Build a prototype first, not an MVP
Conventional startup wisdom says that the first thing you should build is an MVP.
And yet, I’ve built three in the past, each taking 2 - 4 months to release, despite estimating a few weeks at most. This is the planning fallacy at work, and the reason why MVPs in practice aren’t nearly as compelling an idea as they seem in theory.
The planning fallacy says that humans are extremely overoptimistic about how long something will take. A landmark 1994 study found that the actual time things take is generally slightly worse than our worst-case prediction.
The point of an MVP is to learn and validate in extremely short cycles. But if most MVPs take months to build, then it ceases to be an effective tool for rapid learning.
Knowing this, I decided to do things a bit differently this time.
Building a Prototype
These days, I’m working on Probe.
Probe is an autonomous user interviewer who talks to customers for you, so you can conduct hundreds of customer interviews in a single weekend.
In the past, I would have spent months building an MVP to validate it. This time around, I knew better and built a prototype instead.
I figured that if the prototype can gather deep insights about my customer, then the product probably has potential. If it can’t, I’ll either need to iterate, pivot, or drop the idea altogether.
The prototype is pretty basic: it just interviews founders about their experience conducting customer interviews. You can’t sign up to it, and it doesn’t do much else.
Overall, it took just over two weeks to build.
The planning fallacy still made its presence known, since my initial estimate was four days.
But because the scope was so small, it didn’t really matter. Two weeks is miles better than the months I would have spent building an MVP.
If you want to give the prototype a try, you can chat with it at heyprobe.com. It only takes ~3 minutes, and it’d be a massive help in validating whether the prototype does the job!
Really love this. Same way
May i ask, how would an MVP have been different?
Thanks a bunch!
The MVP would have likely been the most scoped-down product that founders could use to interview customers. So, they could:
The first few questions were a joy but then I felt like it was sort of asking the same question again, that's where I stopped.
I was surprised how well it handled my answers, since I told it that my co-founders and their sales people had conducted the interviews, not me. I understood this better than I expected.
Thanks for sharing - I'll look into making that better! :)
Nice chat bot. But how is it useful, to the user, I was wondering. (Edit: See the edit below.)
I tried it a little bit; it was fun, it said make-sense things. However soon I started wondering "What's the point, I'm just wasting my time here?". I asked the chat bot what the whole point was (is it ChatGPT?), and it said something about "exploring blah blah together".
Edit: Now I read the Orig Post more in detail, and I see: "The prototype is pretty basic: it just interviews founders about their experience conducting customer interviews." — Ok, I think it does that well. /Edit.
In the end I said to the chat bot that I got great response rates and NPS scores, when I told my customers that I would send all my angry lions to where they live, if they didn't respond. The chat bot said "That's certainly an interesting approach" and that "It's worth exploring other strategies that align more with ethical and respectful communication", so I guess I learnt something :-)
Edit: I don't see how this demo is different from telling ChatGPT to "Interview the human about their experiences with customer interviews" + some nice looking design? Best wishes anyway.
If there are ways to have the AI collect statistics about what customers tend to say, and shown nice graphs with auto generated titles, I'm guessing that that would be useful.
This is very helpful, thank you! Will try to make it clearer to the user what the purpose of the interview is in the first place.
Will have to try this approach 😂 Glad the AI took it well, lol.
Pretty much :P But without the prototype, I wouldn't have been able to send the interview out & review the responses. And if I find value from the prototype, then it may make sense to build a product that lets others make their own interviews without having to build their own interface, too.
The concept is impressive, and I'm excited to see your product in action.
Appreciate it :)
Quick validation is necessary and can be done in various forms.
Fast validation can definitely be a copetitive advantage on its own! Though, I've seen founders spend 6 months+ interviewing customers before building. They built beautiful products in the end, but I hope Probe can help them get to market a bit faster :)
How would an MVP have been different? Would it have included auth and more features?
Pretty much!
When I build an MVP, I tend to make the most scoped-down version of my imagined solution. So, the MVP for Probe would have let users make an account, generate their own shareable autonomous interview, and view the responses.
That's pretty simple, but still a lot more complex than the prototype I built ;)
I was going to ask the same question before reading through the comments. After thinking about the difference between a prototype and an MVP I was reminded of probably the most bare bones idea-validation technique - making a simple website/webpage with squarespace (or a similar tool ) with an SEO friendly name and just have user 'sign up' if they'd like the idea of the App.
Thanks for sharing.
In some cases I feel the same way, I hope this experience will help you
Thanks! Hope so too, wish you the best of luck with your projects 🙌
I liked the concept, I can't wait to see your product alive, maybe i'll be interested in including your service in my saas.
Great job!
Thanks a bunch, Rami! Would love to hear about what you’re building :)
Nice clean interface and process, quick and effective experience, very nice
Awesome! Thanks for the feedback Mark, I’m glad you liked it 😊
nice post.
Thanks :)
It's a pretty cool prototype.
If I had to guess - the end result for you was understanding my challenges associated with customer research(?). I couldn't recall any specific challenges I had in the past; when I told the chatbot that, the bot kept asking me repeatedly for a specific challenge I had faced in slightly different words.
The chatbot as a market research and data-gathering tool in itself is a pretty cool idea (if you are heading down that path), more engaging than the old-school surveys.
Appreciate the feedback! Will need to play around with the balance between keeping the AI on track with interview goals + giving it some flexibility.
And yeah, I think I'm heading somewhere down the path of a market research and data-gathering tool. Though, there's a lot of ways to go about positioning it:
Guess I'll have to let the interview responses help me figure that out ;)
Fun prototype! I was impressed with how real it felt. My 2c. I felt like the interview process was too long and high effort. There were a lot of open-ended responses and I felt like I wasn't getting too much out of the chatbot vs. if it was a human interviewer, we could exchange ideas, thoughts, feedback, etc.
I ended up bouncing b/c I didn't know how many questions there would be and what the point of the research was. Usually, with an interviewer, they can set up the research study and facilitate those questions. I hope that's helpful!
Good point! Most of the effort is on the interviewee, and it doesn't give them much reason to continue.
Thanks for mentioning this! Going to play around with adding a progress bar ~today, hopefully this improves things.
So, if I added a page at the beginning that explained the purpose of the survey, ie. to understand your problems to help design a better product, you'd be more likely to respond?
Probably. It'll give me context and focus.
Achieve Product-Market Fit swiftly.
Nice one-liner :)
I have built several AI web app and chatbot prototypes/MVP through several tech startups in the past; The basic prototype cannot generate enough market feedback to see if this product has a market fit through pilot customers/clients;
Totally agree with you!
A prototype isn’t enough on its own to validate a product. But, the prototype can give you valuable learnings in a much shorter time-frame than if you were to start with an MVP. It’ll often inspire the next iteration of your product massively, might lead to a pivot, or help you realize that it wasn’t a worthwhile project in the first place.
All in all, it’s a great starting point imo!
Good!