. You know, it's marketing itself, it's pushing, it's promoting itself. Here's a good litmus test to determine if you've reached product-market fit. You know, when you've launched or when you're in your build-prototype stage, well, it's actually more when you've launched and you're already getting feedback, you should try to subset survey a subset of your customers on a certain cadence, whether it's weekly or biweekly, and you ask them, how would you feel if you could no longer use this product? You know, have 3 options: very disappointed, somewhat disappointed, not disappointed at all. So, um, if 40% of your user base reports that they would be very disappointed, and that's like a threshold I think anything more than that, then you've effectively reached product-market fit. So good job. All right, uh, recap, um, keep your MVP lean. It should be built quickly. Your MVP is supposed to be making building a product easier, not harder. It only really needs enough features to get a sufficient learning about the product so you can build further on it, you know. Depending on what your goals are, it could be to secure funding, it could be to get a certain amount of pilots, et cetera. Your MVP should help you to answer and analyze what the problem is and how to quickly test the way you intend to solve that. In many ways, it's a testing tool that needs to be iterated upon. And don't be afraid to pivot, very important. Now when you start working on your MVP, you're probably going to realize that your eyes are bigger than your stomach. So cut things out which aren't important. Really, you should timebox it, you should write out the specs, and then, you know, cut it. Um, set also success and validation criteria. You know, what, what kind of goal you're trying to hit? What are you looking at as like your target to make sure that, you know, you've succeeded? And also, don't fall in love with your MVP. You know, you should, you should not love it. You know, don't, don't, don't, don't be enamored by it. It'll most likely change. What's more, more important is the problem that you're solving and the customers that you have access to. Um, and lastly, I talked about this, but your MVP should, should validate the following, which is, uh, something called the DVF framework. Is, is it desirable? Is there a need in the market? Is it viable? Can we actually build something here? And is it feasible, which is a mix of technical and pain point? And is this a relatable thing to solve for? All right, um, now if you want to, you know, if you're a founder, you want to stay in the know in terms of what's going on in the startup world, subscribe to these newsletters. I highly recommend them. I live off— I live by these to be, um, in the know in terms of what's, what's happening. Okay, I think I'm at time. I kept this to 45 minutes, so I'm going to open it up to some Q&A. And if you guys want to book a time with me to discuss your project, your MVP, whatever it is, here's a link to my office hours. You could either click the link or type it in. I know you can't click on it right now, maybe, but you could also scan the QR code. All right. I'm done.

Awesome, thanks so much. I hope everyone was taking notes. Yes, this deck would be available. I think I answered 40 questions about, is this deck available? Yes, I will send it out within 48 hours. We just want to clean up the video. All right, let's just, I don't want people waiting. We got a lot of questions coming in. Okay guys, just jump into the Q&A. We're going to try to do at least 4 questions. And then we'll go into the networking session. Aram will have a table there, you guys can chat with him, but I just want to be respectful of everyone's time here. Aram's in from Barcelona, it's late for him as well. So, all right, the first question, this is pretty cool, let's bring it up on stage. So, Siranji asks, how does it work with a physical product that includes both hardware and software? And Aram, FYI, we have like 3, 4 more questions, like what does the physical MVP look like? Versus a digital MVP?

So, um, yeah, good question. Um, it kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier in the MVP types. So there's something called a heavy MVP, you know, that could be something like a hard tech, whether that's, um, you know, a watch, whether that's a car, a rocket, whatever, right? Um, at the end of the day, in those scenarios, you know, what I would do or look at, you know, depending if you want to source funding for it, you could put it on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, you know, try to pre-fund it. Seen lots, lots of success with those type of solutions. But really, it's more about showcasing what the product is going to be doing. So if it's hardware, showcase the product, showcase its features. You know, with the software side, obviously you would need to do some sort of embedded software, probably with that hardware. So those are a bit tricky. I'm not actually very familiar with them, but there's a lot of great companies out there that specialize in building out hard tech. So you could, I could try to help find some of those. But yeah, I would say it still revolves around doing the same process, just, you know, it's physical. So, you know, simplest thing I would say is take the product, go to where the users are, get them to use it, get them to try it, get feedback, Same thing, right? It's just, it's not in the virtual world, it's more in the physical.

