What do you wish you had done before letting your first customers in?
I’m “opening up the doors” to a few people this week after getting to a decent mvp state. No more blowing up the database whenever I want to, or releasing breaking changes on a whim. It’s time to actually get this out into the world like apps are meant to be.
So, here is my question: if you could go back, is there anything you wish you had done before you invited your first users into your app?
Congrats on the MVP! My advice would be to make sure you have as much visibility as possible over what's going on.
Great point about the product analytics / monitoring. I have not yet added sentry or analytics tooling, but I could see now being a critical time to do so, both in order to get ahead of the inevitable bugs in an mvp, as well as having good insights into how people are using the product.
Thanks for the tip on questions and feedback. I could see that being very helpful to get the dialog going as well. Much easier for the user than emaIling back and forth.
Depends on your end goals. Mine changed over time and I noticed it in a lot of others as well. Went from lets get to 10k mrr, then once you start growing you want something bigger (but your v1 might not get you there).
If I had the luxury of time what I would do differently for Versoly is
I think this advice would also work for micro SaaS (but building something world class would take a lot less time)
Thanks Volkan. That makes sense. I guess the challenge in the early days is balancing my own conviction with real-world feedback.
What I mean by that is: I may have strong conviction in my product that it will be successful in the long run, so I should move slower, and build it properly.
At the same time, I need to prove that it's even viable as a business, and so working to solve things for early customers quickly and not perfectly is important to make sure I don't waste years building the wrong thing.
I don't think this goes against anything you're saying though. This is part of the "art of product" I suppose. I definitely have a bit of time luxury, and there are proven solutions in the market, so I think with that, I'm in a good position to follow what you have outlined. Let people in slowly, refine the product (and still make big changes if needed), and only put on the gas once it feels like it's ready to do so.
Cheers,
Cam
The gas should always be on, just focused on product and making the few existing customers happy.
You should never build without customer feedback, you might not always listen to it.
Also it depends on what you're trying to figure out. If competitors exist then you need to build something with a USP that the market values. If they don't (rare) then you can build quickly and try to get as many customers as possible.
Yeah I am building in the onboarding product tours space. It certainly has its fair share of competition, and so I am balancing getting up to "feature parity" where it matters, and differentiating where I feel there is a gap. I will be taking in user feedback to help me determine the roadmap.
Here is a link to our product onboarding tours solution, which I should have added to the initial post.
Yep very competitive space with huge players.
Will be interesting to see what your USP will be and how you handle distribution (tons of VC backed startups PUMPING out content and ads)
Yeah definitely competitive with some major players.
A lot of my conversations are starting with price (and thus market segment) right now. $200-$600 per month for these tools is standard. I’m looking to provide a solution that will serve the lower tier of the market. The majority of competition is heavily focused on enterprise.
So that’s where I’m starting, but price alone won’t be enough to keep me in it. I have ideas of differentiating features to build (which would inevitably be copied if I have any success), but we will see what comes out of early customer conversations in the coming months as being most important to focus on.
I wish I had done less and invited users earlier.
Haha yes I am feeling the same, though I also limited scope "decently" well I think. I can definitely relate though. I know I should have done this sooner.
We opened early access for Clap a month ago which gave us the opportunity to get our feet wet without diving into it.
The only difference between launching and early access was that the free trial customers would also have to talk to me on a call before trialing the product. This has its pros and cons, but getting our feet wet helped us to learn before we really got into it.
We learned about our actual target market — these people were actually felt this pain and found our product as a possible solution.
We learned how to develop a CRM process to nurture customers and eventually (hopefully soon)make sales.
And lastly, we learned how to prioritize work effectively, from new features, customer wants/needs, bugs, handling customer service, etc.
Overall, regardless how much preparation we did by reading and learning about these things, nothing beats the real experience. I think easing into the first few customers to develop a process has been key 🔑!
Yes I have been doing some calls over the past couple months in advance, but actually have been letting a few people in here without calls. Hopefully I will be able to do a follow up with some of them to see what their initial thoughts are.
Thanks for sharing your experiences, because I definitely can see glimpse of what lies ahead for me.
Much appreciated! Good luck with Clap!