QuickMVP Blog

A potential customer recently wrote me:

I’m going to be trying quickmvp, but I’m wondering how I can use this method of testing without angering people who expected a working, already made website? Also, what if I end up not implementing a certain idea? I’m thinking of saying, upfront, “put in your email to be notified if/when we launch,” but I’m concerned that won’t have the same effect. Would you happen to know if users have run into this problem/solved it successfully?

I answered:

Hi Joe,

I can totally understand your concern, it's a common one among entrepreneurs. After doing this for four years with over a thousand startups, and seeing two thousand QuickMVP pages launched, I haven't seen a single angered customer. People fundamentally want to be a part of the process of creation. So they are happy to be contacted by you and interviewed about their feedback on your product. Think about it, how awesome is it to have the CEO of a startup contact you to get YOUR opinion on his business?

Some may be disappointed--but not angry. But it's ok to disappoint some people. You gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelet, as they say. If someone is actually disappointed when he finds out your product doesn't exist--that's the best thing that could ever happen to you. It means you found a business people actually want. Most entrepreneurs never get to that point, because most customers never click on the "Buy Now" button. It's why so many businesses fail.

Sincerely,

This video is amazing. If you've attended LSM you will have had this idea drilled into your brain.

In this three part series we introduce an awesome tool called Flutter which helps you to acquire a constant stream of new customers for your business or landing page test.

The interview is with Tom Kornblit, the Co-Founder of Flutter, and is conducted by Nathan Snyder.

-> Check out Flutter here.

Part 1: Introduction to Flutter

Part 2: Demo of Flutter

We are excited to announce that QuickMVP now supports a full page image for your landing pages. This can give your idea a more polished look.  To use this feature choose one of the two full page image options when creating your page. View “Colors” and choose an appropriate font color so the text resting on the image is legible.

Here's an example:

QuickMVP helps you calculate the ultimate potential of any business. Mathematically. In just 5 minutes. For a fact. Let it sink in. QuickMVP removes all ambiguity and uncertainty for you in starting a new business. The secret is in what I call Formula X. X = Maximum Daily Profit How would you like to know in 5 minutes the maximum daily profit you can achieve from any business idea you ever come up with? Rhetorical question.

How to Calculate X

X = Max Daily Customers * Profit Per Customer

Max Daily Customers = Daily Google Search Volume * Google Ad Conversion Rate * Landing Page Conversion Rate

Profit Per Customer = Landing Page Price - Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer Acquisition Cost = Cost Per Click of Ad / Landing Page Conversion Rate

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That's it. You're welcome. (probably the shortest post I've ever written)

Written by Grace Ng, Co-Founder of Javelin (Creators of QuickMVP)

I work with many entrepreneurs who often mistake the concept of “talk to customers” as a sales pitch or an online survey. They go into salesman mode, pitch hard without hearing what the customer has to say, and ask leading questions that steer the customer into responding in ways that reaffirm his beliefs.

The goal of customer interviews is to collect detailed stories on customer mentality, behavior, and frustrations. Ideally, this is done in person, or over Skype, so you can dig deeper into the answers they provide. This builds empathy, uncovers richer insights, and reveals opportunities you could solve for that you may not have considered before. 

Here are some quick tips to help you get the most out of customer interviews.

Interview Preparation:

Effective exploration starts with having a clear customer in mind.

Get rid of any preconceived notions you have about your solution; focusing too early on testing the solution makes you prone to biases that will prevent you from hearing what customers have to say.

Jot down a list of questions that test your riskiest assumption. It’s not necessary to write out the questions one by one. The best approach I’ve found is keeping in mind key objectives you’re looking to get insight on, and having a casual conversation with your subject around those objectives.

Interview Techniques:

Dont's

Never start off by saying that you’re working on an idea. This biases the interviewee and they will feel inclined to be nice or reverse engineer your questions.

Never ask leading questions. You are priming the interviewee for the answer you want to hear. Bad: It’s really awful to wait in long lines, isn’t it? Good: Tell me about the last time you waited in a long line.

