Egehan Özsoy is the CEO of Coachify AI.
You have a novel concept for a new product and you’re ready to dive into production, but how do you know when it’s ready for its debut? My answer is simple: It’s ready when the product offers a feature someone will be willing to pay for. This is the minimum sellable product approach; it allows you to go to market, attract users, gather feedback and iterate on the product without wondering if you’ve captured all the features your users will need and want.
The Importance Of Speed In Product Development
Rather than spending six months building the perfect product, you should get something functional out immediately and iterate from there. What you’re focusing on in the beginning is not how good your product is, but building based on the feedback you’ll gather from your initial user base. The faster your product reaches its intended users, the sooner you can collect feedback and work on upgrades and improvements. The goal: Build something functional, get users and iterate.
Defining The Minimum Sellable Product (MSP)
Instead of calling it a minimum viable product, I like to call it a minimum sellable product. The goal is to make something you can turn profitable on day one. What that means is selecting one core feature and working on it. As long as you have something you can sell that helps the user in any way, you should start selling it. For example, if you’re creating a fitness app, and the core feature is logging exercises and weights, you should focus your efforts on that first. The profile page looks really bad? That’s fine. The diet or macro tracker doesn’t work? That’s fine. Just work on one feature and make it sellable.
Pre-Launch Testing: A Unique Approach
You don’t always have to give a free trial to gauge user interest. There are a lot of apps that don’t; they just show you what the app does. Before I build a new app—before I write a single line of code—I create a landing page and test user demand. I don’t just make a waitlist. I take it a step further.
We show users screenshots, list the features, and then ask them to sign up. At the end of the sign-up, we ask them to enter their payment details, but we don’t charge them. We include this step just to see if they’re actually willing to buy. I’ve found this to be the most accurate way to test demand because when people enter their payment information, they’ve already decided they are willing to pay for your product. And, with each person who gets that far in the pre-launch process, you gain insights into conversion potential without wasting resources.
Getting Initial Users And Feedback
When you launch your minimum sellable product, the initial challenge is getting the first 100 customers. To do this, I like to start by leveraging my personal networks and social media. I ask myself, “Who do I know that might find value in this product?” and I pitch it to them first, targeting early-adopters who are most likely to engage with the app.
Once I have my initial user base, I talk to them. There are a couple of different ways to do this. One of them would be reaching out via email. But I’ve found that email alone doesn’t work well in consumer products, because a lot of people disregard their inbox.
What has worked for us is small surveys placed inside the app and a chat button where users can click and talk to us directly. We’ve done this with Coachify using a third-party interface. It’s not just for support—it also gives us valuable feedback on what users need.
If 10 people are complaining about a feature or asking how to use it, that tells us it’s probably not designed well and we need to iterate to make the interface more intuitive so users don’t need to ask how to use it.
Segmenting Users For Better Iteration
After gathering feedback, it’s important to put users into segments based on key properties. For example, in Coachify, we look at whether someone’s goal is to gain muscle or lose weight, and how often they use the app.
I always argue that you should focus on the users who are already engaged with the product rather than trying to convince disengaged users to use your product more. Some people just aren’t the right fit for your product, and that’s okay. By focusing on the most engaged users, you gain insight into what those power-users are struggling with, what they want to see added next and in delivering solutions to their pain points you further secure them as users of your product.
Continuous Product Improvement Post-Launch
Instead of just asking users for feedback, another great way to improve is to actually watch how they use the app. We have done this by having users share their screens and perform tasks while we observe.
For example, we found that a lot of users were looking for the ‘edit workout’ button in a different place than where we put it. Since we saw them repeatedly clicking in the wrong spot, we realized we needed to move the button there instead.
This observation approach allows us to evaluate the effectiveness of our product based on what the users intuitively do versus what they say they do with the app. Then we can to iterate based on real-time user behavior and direct observation.
To build the perfect product, you need user feedback. It’s not about guessing what will work—it’s about listening, iterating and improving based on real data from the people using your product.
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