Yeah, I guess you can do videos as well. There's a lot, and maybe like miniature scales and stuff like that. So I guess there's some literature out there. I'd encourage folks to do a little bit of research on it.

All right, next question.

Sorry, I'm just trying to burn through as much because there's a lot coming.

That's good. Yeah, yeah.

For early monetization of a web app, how would you choose the best methodology? Membership versus advertising, or I guess any other revenue model?

Early monetization of a web app. Um, sorry, can I see that again? Yeah, uh, sure.

I guess another way of asking this is like, yeah, why do you choose the best revenue model for your, for your MVP?

Well, I think it's not something you should choose. You should, I mean, you should go and ask your clients how would they pay for it. I know this is like maybe a very simple, simple answer, but like honestly, don't overcomplicate how you should monetize. You know, when you speak to your customers, you're like, okay, how would you pay for this? You know, is it a membership? You know, if you're a content creator, and you're a course creator, you're creating content, right? There's many examples of solutions out there that I put in my slide that you could use. There's Memberstack. God, I can't remember the other ones, but those already exist that you could go if you want to monetize off of memberships to access course content. If that's not what you're doing, you know, there's many different ways to monetize. And, you know, when building out an MVP, you could just use, you could do something as simple as like taking Typeform, integrating with Stripe. When people go and fill things out, they could get prompted to pay via Stripe integration and see if that works, right? You're trying to figure out, you know, how do I generate the value that people would pay for it? Don't focus too much about how do I monetize, you know, just ask people how they will plan on paying for it or how would they use the product to pay for it.

I guess one thing to add to that is like not all users will pay on the product. It depends if you're able to be B2B versus B2C is that like sometimes your MVP does, you don't need to get straight into like monetization. Like maybe your MVP is just to like move some people one step further down the funnel, right? right? Like don't think your MVP has to achieve 5, 6 different things because that's gonna be really, really challenging unless you're a one-feature product. So just something to think about. Okay. I, there's a couple questions on like user interviews and customer development. So we talk a lot about this in FI, about customer development and how to ask really good questions. But essentially people are struggling on, you know, getting in front of people and asking them those questions. So like, what are your thoughts on that? Resources?

So, okay. I mean, there's different ways to do it, right? When you reach out to customers, you could start off by saying, hey, you know, I'm doing some research on an idea. You are my prime target user that I think would benefit from this type of problem. At the end of the day, you want to help them solve a problem to make their, you know, work, their solution process easier, right? So I know you're trying to figure out something at the same time as like the founder, but also for them, they're also getting something out of it as well, right? They could tell you about your problems and this is like a really much just a dialogue, you know, for you, for them to be able to share, right? So it's kind of a win-win in some ways. It's not, you know, You know, don't be afraid to ask for it because you'd be surprised, you know, what people can tell you. Like, they might tell you different problems that you didn't even think existed. So, I mean, there's different ways, as I mentioned, to reach out to your target users. You know, first you gotta figure out where they are. So I think the person who asked that question was in HR from what I saw. So I'm gonna assume, I'm gonna make an assumption here. but if you wanna build out a solution in the HR space, where are they, right? Go to them. If it's a forum, it's a specialized website, it's a conference, you know, that could be a starting point, right? Because if you don't know how to access them or you know where you could speak to them, that's a problem. I mean, then you don't really have anything to build on. You've kind of wasting time. So I would say figure out, you know, where can I access them? It's in person, you know, as an event, you know, specifically for HR, you know, start there, go around, you know, ask people these questions. And you'd be surprised what people are willing to share, right? And keep it open, you know, understand how that problem really impacts their life, you know, in a day-to-day basis. But don't pitch them on anything yet. You're really more just trying to understand you know, what's going on.

