We’ve spent a lot of time building the technology behind scenes at obvious.io – in startup circles, this is generally frowned upon. The mantra is build an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), gain feedback, pivot, iterate and if you can’t find a market, fail fast and move on. This is fantastic advice that we chose not to follow.
Obvious.io started with the idea of what would happen if we gave our monitoring tools eyes. If our arsenal of monitoring solutions (we believe strongly in monitoring in-depth) behaved like a human, we would know within seconds if a problem made things on our page look different. So we set about building something that can view a website, understand it and then let you know the moment something changes.
That wasn’t an easy problem to solve (I’ll blog more about that another time). We made a lot of mistakes on our way, we also learned a lot. All of this, without a landing page, without a single customer and with no real idea whether we could build a product and find a market for it – but we did it anyway. We learnt these 4 key things that helped us along that journey.
1. Be one of the crazy ones, they’re not fond of rules
The ground breaking advertisement originally penned by Steve Jobs on his return to apple exemplifies the entrepreneurial mentality that you need to hold on to. Entrepreneurs, builders of companies, those who create value when none existed previously are all a little crazy. The basic premise that you alone see something that 6.5 billion other people have missed can be your greatest strength. Hold on to what you believe and have the conviction to keep going when you hit the odd rejection.
Sometimes as founders, mentors, startup folk we like to create sets of rules that we can apply to a creative process like creating a great company, things like “Always have a co-founder, you can’t do all the work yourself” or “Ship your product, even when it sucks”. However, these rules very rarely apply to everyone and when you think slightly differently about some of these pieces of advice, they are easily overcome by good management and leadership. “Always have a co-counder” becomes “Build a great team and culture, they will help you get where you need to go” and “Ship your product, even when it sucks” has been better described by Steve Blank, “You’re selling the vision and delivering the minimum feature set to visionaries not everyone”. Pick your audience, get the feedback you need – deliver only what you need to get there.
2. Stay lean for as long as possible
If we raised capital (even an Angel or Friends and Family round) early on based only on the idea of obvious.io, we would have run out of runway well ahead of having anything useful to demonstrate. We would have upset early stage investors and sent my grandma broke.
Be selective about when you need capital and how much you need. Early stage capital in Australia is becoming easier to obtain – you still need to prove you have a viable proposition, but there are many more incubators, angels and funds who will dip in if they believe in your product, idea or even you as the entrepreneur.
When you are raising, or even having the early stage conversations, talk through;
- Where you are today
- Where you need to be
- What you need to do to get there
- How long you need to do it
This will help you solidify in your own mind, what your company is aiming for and in a realistic way, the resources you will need to get there and whether in fact you really need to reach out for funding.
3. Feedback from users is interesting, feedback from customers builds a business
Once we actually got obvious.io out in its first iteration, we started by sharing it with people that would automatically understand it’s proposition. This was a collection of Cloud, Infrastructure, DevOps and Product Manager folks who we believed would see the value with little convincing. You should by this point have a solid view (or at least a decent opinion) of who your target market is. Start with them because your first pitch will most likely suck (ours certainly did). Your next few pitches will be better and pretty soon you’ll work out exactly what to say either face to face or in an email in order to get them to use your product (we’re still trying to get better at it).
We kept the following in mind for our initial beta users;
- Seek the influencers in your target market, it’s easier to reach people who ‘just get it’
- leverage your existing networks, it’s easier to pitch an idea to people you know
- Being selective forces you to start identifying a target market
We realised that our customers started telling us interesting things that straight away point to business growth and not simply feature sprawl. This was feedback like “I need to have good visibility of my invoices” or “Have you considered providing pre-pay options so I know what my costs are going to be” or especially “Have you got an API? I need to plug this into my CI pipeline and monitoring dashboard”
4. Think big, its easier
This is one of the best piece of advice I have received. Chances are you’ve found a niche because the problem you are solving has been too hard for most. You’re always at an advantage as a startup, you have nothing to lose and chances are that your competitor (if they exist) is a company who’s DNA doesn’t allow them to innovate as fast as you.
Solve the big problems. If your startup idea doesn’t make you feel uncomfortable in its delivery, execution or growth, then perhaps you need to look at the bigger picture. Is what you’re doing big and disruptive enough to challenge the status quo? Most importantly, is your proposition personally challenging enough for you devote your working life to solving it?
Summary Thoughts
If you’re a high technology focused startup, perhaps the same rules don’t always apply to you. I don’t believe an MVP is a landing page, that concept doesn’t sit right with me. Certainly this is a great way to get your message out, but it’s not a high tech product.
By all means, build a product, get something out as quickly as humanly possible for you and your team. Just make it useful, your product will sell itself if enough people value it. Your Minimum Viable Product should also be a valuable product.
Obvious.io Blog 