Here's What Happened When I Tried to Pre-Sell My Startups Product

#1

Post by paultowers » Thu, Dec 15, 2016, 9:45 PM UTC

Here's What Happened When I Tried to Pre-Sell My Startups Product
blog.taskpigeon.co

Re: Here's What Happened When I Tried to Pre-Sell My Startups Product

#2

Post by danieltillett » Thu, Dec 15, 2016, 9:54 PM UTC

Paul I have taken a look at your product and I think the problem is that you are still far from a minimum viable product. Sometimes you just have to invest quite a bit of resources before you have a product that people want to pay for. Lean is good, anorexic is not.

Re: Here's What Happened When I Tried to Pre-Sell My Startups Product

#3

Post by paultowers » Thu, Dec 15, 2016, 10:12 PM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #2

Paul I have taken a look at your product and I think the problem is that you are still far from a minimum viable product. Sometimes you just have to invest quite a bit of resources before you have a product that people want to pay for. Lean is good, anorexic is not.

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for your feedback.

We have done detailed research on other products on the market and our solution is comparable on all of the core features. Perhaps this isn't articulated clearly enough on the landing page so I will definitely look into this.

We are launching our private beta in January 2017 and are already using it internally for our own task management so it is a functioning product. (Obviously needs ongoing refinement based on user feedback).

The purpose of the pre-sale experiment was to really take people who had already expressed interest in Task Pigeon and to test their receptiveness to paying for the product. As I'm sure you would know many successful founders/VC's do suggest trying to pre-sell your product as a form of validation.

While we didn't do this before starting the development work, we still thought it would be worthwhile to test our pre-launch subscribers with this campaign.

Thanks again for your feedback. I do appreciate it and will revise how we are articulating our feature set.

Paul

Re: Here's What Happened When I Tried to Pre-Sell My Startups Product

#4

Post by danieltillett » Thu, Dec 15, 2016, 11:08 PM UTC

paultowers wrote: post #3

danieltillett wrote: post #2

Paul I have taken a look at your product and I think the problem is that you are still far from a minimum viable product. Sometimes you just have to invest quite a bit of resources before you have a product that people want to pay for. Lean is good, anorexic is not.

Hi Daniel, Thanks for your feedback. We have done detailed research on other products on the market and our solution is comparable on all of the core features. Perhaps this isn't articulated clearly enough on the landing page so I will definitely look into this. We are launching our private beta in January 2017 and are already using it internally for our own task management so it is a functioning product. (Obviously…

It is always a bit of a judgement call as to when you have a MVP or not. I am a little biased towards ‘fat’ MVPs as I think people have started going to far towards lean and they end up releasing something that does not provide much customer value.

My advice for what is worth is focus on getting high quality beta testers who will give you the feedback you need to improve the product and leave paying customer until later.