Episode 056 - Minimal Viable Product

It's tough to separate yourself as the entrepreneur whose life and soul and being is invested into whatever it is that you're building. It's hard to separate yourself from that and say, okay, but when do I make money?

Hi, welcome to this episode of the Content Amplification Podcast. Now, you know, in business you may be developing programs, you may be developing software or products, you know, it's always best to not go too far before you can actually test out if there is a market and if it's actually going to work. And today's guest has been down that road many times. We have Adrian Tobe. He has developed many different softwares that we're going to talk about on today's show and get into that MVP mindset and learn from the lessons and, you know, maybe some of the mistakes that you've made along the way. Thank you, Adrian, for joining us today.

It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on.

So one of the things that we want to really focus on is this concept of MVP. And for those who don't know what that is, minimal viable product. Take us through really what your, your idea or mindset around MVP and why it's important if you're developing anything online, even more specifically a software program.

Well, regardless of software, the idea of a minimum viable product I think would be useful for anyone trying to sell anything, um, especially in the digital world, be it software, be it a course or a video series, which is super popular now, whether it's like a paid newsletter, whether it's, um, paid podcast subscription, regardless, I think the idea of the minimum viable product is, is incredibly important. And the main reason for that is I see this, I work with small businesses every single day of my life. Our software that we build is designed for small business, and I see all the pain points that they go through and all the mistakes that they make. And I try to produce content, my own content, about kind of educating people about this MVP process. And I see someone, for example, developing a course which is an incredibly time-consuming process. You know, they want to develop basically like a War and Peace course, to quote a friend of mine, Jonathan Denwood. They want to create a course as long as War and Peace is. And then they spend all this time, they create great content with, you know, 30 lessons, and it's the same, put the whole website together. And then they decide, okay, okay, it's ready. I want to I want people to sign up and I want to buy my course now. And then they go on and they, and they try to sell this course in crickets, right? And they realize nobody bought it, or they have a few people buy it and then they go through and then they don't get it and they have all of these problems. And then they spent all of this massive effort and this monumental amount of expense developing this course only to realize that had they thought about it a little bit differently, they might've been able to sell it better and people would've been able to consume it easier.

One question I want to ask you is, when you first started out, were there any mistakes you made? Have you gone too far down the process? Have you ever built something out and realized, I went too far?

Absolutely. And the next part of the process, the MVP process, is you have to actually build something, right? You can't— you can't— it's hard. It's hard to sell something that you don't have. It's not impossible. Like, it used to be very common that you would be able to, like, pre-sign up for a service or, like, pre-subscribe. Or preorder, like video games. So people preorder video games all the time, and that is a great way to fund something, uh, if you don't have the capital to build it in the first place. Um, I think in the course industry, and I think in the kind of community industry and the membership industry, that preselling is a great way to raise capital ahead of actually building anything. It's also a great thermometer of whether it's actually worth building something in the first place., right? So for any of you in the, in the course or LMS industry, you can say, all right, I have got this course and it's going to help you learn how to build a website in 3 days, uh, and add membership and put all this together so you can launch your great idea, right? That's a very common course. And you could set up a landing page. It's like, it's not built yet, but we're gonna let you know when it's ready. Here's a landing page, uh, and you can basically put in your email address. And we'll send you an email when it's ready. And then if they do that, if they actually signify that they want to access it, then part of your presale journey might be, okay, well, they've indicated interest. I can now send them a follow-up, say, hey, listen, we're gonna have like a VIP section of this thing when it's ready. If you want access to that, and it's only gonna be access for people who preorder it, you can pay like $99 now. And you're gonna get this massive deal when it's actually released. And you're gonna be like a VIP member with all of these different benefits. Right. And if you sell enough of those, then you know, okay, this is a viable thing. People are gonna want it. People are gonna buy it. Now I'm gonna invest the time and money into actually building it. And I think for like digital consumption, that is a great way and a great path to go down. For a software company, and if you're building like a software product like we did, it's a little bit different. It's a little bit harder to do that. When people invest in software, they want to, they want to see features, they want to play with it, they want to do a demo, they want to— not, not quite tactile because it's behind a screen, but they, they want, they want some kind of experience to make an informed, uh, purchase decision. So if you are building a product then I would build literally the dirtiest, most, uh, like bare bones product that you can, that at least gets the job done. And that's what we did. So we built a full-fledged CRM and marketing automation platform by myself in 2 months. So between August and October, I literally just worked on this product every single day. By myself, and we loaded up into the WordPress repository for free, uh, and basically just went, here it is, here's, here's the products. Like, if you want to use it, use it, right? It's got the features and it works and it's great. Uh, and then people found it organically. There weren't many people competing for WordPress CRM in the search results at that point in time, so people found it organically. And as a marketing strategy to kind of let people know that this existed, I would very much like I'm doing now, appear on people's podcasts and tell them the story and, you know, here's what it does and here's how we got here and here's how I think we can help and anything else that that person might've been or that that show might've been interested in. And I just kind of just did the podcast circuit and that funneled people into actually using the product And from there, they'd use the free version. And we have a freemium model, so you can use the free and then it's an upgrade to paid with a whole bunch of more features and stuff like that. And in the first year, sales were just absolutely terrible. Um, and there's a number of reasons for that as well. I know you didn't want to focus too much on the pricing, so maybe I'll just do a little bit. We didn't price it nearly expensive enough, which was pretty much our main problem. So we made it cheap because it's a WordPress plugin and that most people expect WordPress plugins to be inexpensive or more inexpensive than our SaaS counterparts. But I think we undercut the SaaS market just a little bit too much because when people buy things or people spend money to solve expensive problems, they have a certain expectation of what that's gonna cost, right? A Fortune 500 company is not gonna spend $500 for a web designer to build their website. No, they're going to spend $500,000 regardless of whether the $500 web designer could have done just as good of a job. Right. There's just a certain expectation for some companies that you have to spend a certain amount to solve a problem that costs a certain amount of money. Like if you're spending $10,000 on like HubSpot every single year, right. In order to replace HubSpot, you're going to expect to spend at least, you know, half that. Right. And we were not charging anywhere near that. Uh, we were charging like $200 a year at most in the beginning, uh, for kind of like the full suite, which would be comparable to something like HubSpot for most businesses. And, uh, and so that was a major, I mean, it had a major like negative impact on sales, which we eventually figured out and we hiked the price up and now we're doing fine. Um, but as part of the MVP journey. Knowing what you should be charging, I think, is as important in order to determine whether or not you actually have a viable business model as well. Because, you know, the product is one thing, but if you don't have a viable business model to support it, then whether you have a great product or not, the business is not going to survive, right?

It has to be sustainable.

Absolutely.

Now, as you mentioned before, you work with small businesses every single day. Within that group of entrepreneurs, I'm sure you have come to realize that they are a group of perfectionists. I can certainly see a lot of people having objections to the whole concept of a minimum viable product. How do you ease their minds and how do you respond to those objections?

Perfectionism is the enemy of progress. It really is. And the problem with perfectionism— and I am as guilty as any entrepreneur, and I love things to operate at a certain level of quality— and it's tough to separate yourself as the entrepreneur who's life and soul and being is invested into whatever it is that you're building, it's hard to separate yourself from that and say, okay, but when do I make money? Like, when do I take this thing that I've built and when do I actually try and put in the hands of people in exchange for dollars, right? Because I think as entrepreneurs, what we fear most is criticism, especially negative, right? And in order to avoid kind of, you know, to go back to school, like I went, I went to university and I failed a course in university and then I subsequently dropped out, uh, and I got, I got an exam back and I had a whole lot of red on it. And that feeling is just soul-crushing for most people, right? They're like, oh, I can't believe I did that. It's so painful. And as product distributors, you know, when we put something on out there, a lot, sometimes, not a lot of time, but sometimes people come back And there's— they, they basically have written a whole bunch of red marker all over the thing that you've built and put— invested so much time in. And that's also soul-crushing. So in order to protect ourselves from that, we try and proactively identify all of the issues that someone might run into, and we try to solve them ahead of time. But the problem is you're— it's impossible to please everybody, and it's impossible to get it 100%. It's just, it's not going to happen. Like, you look at some of the most powerful and prolific software companies out in the world, they've got millions of bugs between them. But it doesn't matter. They're still making dollar over dollar, you know, hand over fist. And the reason is because it doesn't matter. They push out a product that gets the job done. And that's what's most important. It's a question of, do you want to have like a perfect product or do you wanna make money, right? Those two things are mutually exclusive. Absolutely. You can't, it's just, you can't do it. Groundhog's got issues. We certainly don't have a perfect product, but we have a product that thousands of businesses are using in 45 countries in the world to make money. And that's what's important.

Absolutely. So Adrian, you know, before we, we, we kind of switch the focus over, because I want to talk a little bit about your CRM solution, you know, just briefly, let's, let's talk about the idea of you launch your minimal viable product. You know, what advice would you give to people to realize when have you just done too much? Like, when is the time to pull the plug? Like, when you realize what, like, what are some key factors you should look for to realize that this thing isn't going to fly?

