MVP using existing tools

Let’s take a look at Sarah and Bob’s situation

Sarah tests 4 MVPs per month

Bob spends 1 Year building a “perfect app”

Who will get to PMF faster? Why?

How do we know success for MVP testing/building?

It’s finding out “Does this provide value?” as FAST as possible

Your goal: How can I use existing tools to deliver value prop?

Example situation

Define problem: Founders who don’t know each other want to co-work online with each other
Define value prop: Video call that founders can join anytime they want to co-work
Test tools: Using Zoom
Defined success: launch with 15 founders, 8 DAU after 2 weeks
If successful: start charging for membership
If it fails: Talk to founders to find out why. Pivot.

Other tools to deliver value prop

Turn Figma into React - they fulfilled these requests manually / hired an offshore dev to test this. Once successful, they slowly automated it away.

Doordash - people called their cell phone and they manually delivered food. They hired some drivers, then slowly made an app.

Mentor Matching - Had people fill out a google form, matched people manually

Uber - people called their cell phone for limousine service, then car service, then much later they created an app

Automated Data Science Question and Answering -- hire a VA to answer all the questions and pretend they are the “AI”

Automated Email follow up tool - Hire a VA to automatically do follow-ups

Zapier - Manually service clients yourself using a offshore dev

❌ Some Red Flags ❌

Build any app and spend more than 60 days building an MVP

✅ Instead:

Time to add the Feature Creep

Before you add a feature, write down your success metric

That way if it doesn’t hit it, you can kill the feature and double down if successful

The Common Success Metrics

You decide based on your business what’s best!

Rooting for everyone’s success from founderscafe.io !!