Never put the interviewee in hypothetical scenarios. The more you ask them to imagine a situation, the less you can trust their answers. Bad: If you were stopped by the police, what would you do?   Good: Have you ever been stopped by the police? What did you do?

Never start a question with “would.” This asks them about future behavior, which they cannot predict and is not reliable.

Bad: Would you pay for this?

Good: Actually test if they will through a Pitch experiment. 

Never start a question with “do,” unless it’s a qualifying question. Bad: Do you want more free time? Good: How do you manage your time? Qualifying question: Do you have kids?

Do’s

Qualify the person you’re talking to and make sure he/she fits your customer hypothesis.

Always ask about past behavior.

Always start questions with “who, what, why, when, where, how.” Why and how questions surface the most insightful answers.

Always close by asking for their contact information and an intro to others who fit the customer profile. Chances are they have friends or colleagues who do.

This article is written by Ben Yoskovitz, Co-Author of Lean Analytics

Problem Interviews are designed to collect qualitative data. They’re meant to indicate strongly (or not) that the problem(s) you’re looking to solve are worth pursuing. They’re hard to do well, and take lots of practice and discipline to master. If you do it right, you’re left with a ton of insight into your customers’ needs and thoughts.

Unfortunately, those reams and reams of notes are messy. Interpreting and sharing qualitative data is hard, and often subjective.

So we want to try and score them. Scoring interviews is designed to help you quantify your results, without getting overly scientific.

The challenge here is that you can’t beat a forest of qualitative data into a carefully manicured lawn of quantitative data. We’re not even going to try that. And we’re also not proposing that you go overboard with this method: if you’re not good at collecting and interpreting qualitative data, it’s going to be difficult to get very far at all (through the Lean process or through any startup.) But our hope is that this method helps coalesce things a bit more, giving you some clarity when analyzing the results of your efforts.

During the Problem Interviews, there are a few critical pieces of information that you should be collecting. I’ll go through those below and show you how to score them.

1. Did the interviewee successfully rank the problems you presented?

Yes = 10 points

Sort of = 5 points

No = 0 points

During a Problem Interview you should be presenting multiple problems to the interviewee—let’s say 3 for the purposes of this post—and asking them to rank those problems in order of severity.

If they did so with a strong interest in the problems (irrespective of the ranking) that’s a good sign. Score 10 points.

If they couldn’t decide which problem was really painful, but they were still really interested in the problems, that’s OK but you’d rather see more definitive clarity. Score 5 points.

If they struggled with this, or they spent more time talking about other problems they have, that’s a bad sign. Score 0 points.

It’s important to note that during the interview process, you’re very likely to discover different problems that interest interviewees. That’s the whole point of doing these interviews, after all. That will mean a poor score (for the problem you thought you were going to solve), but not a poor interview. You may end up discovering a problem worth solving that you’d never thought about, so stay open-minded throughout the process.

2. Is the interviewee actively trying to solve the problems, or have they done so in the past?

Yes = 10 points

Sort of = 5 points

No = 0 points

The more effort the interviewee has put into trying to solve the problems you’re discussing, the better.

If they’re trying to solve the problem with Excel and fax machines, you may have just hit on the Holy Grail. Score 10 points.

If they spend a bit of time fixing the problem, but just consider it the price of doing their job, they’re not trying to fix it. Score 5 points.

If they don’t really spend time tackling the problem, and are okay with the status quo, it’s not a big problem. Score 0 points.

3. Was the interviewee engaged and focused throughout the interview?

Yes = 8 points

Sort of = 4 points

No = 0 points

Ideally your interviewees were completely engaged in the process; listening, talking (being animated is a good thing), leaning forward, and so on. After enough interviews you’ll know the difference between someone that’s focused and engaged, and someone that is not.

If they were hanging on your every word, finishing your sentences, and ignoring their smartphone, score 8 points.

If they were interested, but showed distraction or didn’t contribute comments unless you actively solicited them, score 4 points.

If they tuned out, looked at their phone, cut the meeting short, or generally seemed entirely detached—like they were doing you a favor by meeting with you—score 0 points.

