I supported Augmentor, an early stage startup backed by Y combinator, for a year, helping them test out and validate the need for several product ideas, and navigate through several pivots. Over the year, this included building functional MVPs with limited resources, running a series of landing page MVPs to test out messaging, setting an outreach and content marketing strategy to reach potential leads, and design pitches for corporate clients to pitch our solutions. Here I share some high level details (without revealing any of the secret sauce).
I was the acting CMO for the company, setting and executing a strategy to validate product market pit, and make recommendations to the founders for when to pivot.
Our goals included:
(a) Quickly test out ideas and concepts with limited resources.
(b) Gain experience with the full range of ways of testing product MVPs.
(c) Pivoting early to increase our chances of success.
For one of our products, we wanted to build a simple platform to give merchants the chance to list a kind of product on their websites through an integration with Shopify.
One of the founders had the coding experience to build this, and I had the background in UX (albeit not in UX design). Over several evening sessions, I showed the founders how to put together wireframes, by:
– listing out a full list of Jobs To Be Done
– mapping these against a user flow
– defining the screens needed for these flows
– defining the concrete components and interactions needed on each screen.
I was able to then turn these mockups into simple high-fideltiy designs of a good enough quality to already show potential clients to gage interest. Once we validated that there were partners willing to pay for the solution, the founder then built it out.
So, this was an example of using mockups and detailed descriptions of JTBD and business cases to validate interest before investing in a full build.
One of the products we tested was a platform making it incredibly easy to create and list NFTs. In particular, we were interested in validating whether small indie businesses, artists, and photographers would be interested.
We created Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs), and wrote examples of messaging we thought would appeal to each, using conversation mining from social media for inspiration.
It would have required a lot of investment to actually build the platform, so to validate interest, I built a simple website using Unicorn Platform. I created a landing page addressing each ICP, and we ran search ads in addition to carrying out cold outreach on LinkedIn to drive traffic to our site and gage interest.
Our ads allowed us to AB test messaging, and refine our website content and the way we described the product and increase the amount of sign ups.
