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,MinimumViable,Products,Why they are a life or death matter whenyou are building a live marketplace,We share the story on how weve built our product Solved.ioon consecutive iterations in order to prevent failure.,Hello / my name is Tom,I learned how important Minimum Viable Products are the hardway: failing my rst company.,My new company, Solved, has an extra diculty: its a livemarketplace - we connect people facing a software issue withsoftware experts live.,In this scenario, building a product on consecutiveiterations is a life or death matter.,Heres why - and how to make it right.,Building a live marketplace / The number one challengewe need to make sure the supply side and the demand sideare validated simultaneouslyand follow the same path of growth.,1,2,3,Supplysoftware experts,Supplysoftware experts,Supplysoftware experts,Demandcollaborators who needhelp,Demandcollaborators who needhelp,Demandcollaborators who needhelp,First MVP / validate the technology,Our pain point: on-site training is not ecient for bigcompanies, and that small companies only haveforums when it comes to software issues,Basic product need: connecting employees with,software experts live,First Step: make sure we could establish aproper connection between a client andan expert within a browser using the newWebRTC technology,This is Solveds very rst MVP,How to assess the “V” in Minimum Viable Product at this point?,Its a 1 or 0 situation: if your productworks, then you should go on.,2nd MVP / fuel the supply side,Solved is supposed to be used with any software butwe reduced the scope to Ms Excel: it has a lot of heavyusers and is complex enough.,Basic product need: nding experts. We could havehired some, but it wouldnt have proven that there is ascalable supply (freelancers working remotely).,Next Step: crowding experts who areinterested in taking calls and helpingpeople remotely within an on-demandplatform,1.Build a landing page,2.Drive trac towards it,-,Direct marketing: #FAIL,Reach was great but not the directories (software certications) so it led tofew contacts we couldnt even convert into experts.,-,Inltrate communities: #FAIL,Contacting directly people in Facebook groups, Linkedin groups led to beingbanned by algorithms for phishing.,-,Social media marketing #SUCCESS,Advertising on Linkedin, targeting skills and on Facebook targetinginterests.That led to amazing conversions and costs of acquisition of $10.,How to assess the “V” in Minimum Viable Product at this point?,When testing acquisition methods,your key indicator is ROI.,That said, even though there was room for improvement toreduce our CACs, there was no time for it so we never improvedanything with this process.,3rd MVP / qualify and quantify your supply,We tried emailing experts a list of questions: we onlygot a 10% open rate. Then we built an in-appquestionnaire which worked well.,We made sure experts were not “paid to wait” byhaving them invest some time and energy on signingup and we nurtured them with newsletters.,Next Step: test the experts skills to get aminimum volume and engage them onour platform,How to assess the “V” in Minimum Viable Product at this point?,The key is to avoid vanity metrics.,We could have bragged about having 1000s of experts. 100 canseem a few but it was enough to prove our point: the experts weneed exist, and they are willing to work with us for $20/hourbecause we oer great exibility conditions.,4th MVP / fuel your demand accordingly,We needed to know how we could catch clientsright when they face a software issue to connectthem with an expert.,1.Build a landing page,we actually built several: focused on Excel, Photoshop, etc.,2.Drive trac towards it,Using Adwords: we bid on keywords like “problem VLOOKUP excel” and got a$10 of CAC with a good potential reach, which was perfect.,How to assess the “V” in Minimum Viable Product at this point?,Just like the supply side: ROI is yourfriend.,5th MVP / qualify and quantify your demand,We could not “stock” any of our alpha users: once theysigned up, we were supposed to be able to connectthem with an expert.,Our technology wasnt ready so we had to use tricks toconnect experts and clients (using live-chat plugins,Skype etc.),We needed to check that our experts could solve,our clients issues,Live-chat with a,client on thelanding page,Checking out which,experts were availableon Skype,whileFour (painful) days laterOur rst call!,How to assess the “V” in Minimum Viable Product at this point?,We realized that our clients had realissues that our experts could x livewithin 20 minutes.,There are many reasons why this could have been a failure: if theclient had been more expert than our expert, if the client wasreally incapable of anything, if the calls had lasted only 2 minutesor 2 hours. Big victory for us.,It showed us we needed to build a kick-ass product to automate the connexion between clients and experts :),To sum up / building a live marketplace means,Handle instant liquidity on both supply & demand.Test acquisition on each side - at a reasonableROI and using scalable methodsTest your rst users retention,side.,Possibly build your own technology.Uber couldnt use phone lines: they neededtheir magic app!Build your app while testing your supply and,demandFocus on the supply side before the demand,In the meantime, use your imagination!,Thank you, we are,Read more on our blog.Try solved for free now.,
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