PodInbox

When we found out the largest conference for our industry was about a month shy of our MVP date, we decided to cut scope and launch at the conference (Podcast Movement 21)...versus waiting til the next industry conference.

The second big decision we needed to make was to launch as a conference sponsor with a booth, or just as an attendee. Tough choice, cause being a sponsor wasn't cheap.

But, we made the decision to get a booth, cause of 3 things...

1. You only get to launch once.
   I didn't want to squander the opportunity to make some kind of splash with our launch...so wanted to maximize budget spend on this occasion. I learned this doing PR for my previous startup, where you get 1 opportunity to tell the press who you are for the first time.

2. Our goal was for max exposure.
   Our primary goal wasn't sales. Our primary goal was to tell the industry, "Hey, we're here!". We didn't think we'd accomplish this as an attendee, no matter how much guerilla marketing we'd do at the event. We wanted a place for people to come to us, so we can maximize the feedback we'd receive from the industry. We also wanted to meet other vendors as a peer...something that would be a lot more difficult to do as an attendee.

3. We got a startup discount.
   Having done conferences for previous startups, I knew that in year 1, most conferences will offer you some kind of a startup discount for their "startup area". Podcast Movement didn't have such a thing, so I just had to negotiate it. Fortunately, figured something out that worked for both of us.

So when we initially set out to complete our MVP, I budget about 2 months for the prototype. I'm calling this our prototype, cause we just wanted to create a web audio recorder.

We actually finished our MVP in June!

Lotta ppl mean different things when they say "MVP"...but my definition is actually more like MSP (minimum sellable product). Yeah, I know, doesn't roll off the tongue as good as MVP!

IMHO, MSP is the baseline product someone would actually pay for, which typically means it has more features and polish than how most people describe an MVP.

I knew our MSP needed a lot more work than our MVP, so I was budgeting 2 - 3 more months...which ideally bring us out to around end of Aug or early Oct.

But when I did a bit of industry research, I knew I wanted to launch at an industry conference, and the biggest one in the industry (Podcast Movement) was going to be on Aug 4...which is about 1 month earlier than what we budgeted in our roadmap.

Anyway, on June 30, we signed to have a booth at Podcast Movement, reduced MSP scope by a lot, and finished our MSP several days before the conference!

I hate coming up with product/startup names. I'm a stickler for .com's...especially for this idea, where users would need to tell their fans about this domain name.

After doing close to 1 million domain name searches, I settled on PodInbox.com. Bought it for the price of a Mcdonald's meal. Works for now!

I was just about to go-to-market with another product I built, but at the last minute, thought maybe it'd be a "good" idea to take a couple of months to scratch this 1 itch I had around the podcasting industry.

I knew the go-to-market road would be long and arduous for that other app, and I always liked the baked-in viral potential of this podcaster tool, so I decided to put at least 1 software development lifecycle into this idea, which is how PodInbox was born!

My goal was to take 2 to 3 months to research the industry, build a prototype, and see if it'd be embraced or hated by an initial batch of potential customers/users.