This is the third lesson in the series: How Non-Technical Founders Can Bring a Product to Market.
By Poornima Vijayashanker
Welcome back! In my previous lesson I taught you what a concierge MVP is: an experience, not a product. I also mentioned that there are 2 key benefits to a concierge MVP. The first is to understand who your early adopters are, and form a close connection with them so they can provide you with feedback. The second is to reduce your iteration cycle, normally you’d build a whole product, then market it, only to discover that the product doesn’t appeal to the user base you thought it would. With a concierge MVP you don’t need to have such a lengthy cycle. You can begin by testing the value proposition through messaging, and change it if it’s not attracting any early adopters.
Both technical and non-technical founders groan when I tell them not to build anything. They push back telling me that customer are going to want to *see* and play with a product before they can determine it’s value.
Here is where the misunderstanding begins. Too often we think the value comes from features. When really customers value a product for it’s benefits.
Let me tell you a simple story to illustrate my point. I had a student who was pretty confident that she wanted to build a product that helped private practice doctors retains their patients. She even had the mockups ready. I told her not to build anything just yet, and to not even show the mockups during an initial conversation. She was a little reluctant but she agreed to my experiment.
She approached several doctors and asked them if they had a problem retaining patients. The doctors responded that their problem wasn’t retaining patients, but getting paid on time for the patients who were walking through their doors! In fact, the vast majority of the private practice doctors she met with had a product to help with billing, but it just wasn’t meeting their needs. They needed to reduce the time it was taking for them to collect. Hence the benefit they were looking for was getting paid on time. Imagine what would happen if my student conveyed this benefit to the doctors. They’d probably be interested in signing up, and that’s exactly what happened next.
Whether you’re a technical founder who is a whiz at coding or you’re a non-technical founder who is eager to build a product, you’ve got to take the time to identify the main pain points a customer is experiencing. Knowing the pain points you’re would-be customers are experiencing will help you translate the resolution of them into benefits, which is your initial value proposition.
Then it doesn’t matter what “product” you sell to early adopters. They are interested in experiencing the benefits you spoke about, which you can given them through a Concierge MVP.
In the next lecture, I will provide you with some examples of successful startups that began with Concierge MVPs.
Did you enjoy this lesson? Got any questions for me on it? Please let it the comments below and I’ll be happy to answer it!
Checkout out the previous lessons:
