Delivering Product Value
MVP. 2 years ago, my impulsive response to this acronym would be Most Valued Player. But I was no longer in the sports world, I was in the startup world. Here things ran differently. I would soon learn that MVP stood for Minimum Viable Product. Literally broken down these three words mean that Minimum (small), Viable (working) version of the product. For those that want to learn more about, check out my blog, What is an MVP.
Disclaimer: I spent the last 2 years of university of life working on a company called HireFast. We wanted to create a SaaS B2B company that aimed at helping recruiters finding quality developers across the web. Brace yourself for a ride of pivots!
Building the wrong MVP
So after 100 calls, we set out to build HireFast, a name that would later mean a sourcing tool to find hidden technical talent across the web. Originally, HireFast meant a glorified Applicant Tracking System (an ATS is system to track all the applicants that apply for a job in one place) copycat. Why was there a mismatch between what the customer asked for and what we delivered? I did not listen to my customers.
Customer discovery should be 80% of your customer talking and 20% of you talking.
The pain communicated to us on these customer discovery calls was for non technical recruiters to source (find) developer candidates. Sourcing takes up 80% of the entire recruitment cycle. Sourcing is only 1 out of 6 steps and occurs right at the beginning of the recruitment cycle. So reducing the bottle neck of the system intrigued many recruiters.
Despite the fact that we knew the pain point was at sourcing, we built the the entire recruitment funnel (steps 1–6).
Five months later, I became aware of the two major mistakes that I made here. The first was not listening to my potential customers. They wanted to relieve the time to source a candidate, that was the real bottle neck. Neither of my top two features even touched on that idea. The second fatal flaw I made was assuming that these two feature specs were feature specs when these features could be a product of their own. Not to mention that the first feature is literally what ATSes are designed to do, track the pipeline of candidates.
When pushes comes to shove
Five months into the businesses we still didn’t have an MVP or even a proper roadmap. Until the night before we had to a live demo of the product. We scrapped everything we had made, and started from scratch. We focused only on sourcing and our features began to align with that scope:
- Candidate profiles will be scraped from Linkedin and put onto our platform
- High level insights on the candidate will indicate the type of developer that they are to assist aligning the developer to a job description.
- The candidate will have their social media profiles available to verify their information to assist reach outs.
We were ecstatic after our demo. The customer loved the product. Little did they know, the product wasn’t much more than a glorified LinkedIn Recruiter copycat. But that call gave us the motivation to keep going. And onwards we went. All the way to another wall during a customer call.
Customer: How are you different than Linkedin?
Me: We offer premium insights on each candidate that LinkedIn doesn’t offer.
Customer: Does that improve my ability to hire?
Me: It provides you with the confidence that at least on paper this candidate checks all the boxes on your job description.
That customer call stung me like a wasp on a hot summer evening. I wasn't solving the pain point. Sourcing the right candidates should make the customers ability to hire improve. But sourcing from LinkedIn didn’t.
I stirred with this idea in my head. I had no way to fix this. I was going to close the company. But then came along a great mentor, who asked me about GitHub, an open source platform where developers could share their code. That platform had open sourced practical skill sets that LinkedIn resumes could only story tell. I had hit the jackpot, I needed to stop using Linkedin as my main secret sauce and instead use GitHub to find the talent.
The next major pivot was accomplished and our platform outperformed LinkedIn search results. The quality of candidates were so good that one of our customers made their hire from the first page of search results.
We made $20000 in annual revenue that year. What changed? We finally listened to our customers.