Uh, so it's impossible to know whether something's not gonna fly until you put it into the hands of people, right? So number one, from, from day one, you should be building a list. From, from, from the day you decide to start launching a product or like, I'm going to build this, you need to be building the list. Because when you actually have a product, you need to be able to put it in people's hands. I was fortunate. Oh, we had built a list. List of, uh, I was coming from a digital marketing agency. We worked with hundreds of businesses and implemented Infusionsoft for them. So we had a list. We're like, great, we're going to be able to go to like these 400 people and say, hey, we have this alternative thing that's going to save you tens of thousands of dollars each year. Are you interested? And a lot of like 80% of them came back and said, sign me up. Right? Like, so that, that was, that was very fortunate. I was fortunate for that. Um, most people don't have that. So from day one, you have to be building a list. You gotta set up a website, you gotta join Facebook groups, you gotta do the podcast circuit. And, uh, I mean, day, uh, day one, like when I decided that I was gonna be launching this and we're just gonna, I was gonna do it. I just Googled WordPress podcast and I found 40 or 50 of them and around 80% of them had a contact form. And I just said, can I be on your podcast? This is my product. Here's what I want to talk about. Thanks. And about 10% of people got back to me and I just, I did those podcasts and that kind of snowballed into being contacted and being invited to other shows. And some of the shows that were initially rejected me and say, hey, actually I think we'd like to have you on. And then that kind of snowballed and that created an audience. And I just kind of fed off other people's audiences to create my own and then put the product in the hands of those people and then got feedback and then use that feedback to improve the product. And it's kind of this flywheel of feedback from people that actually makes product better. You as a product owner are incapable of actually deciding what's going to be the most beneficial for the customer. The customer is actually going to tell you what's going to be the most beneficial for them, and from there you can refine your features, you can refine your content, you can refine everything. You as a business owner can identify a problem But the way that people go about actually fixing that problem with, with your solution can be wildly different, right? Like we, we, we are on a CRM and marketing automation product and we see all over the map the different ways that people implement it to actually solve whatever their problem is. It's, there's just huge variation. Uh, and that's one of the interesting things about, you know, creating an MVP is that you set the groundwork for people with these different ways of implementing your product, for them to be able to actually do that. Because if you go way too far down one road of like, they're going to implement it in exactly this way, if you go too far down that road, you are going to alienate and prevent a whole subsection of your market from actually being able to be successful with it. Right. So if you scale back and you kind of do like that, that just minimum version, right. It's just, you kind of leave it open to interpretation for how people actually go about implementing it. You're going to see a vast differentiation between different groups. And from there, you're going to be able to tweak your product and your support articles and your videos and your courses and everything to fit those molds. And you can provide different ways of implementing to those different kinds of people.

Excellent. Thank you for all that. So we're, we're pretty much out of time. So we're just going to give some information about what Groundhog is., and the website. So, you know, elevator speech, what is Groundhog? I know you covered some of it here, but what is Groundhog, uh, and what— who's, who's it a perfect fit for, I guess, is really what I'm asking.

Groundhog is a CRM and marketing automation platform that is self-installed as a plugin on your WordPress site. It is designed specifically for small businesses and agencies. Agencies specifically have a great time with it because it enables them to get clients set up much faster than with competing SaaS platforms. Uh, it is the easiest way for small businesses to launch their funnel, grow their list, and scale their business, uh, at a very, very cost-effective rate. Groundhog is a flat fee per year. We do not charge any additional fees for the size of your business. As a business with 100,000 contacts would pay the same as a business with 100 contacts. So it's incredibly equitable. It is specifically great for companies that need to comply with GDPR or who need to have their data located in data centers within their own countries. Because again, self-hosted, so you can put it on whichever server that you want and then all of your data lives there. You own all of the data. So that means that we don't know who your contacts are. We don't know who's on your list. We don't know what kind of content you send. So it's incredibly, it's incredibly private. So if privacy is an issue for you, then there's no better option than Groundhog. And if you want to learn all about kind of the value prop and everything that Groundhog is going to enable you to do in your business, you can head on over to Groundhog with two Gs. So groundhog.io to learn more, and we'll be happy to hop on live chat there with you if you've got questions.

Excellent. Thank you. And thank you so much for sharing all that knowledge about MVPs, when to pull the plug, and telling us all about Groundhog.

Well, thanks for having me. I had a great time, and I hope that your listeners got value from this session.

All right, take care, Adrian, and all the best of luck in the future.