#MVP #StartupProblems #PivotingStrategies #ProductDevelopment
Have you launched your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) but found that it’s not gaining the traction you had hoped for? 🤔 Don’t worry, you’re not alone in facing this common challenge in the world of startups. Many entrepreneurs find themselves at a crossroads when their MVP fails to resonate with their target audience. So, what do you do next? How do you determine whether to pivot or keep pushing forward with the current product? Let’s explore some practical solutions to help you navigate this crucial phase of your startup journey.
## Understanding the Problem:
Launching an MVP is just the first step in the product development process. It’s normal for your initial offering to fall short in terms of user engagement and market fit. The key is to identify the underlying issues that are hindering the success of your MVP.
### Conduct User Feedback Sessions:
Engage with your target audience through surveys, interviews, and usability testing to gather valuable insights into why your MVP is not resonating with them. Listen carefully to their feedback and identify recurring pain points or feature requests that can guide your next steps.
### Analyze Data Metrics:
Review your analytics data to track user behavior, conversion rates, and other key performance indicators. Look for trends or patterns that can help you understand where users are dropping off or disengaging with your product. Use this data to prioritize areas for improvement.
## Exploring Solutions:
### Iterative Development:
Consider making incremental improvements to your MVP based on user feedback and data insights. Focus on addressing the most pressing issues or pain points that are preventing users from fully engaging with your product. By taking a step-by-step approach, you can gradually refine your product to better align with user needs.
### A/B Testing:
Experiment with different variations of your product features or messaging through A/B testing. This allows you to compare performance metrics and identify which changes have a positive impact on user engagement. Use the results of these tests to inform your product roadmap and strategic decisions.
### Seek Expert Advice:
Don’t hesitate to reach out to mentors, advisors, or industry experts for guidance on how to pivot effectively. They can offer valuable insights and fresh perspectives that may inspire new ideas or strategies for overcoming the challenges you’re facing. Learning from the experiences of others can help you avoid common pitfalls in the startup journey.
Remember, the road to success in the startup world is rarely a straight line. Embrace the iterative nature of product development and be open to adapting your approach based on user feedback and market demands. By staying resilient, proactive, and open to learning from failures, you can turn your MVP challenges into valuable learning experiences that ultimately lead to a successful product launch. 🚀
What tactics have you used to pivot or iterate on your MVP when it wasn’t finding traction? Share your experiences and insights in the comments below! 💬
From what I’ve heard, you need to talk to users or potential users. Based on those conversations you’ll know if you can make your existing MVP work, or if not what to pivot to.
I haven’t really done that myself, mostly because of the effort required to build an MVP first. I’m mainly doing this based on what I want myself. Also, the few people I did talk to couldn’t visualize what I intended to build without actually seeing it. Perhaps I should have built the front-end only with mock back-end data to start with.
I do intend to talk to users once the MVP has launched, however. But I would have more confidence if I had been talking to users all along.
Give up
You absolutely need to keep speaking to as many target customers as possible. If nothing else it will help you refine your elevator pitch into something that resonates. Getting your pitch right is an important part of the process – i.e. the benefits of using my product to you are….
Worst case, those discussions will keep you out of the detail of the MVP for a while so you can do a bit of wood-for-the-trees thinking. I always find this helps me see the obvious stuff I was missing before.
If you find you can’t get the pitch right and the wood-for-the-trees thinking doesn’t start to clear a way through, then it might be time to thinking about a pivot. Your gut feel will tell you.
If your product doesn’t solve a problem for your user, you iterate to something that does solve a problem for your user. To do that you need to uncover what problems your users have.
Ask people to define their problem, before you talk to them about your solution.
This sounds like you don’t have an existing audience with a well defined problem.
You need to backtrack and find an audience with a specific problem that you can solve. This may require you to become a consultant for a while. Being a consultant is one of the best ways to discover markets for software. As I look back on 25 years in software industry – the 2 most successful products I was able to work on -started as products build from consulting.
Otherwise you are unlikely to have success.
Because if you have an audience with a problem that you understand and a solution – knowing what to do next is never a problem.
You might not yet know how to meet the requests and frequently there are more feature requests than time but you know what the requests are.
Talk to the users that you consulted with before starting down the road of building.
Depends how you see that it doesn’t get traction. Are users just leaving the website/app and not interacting with it or do you have a hard time converting them to paid customers?
For me getting a stable small traffic ~500 users/per week was very helpful. It allowed me to measure how users are interacting with my product and understand in which direction to move.
![gif](giphy|oCjCwnuLpiWbfMb1UA|downsized)
Without a lot of context, I can offer a few general suggestions.
1. Read the book “The Mom Test”. You can probably find a free PDF online. It’s one of the best books about talking to customers. The main point is that most people talk to customers using very leading questions, which results in founders building products without a clear need. So the book teaches how to ask prospects questions in a way that even their mom would be able to give useful feedback.
2. Consider your distribution – is it actually correct? Are you actually able to reach your target audience and meet with real buyers (people who can actually make purchase decisions) or not? Within your current target segment are there smaller segments that might be different from who you have currently been talking to? If your target is the HR department for example, maybe it’s remote first teams that might need your product and not general companies. Just an example.
3. Consider solving the problem for your target audience manually first. You mentioned that you think the solution can be solved with a manual engagement. It’s worth considering starting with solving it manually and then seeing what you can digitize over time. If people are paying you for the manual solution, you’re probably onto something and then can focus on making it into a real tech product later.
I used to run growth at a VC backed-startup. We lost PMF and had to find it again. Basically did some combination of these 3 to scale it to a few million dollars in annualized GMV. Wasn’t easy though.