Why I got a co-founder to reach Product-Market fit (instead of quitting)
As an entrepreneur, running into a roadblock in development is not uncommon. That's what happened with Just Gamification. After months of building and refining the product, I needed to take a step back and evaluate if what I was building reflected what future clients would require. Here's how I figured out if I could achieve product-market fit.
My challenge was to build a way to increase web service engagement by generating a leaderboard and providing badges based on website interactions. Although it was an exciting concept, it was evident to me that the contribution given by Just Gamification must be more noticeable, concise, and compelling to steer potential users to integrate it into their projects.
Specifically, I've developed the primordial version of Just Gamification as an event-triggered API tailored for the specific web service. However, such a version requires technical skills that limit the number of potential users. Consequently, the results of those efforts could have been better, and the product did not arouse much interest.
At least, that was the customers' response to the primordial version.
After thinking about it for a while, I realized that the vision of the product and its roadmap needs an extra pair of eyes. A Solopreneur can be great if you have your niche and a clear go-to-market strategy, but this is different from the stage in which I was with Just Gamification, that instead needs a co-founder @Gamificator
The first chats with @Gamificator on Just Gamification gave me several good insights about the product vision. So, we decided to challenge the initial value proposition to get a more salable and easy-to-market product.
Initial idea.
The initial idea of Just Gamification was a SaaS product where the web service tracked customers' activities. The user site sent data to the Just Gamification server, where it was classified and converted into points. Just Gamification rankings allowed the user to give customers badges and rewards.
Three possible reasons that make that approach not suitable:
- the need for a developer to integrate our solution
- the too-generic response that the user has to tailor by himself
- the concrete possibility of building an in-house solution with little effort
Pivot.
After some shared consideration about building a product worth using, @Gamificator and I decided to move on to a more viable solution.
The GOAL becomes: Generate an automated email marketing triggered by customers' activities.
Examples:
- Reaching a specific amount of points due to certain interactions allows the customer to receive an email with a promotional code.
- A lack of attendance on the site for more than X days can trigger a stunning message to draw the customer's attention to the web service.
- An incomplete onboarding flow can trigger an email that can help the customer by facilitating their experience on the site.
The revised Just Gamification has a more specific perspective and can help us focus on the actual needs of potential customers.
The central concept turns into creating an add-on that is easy to integrate and can help improve a service's engagement, allowing it to scale up the users' business.
The Pivot version is challenging and has many elements to analyze, like increasing customer engagement and retention. So the long-term vision for Just Gamification is quite ambitious, but we are ready to fly low for a while to take off later.
We will build and release the product over the next few months, but we will roll it out to our early adopters over the next few weeks.
Final thoughts.
In conclusion, the Just Gamification team is excited to embark on this new journey of building and releasing our Pivot version. It presents numerous challenges, but we are ready to overcome these hurdles to achieve our long-term vision of increasing customer engagement and retention. We appreciate the support from the Indie Hackers community and welcome any feedback you may have to help us improve our product.
As we roll out to our early adopters over the next few weeks, we encourage you to join our waitlist by subscribing to our newsletter. Doing so lets you stay up-to-date with our progress and become an essential part of our community.
We believe that we can build a better product that meets and exceeds our users' expectations through collaboration and constructive criticism.
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