I met a guy in NYC who had sold his blog services company to one of the major blogging platforms. Blog services means his company did installs, customizations, theming and the occasional coding of custom plugins. This is how he described his experience of the company:
“At first I thought we would become a product company. We would turn these one-off plugins we were writing into products we could sell. Then I found out the world has an unlimited appetite for services.”
That last sentence really struck me. Now I find that with CrowdVine, I’m in the exact same position he was in. We bootstrapped ourselves through customization and services work. Demand for our services is growing. Demand for the code we’ve written, however… we have no idea what that would be because most of it is only available by request (i.e. phone call).
So, I’m going to try an experiment, which I’m calling Product In A Week. I’m going to take some functionality that we have hidden away, I’m going to spend a week putting it though a product development process, and I’m going to release it. The release might be an extension of something we already do or it might be a brand new product.
I’m starting one this week and if you would be so kind, I’d love for you to participate by taking this survey. I’ll post about what we’re actually doing tomorrow.
This first week is as much a trial of the process as it is of the product. Here’s how I have the week structured.
Customer Development
I don’t think I can release significant functionality in a week unless I am either a potential customer or very close to the problem. That said, I’d like to do some sort of customer development process that starts with at least customer interviews or surveys.
Last week, I ran the Sean Ellis and KISSMetrics Customer Development survey on followers of @iheartquotes. I learned a ton about @iheartquotes followers. However, that survey is for when you already have a product and users. For the product I’m doing this week I’m trying to get information about an existing market for which I have no current customers.
The survey I’m running above (would you be so kind and take it) is a kludge of the survey.io survey of existing customers, the survey they ran when they were developing survey.io, and some questions I had while looking at existing options.
Utility
I have at least ten things that I want to pull out of storage. Some of them can stand on their own but many of them are extensions to what CrowdVine already does. Whatever form they take, my primary goal is for them to have immediate utility. There’s a couple of ways I’m judging that.
Is this something I will personally use? Is it something current CrowdVine customers will use? Is it something that the broader world would use?
The product I’m planning for this week is something that I need immediately for four other sites. That makes it easier to develop a first version because I’m scratching my own itch.
The product is an expansion and upgrade of a current module that CrowdVine users use all the time. I’m planning for the implementation to stand as it’s own product but for almost all features to be shared back with CrowdVine. That means our current customers get an immediate benefit. The new features are also a prerequisite for a bigger CrowdVine expansion, so I’m counting that as a win for getting this work done.
The product on it’s own, is, I think, a new and useful take on an existing market. Right now that’s just my opinion. We’re going to test it, with a survey at the beginning and what amounts to a minimum feature set that we launch during the week.
Sustainability
While the goal is to have more people using more of our software, we’re not exactly ready to take on bug fixes, late night system administration and frantic customer service emails. We already have those. Whatever work we do during the week needs to be self-sustainable.
It needs to be built in a way that it can live without maintenance. If it takes off, of course, it’s going to be getting lots of love. If it doesn’t, then it can’t be a large ongoing tax on our time. To me, that means keep the scope small enough that the code quality can be high, make sure it’s monitored, backed up, the logs rotate, etc.
There should be measurability baked in. I want the logs to tell me what’s getting used and what has growth and I want surveys (this is where the survey.io survey is useful). As Steve Blank says, the Minimum Feature Set is not the goal, it’s a first step. This data will let us know if there should be a second iteration and what would be in it.
Almost everything I have in mind has an immediate business model baked in. Money is a great measurement for whether we built something valuable.
For the project I’m doing this week, it’s going to run on top of the CrowdVine code base so it gets to make use of all of our existing sustainability infrastructure (backups, tests, monitoring). It will be subscription based, so there is a business model. I’m not totally sure what stats to measure, but I’m going to start with a subscription funnel: how many people hit the home page, how many try the service, and how many convert to paying customers.
Ready, shoot, aim. We’re already off and running.
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[...] for being coy during yesterday’s Product In A Week post. I wanted to get some unfiltered data from the survey I was running. Here’s what [...]