4. Did the interviewee refer others to you for interviews?

Yes, without being asked = 4 points

Yes, when you asked them to = 2 points

No = 0 points

At the end of every interview, you should be asking all of your subjects for others you should talk with. They have contacts within their market, and can give you more data points and potential customers. There’s a good chance the people they recommend are similar in demographics and share the same problems.

Perhaps more importantly at this stage, you want to see if they’re willing to help out further by referring people in their network.  This is a clear indicator that they don’t feel sheepish about introducing you, and that they think you’ll make them look smarter. If they found you annoying, they likely won’t suggest others you might speak with.

If they actively suggested people you should talk to without being asked, score 4 points.

If they suggested others at the end, in response to your question, score 2 points.

If they couldn’t recommend people you should speak with, score 0 points (and ask yourself some hard questions about whether you can reach the market at scale.)

5. Did the interviewee offer to pay you immediately for the solution?

Yes, without being asked = 4 points

Yes, when asked = 2 points

No = 0 points

Although having someone ask to pay or throw money at you is more likely during the Solution Interviews (when you’re actually walking through the solution with people), this is still a good “gut check” moment. And certainly it’s a bonus if people are reaching for their wallets.

If they offered to pay you for the product without being asked, and named a price, score 4 points.

If they offered to pay you for the product, score 2 points.

If they didn’t offer to buy and use it, score 0 points.

Calculating the scores

A score of 25 or higher is a good score. Anything under is not. Try scoring all the interviews, and see how many have a good score. This is a decent indication of whether you’re onto something or not with the problems you want to solve. Then ask yourself what makes the good score interviews different from the bad score ones. Maybe you’ve identified a market segment; maybe you have better results when you dress well; maybe you shouldn’t do interviews in a coffee shop. Everything is an experiment you can learn from.

You can also sum up the rankings for the problems that you presented. If you presented three problems, which one had the most first place rankings? That’s where you’ll want to dig in further and start proposing solutions (during Solution Interviews.)

This fall Tim Aton will be a sophomore at Eastern Washington University with a major in Business Management and a minor in Visual Communication. To make money as a student, Tim came up with the business idea for Resume Redesign. Basically, Tim took his customer's boring resumes and used design templates to give them new life.

After redesigning resumes for 100 people at $5 to $20 each, Tim realized he wasn't charging enough to build a sustainable business. In addition, he didn't know how to acquire more customers or how much he would have to spend to get new customers in the door. So after reading The Lean Startup, Tim set out to create a landing page and test if he could make his business work. He actually tried every landing page tool he could find because he couldn't make up his mind which tool to use. In the end, QuickMVP is the only tool that worked for him.

Not only was QuickMVP effective in getting customers to his page, Tim discovered these customers would pay $49 for his service and he only had to pay an average of $20.27 to get each one to sign-up. Tim's business was instantly profitable with a healthy margin.

Tim also found he could get 202 new customers to his website every day from just two keywords. With a couple more keywords and another channel or two (say Facebook or StumbleUpon ads) Tim will likely reach serial entrepreneur Jonathan Siegel's target market size of 1,000 clicks a day. And when he does, you can bet I will be putting Tim in touch with Jonathan to invest.

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Here's a graph which expresses the impact these discoveries have on Tim's business. We assume he could grow either business at 10% per month in the near term. Before Tim brought in 50 customers a month at $5 each, making $250 in revenue. Now he can bring in 330 customers a month (from just two keywords) which a margin of $28 each. This is nearly $10k in profit per month.

If you'd like to reach out to Tim and help him in his quest, Tweet at him @Tim_Aton.

Take a closer look at Tim's metrics (download this spreadsheet here)

Click play above to listen to the interview with serial entrepreneur Jonathan Siegel.

Jonathan Siegel's built and sold multiple tech companies (RightSignature, RightCart, RightScale, & ELC Technologies, to name a few).

His most recent (Exceptional) sold for 8 figures after just 18 months, without any investors.

Join us as Jonathan breaks down his startup formula--the four questions he asks of every business he starts and invests in.