Yeah, when I was doing my first startup with F5 in 2016, I would just call the universities because all of them had their phone numbers, and I'd call like, if I'm doing HR, I'd call the HR manager at the university, like, hey, I'm trying to do this thing, can I have 5 minutes to chat? And I'd go from there. And then also F5 hosts a lot of these online events, like right now we have 285 people, we're gonna break out into networking, you know, that's a prime opportunity for to go and just go and ask questions and stuff. I think the key thing there is that you need to ask like valuable questions, not just be like, so tell me about your life. Like, can't keep it super open-ended. Um, I like this question. I'm gonna bring it up here. Um, I'll give you a second to read, but essentially asking like, do I need a technical co-founder? So at the— at FI, we advocate heavy to like obviously get a co-founder because running a startup is very, very hard. But like, what are your thoughts on this? Like, if somebody knows how to build it, like, should they just go and build it and like without their co-founding team or, yeah.

Yeah, great question. Like, as I mentioned, I think the technology exists today that you could go do it yourself, right? Everything from creating the MVP, creating the ad copy, launching the ads, you know, if it's a landing page with like some paid ads, you know, you could do that all yourself. The thing is though, is having a co-founder, whether it's a business co-founder or technical co-founder, really helps because you're kind of splitting the workload out. It's not just dependent on you. And you also have somebody also who's trying their best to figure it out, right? You know, two heads are better than one. I know it's a lame expression, but it really means a lot, right? Again, it also really depends on the industry and like the vertical that you wanna build something in. For example, like if you are building a product in an industry or vertical that you are not a subject matter expert in, you know, think twice because you could become one. It could take you 10,000 hours to get to that point and you could eventually, you know, be that expert. Or you could find a partner who has access and has this knowledge and you could build it, right? So if you're a technical person who has uncovered a gap, but you're not a subject matter expert because you don't have access to those people, highly recommend you connecting with somebody who has the same mindset, same problem, and working with them where you act on one side of like the business and they act on the other side, right? You wanna have somebody whether yourself or somebody else on the co-founding team who actually has that deep penetration into that user base or that knowledge and that industry know-how. So, you know, being a lone wolf is hard, like it's tiring, it's very difficult. So I don't recommend it short-term or long-term.

Very well said. That's, we advocate for the same thing, especially at the earlier stage. Okay, we're only going to do 2 more questions and then we're going to break out into the tables. Uh, just put this up. So this is interesting. So a person here asking is like, hey, like, if I build an MVP that's half baked, like, my customer is not gonna like bunch. So like, what should I do about it? Uh, I guess, Albert, we, we had a talk with Pep Laja, I think it was 3 weeks ago, who talks about this exact same thing. Highly recommend if you go to fi.co/youtube you can watch that talk. Highly, highly recommend. It's one of my favorite talks, uh, where he talks about entering a saturated market. But, um, Aram, your thoughts? Like, do you— like, I guess, do you always need to build—

like, no, you don't always need to build a fully baked solution. No, not at all. I mean, that's not the point of an MVP, right? Um, it's okay if it's half baked, but what I would say to this question is, um, I mean, you could obviously use the open source systems, you know, off-the-shelf solutions that I mentioned, and, and have like, you know, a piecemeal solution. Um, but that doesn't really benefit you if you didn't go and determine whether or not what you're building is actually, um, solving a problem, right? So if there's already a lot of solutions out there What I would say to you is, what is that one thing or one key feature that is gonna be a competitive advantage, right? If you have all, it's a, if it's in a very saturated market and all the solutions are the same, okay, what do I really consider going into this market? You know, how big is the market, total addressable size, all that kind of stuff. What's, what's my market share percentage I could get, et cetera. But maybe look at, those competitors online, look at the customer reviews, look at app ratings, you know, look at what people are saying about the products. Look at the things that people saying are bad about it. Focus on that. Focus on all the negative feedback that people give about the product. Categorize it, theme it, group it, whatever. Figure out, okay, everybody's saying that they're having this specific problem, you know, focus on that. And then validate that with the people that you hopefully have access to, to confirm that.

No, I think that was really, really well said. The other thing, if you look in that particular example, if you're looking at B2B SaaS mid-market enterprise, you probably in the roadmap need to look at integrations because that's how all those companies win. Um, just kind of keep them in the back burner. Okay, last question, which I think is also pretty Good. Lindsay's asking about like, does an MVP differ if you're gonna raise capital versus bootstrap?

No, I would say don't think about building your MVP differently if you're bootstrapping or you're trying to raise. It should be built still, in my opinion, the same way. It doesn't matter, right? Like your MVP is just supposed to get something out to market, test it, Raising capital, like you only really should raise capital when you've gotten to product market fit in my opinion, and you need access to that capital in order to grow and scale. My recommendation in today's time is really try to bootstrap it as far as, as long as you can until you get to like 5, 10K MRR. Once you've gotten to that point, then I was like, okay, you know, I've— and I'm growing. You have something at that point. You could raise money because you probably need to increase your engineering team size or whatever the reason is. Um, but I don't think there should be any difference in terms of when you are building an MVP, whether you're intentionally trying to raise capital for it. And again, this is dependent, you know, if, if you're in a, in a heavy MVP kind of approach and it's a hard tech or biotech company that you're building, very different, right? Because you might need to go and raise capital to actually build the hardware product, right? So again, varying based on industry.

Awesome.

So I know I said the last question was the last one, but I wanna ask this one though, I think it's a quick one. I just find it funny, but a lot of people upvoted it. So when an MVP blows up in your face, and you're not good at programming, like, you don't want to get sucked out and lose my idea to someone. So there's 2 or 3 people here asking, like, hey, if I get an MVP built, how do I protect my intellectual property? So any comments on that would be, I guess, helpful for the audience.

All right, I mean, hope— maybe what I'll say is it's not going to be well received, but here's my opinion on this. An MVP is a— sorry, an idea is a dime a dozen. Everybody could have an idea. I think the most important part is how you executed it. What's your execution strategy to get to that point where you actually have something? Once you actually have something and you have ideally like, you know, figured it out and you have users coming and paying you, then you could start considering kind of a trademark or, you know, file a patent or whatever if that's possible or do any kind of IP protection. But, you know, oftentimes I have people reach out to me, which is fine. Like, I'm happy to sign always NDAs and stuff like that. But most, I mean, I've come across hundreds of ideas. I mean, no offense to a lot of the people that I've spoken to, but there's nothing there that needed to be protected at such an early stage. Because most likely everything that would be coming after that will change whatever you had. So why spend the time and the money going and, you know, trademarking or protecting something if it's not been validated and you're just spending time and money, right? It's not the right way. And even if you speak to any investors and you try to ask them to sign an NDA, like, The good ones will just kind of like kick you out of the room. I got some French in there, that's good.

I think a lot of people agree with you. Okay guys, we're just at the top of the hour. Aram's generously agreed to stick around for 15-20 minutes. What I'm going to do is I'm going to end this session. You'll see a bunch of tables. We're still at 259 people live. You know, please network with each other, jump onto table, organize, everything. Aram, thank you so much for taking the time. I think this was very valuable. A lot of people have been giving the thumbs up. If you found this thing— yeah, there, see, you're getting all the claps and the emojis.

A lot of Q&A.

I'll try to— yeah, I'll jump through the Q&A and try to answer some of that stuff for everyone. But if not, connect with Aram on LinkedIn. We'll send out the recording to everyone. We'll send out his LinkedIn profile. His office hours should be somewhere in his LinkedIn profile or whichever. Also, it's at F5. When you, when you're a kind of member there. So like, he's accessible for the most part. Uh, thank you everyone for joining. Um, hopefully you've found this valuable and enjoy the rest of your Monday. Thanks.

All right, thank you everybody.