You’ve got to be embarrassed by your first version!

Embarrassed by your first version: This article is all about developing minimum viable products, gathering customer feedback and continually improving while keeping wastage minimal. One of the most important tenets of the agile process is to keep iterating as often as possible. If you’re waiting for perfection, then you’ll delay time for feedback, eventually costing you the product development and time to market.

As a startup founder, your primary prerogative is to find the product-market fit. You may recall that one of the most common reasons for startup failure is a lack of product-market fit. The best way to realise this is by developing iterations of product/service to gather feedback from customers.

“Start as small as you can. When I started SkinnyMe Tea, I had $24 in the bank, and I was entirely self-funded. If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product; you’ve launched too late.”

-Gretta Rose van Riel, Founder of Hey Influencers.

On that note, today’s discussion tailors around the minimum viable product approach and the need of getting out to market soon.

Embarrassed by your first version

I’ve joined many startup accelerators during my early-stage startup days where I got to see some fascinating ideas being tested. The most exciting part was to see new ideas being tested on a daily basis – sometimes it was a presentation and some other times a prototype.

But the best part of being in an accelerator was seeing new ideas and getting inspired by them. If you’re feeling lonely, I’d strongly recommend joining a startup accelerator. (Related: What do startup accelerators do?).

The point I want to make here is that most of these founders didn’t have a fully functional product or even a prototype. Most times it was only an idea in the early stages and then presenting learnings on a regular basis. What a fantastic way to see how the audience responds to change in services?!

Ultimately, we’re trying to make the vision a reality, but the early stages mean that we ought to be open to failure and sometimes even ridicule. In the end, we will always be embarrassed by the first version because there are far too many unknowns. But that shouldn’t stop us from developing and putting the product in front of the customer. It is all about failing fast and failing cheap in the startup world where you can get close to the customer at the earliest possibility.

Understanding customer needs

This is the central theme across the majority of startup stages. In the beginning, we only have a business idea that we were trying to test. Although the business idea is well articulated and researched, the market dictates varying needs. The business plan might only be the best case guess from a theoretical perspective. If you want to see the real results, customer adoption and readiness – only the end-user can tell you all this.

However, the most important point to remember is to collect feedback from customers at each iteration. The point of minimum viable products and early-stage developments is to learn from these small mistakes continually while you develop a product that can be simplified later on.

I’m not promoting a careless and unplanned approach, but the importance of not waiting for perfection to release your product.

MVP Vs Prototyping

If you are an engineer, the prototype is probably the first approach you would be interested to follow. However, you need to be aware of the difference between a customer-led approach and a product-led approach. Your product might be of excellent quality, but if it cannot be used by a customer, then it is quite a waste to worry about.

Although prototyping is a great way to start testing out your idea – this takes time. Instead, our recommendation would be the MVP approach – The Minimum Viable Product Approach. It is the bare minimum product with which you go out to your customer. Please note, however, that you are not trying to sell this product. This MVP is used to get customer feedback and understand what they are thinking.

You might have heard of the famous Dropbox story, how their MVP was a mere video from which they started this business of sharing data via the cloud. Most fascinating ideas have started in a very simple vision about breaking down the complexity of your idea into a valuable outcome for the customer. This translates into different solutions and segments, but you cannot wait till the prototype is done. That takes too much time for you to start.

Given an opportunity, it is extremely useful to go out and be right next to the customer to understand their true needs and provide a solution that matters to them.

Don’t waste time perfecting the product in the early stages

No matter how complex or simple your business idea is, your biggest challenge and resource is time. If you are taking too much time to develop a prototype, the customer might lose interest. How do you keep the balance between product development and customer interest?

This will be an eternal question – a very interesting challenge to navigate through. But you must ensure that you are not spending hours and days on something without taking the time out to gather customer feedback. You need to be out there with a minimum possible product, get their feedback and constantly improve. The aim is to be in front of a customer at every opportunity possible.

Gone are the days of development in large chunks – it leads to a lot of waste and increased costs. Your focus needs to be higher level when you are running a business. You might be the core developer of your product, but prepare to be embarrassed by your first version. If you wait too long to deliver a perfect product, you will end up wasting and losing out on real customers.

“Start as small as you can. When I started SkinnyMe Tea, I had $24 in the bank, and I was entirely self-funded. If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product; you’ve launched too late.”

-Gretta Rose van Riel, Founder of Hey Influencers.