When Tim Ferriss was writing his first book, he came up with 6 potential titles, including:

Broadband and White Sand

Millionaire Chameleon

The 4-Hour Workweek

Tim developed a Google Adwords campaign for each. He bid on keywords related to the book's content such as '401k' and 'language learning': when those keywords formed part of someone's search on Google the title popped up as a headline and the advertisement text would be the subtitle.

Ferriss was interested to see which of the advertisements would be clicked on most, knowing that he needed his title to compete with over 200,000 books published in the US each year.

This is an excerpt from The Lean Startup

Drew Houston is the CEO of Dropbox, a Silicon Valley company that makes an extremely easy-to-use file-sharing tool. Install its application, and a Dropbox folder appears on your computer desktop. Anything you drag into that folder is uploaded automatically to the Dropbox service and then instantly replicated across all your computers and devices. The founding team was made up of engineers, as the product demanded significant technical expertise to build. It required, for example, integration with a variety of computer platforms and operating systems: Windows, Macintosh, iPhone, Android, and so on. Each of these implementations happens at a deep level of the system and requires specialized know- how to make the user experience exceptional. In fact, one of Dropbox’s biggest competitive advantages is that the product works in such a seamless way that the competition struggles to emulate it.

These are NOT the kind of people one would think of as marketing geniuses. In fact, none of them had ever worked in a marketing job. They had prominent venture capital backers and could have been expected to apply the standard engineering thinking to building the business: build it and they will come. But Dropbox did something different.

In parallel with their product development efforts, the founders wanted feedback from customers about what really mattered to them. In particular, Dropbox needed to test its leap- of- faith question: if we can provide a superior customer experience, will people give our product a try? They believed—rightly, as it turned out—that file synchronization was a problem that most people didn’t know they had. Once you experience the solution, you can’t imagine how you ever lived without it.

This is not the kind of entrepreneurial question you can ask or expect an answer to in a focus group. Customers often don’t know what they want, and they often had a hard time understanding Dropbox when the concept was explained. Houston learned this the hard way when he tried to raise venture capital. In meeting after meeting, investors would explain that this “market space” was crowded with existing products, none of them had made very much money, and the problem wasn’t a very important one. Drew would ask: “Have you personally tried those other products?” When they would say yes, he’d ask: “Did they work seamlessly for you?” The answer was almost always no. Yet in meeting after meeting, the venture capitalists could not imagine a world in line with Drew’s vision. Drew, in contrast, believed that if the software “just worked like magic,” customers would flock to it.

The challenge was that it was impossible to demonstrate the working software in a prototype form. The product required that they overcome significant technical hurdles; it also had an online service component that required high reliability and availability. To avoid the risk of waking up after years of development with a product nobody wanted, Drew did something  unexpectedly easy: he made a video.

The video is banal, a simple three- minute demonstration of the technology as it is meant to work, but it was targeted at a community of technology early adopters. Drew narrates the video personally, and as he’s narrating, the viewer is watching his screen. As he describes the kinds of files he’d like to synchronize, the viewer can watch his mouse manipulate his computer. Of course, if you’re paying attention, you start to notice that the files he’s moving around are full of in- jokes and humorous references that were appreciated by this community of early adopters.

Drew recounted, “It drove hundreds of thousands of people to the website. Our beta waiting list went from 5,000 people to 75,000 people literally overnight. It totally blew us away.”

“To the casual observer, the Dropbox demo video looked like a normal product demonstration,” Drew says, “but we put in about a dozen Easter eggs that were tailored for the Digg audience. References to Tay Zonday and ‘Chocolate Rain’ and allusions toOffice Space and XKCD. It was a tongue- in- cheek nod to that crowd, and it kicked off a chain reaction. Within 24 hours, the video had more than 10,000 Diggs.”

(You can watch the original video here: http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/1372-marketing-lessons-from-dropbox-a-qa-with-ceo-drew-houston/ and see the original reaction from the Digg community here:http://digg.com/software/Google_Drive_killer_coming_from_MIT_Startup.)