Building our first Concierge MVP

Now that there is a healthy list of early adopter hypotheses, it is time to setup the Concierge MVP experiments.  If I understand it correctly for each hypothesized early adopter, I need to ask 3 main questions:

1. What is your initial value proposition for your customers?
2. How do you plan to convey the value proposition to them?
3. What are you looking to measure?

(from “Will it Launch” by  Poormima Vijayashanker)

Trying this for the the hypothesis, “SMBs that use Quickbooks but would like more analytical and reporting capability.”

1. What are your value propositions?
1. Provide additional visualized insight on-line with data pulled directly from the cloud (no need to load files)
2. Use a drag and drop metrics builder, to analyze your Quickbooks data-  don’t need to know how to run a query
3. Push button web technology that doesn’t require IT resources

(I wonder if there is a way to figure out which value proposition is most important.)  

2. How to convey the message?
1. Do a mini adwords campaign to see if people click on add-on reporting for Quickbooks 
2. Create a video that demonstrates how we pull data on the cloud so you don’t have to sit there and load flat files
3. Create a video that shows how you create a simple query through the drag and drop metrics builder
4. Go to the next small business expo and ask people to fill out a small survey
   
   
3. What will you measure?
1. Use interaction in terms of adwords results.  Additionally count e-mail addresses collected from the landing pages
2. Count video views in youtube.  I would also count e-mail addresses collected from landing pages with the videos on them
3. Process the survey results from the small business expo

One down six more experiments to think through. The survey is probably the easiest one to tackle in considering resources and complexity. But it is time to learn landing pages too. Hopefully I will be able to reuse some of the content or landing pages for the others.  What are the easiest landing page vendors out there?

Hypotheses for early adopters

Late in June, I attended an event hosted by the new business incubator at Broward College.  Poormima Vijayashanker lectured on many lean startup concepts in her presentation “Will it launch?”. At Bimotics, we often pitched our startup as the “mint.com for small and medium sized-business”.  So I have to admit; I was a bit star struck to meet the founding engineer of the business we’ve strived to be like.  Turns out she is pretty cool and down to earth.  I’m going to ask join her Femigineer mentor group.

So the main takeaway I got  from the workshop was related to coming up with the right hypothesis for customer adoption- particularly for early adopters.  Bimotics is a cloud analytics company targeting small and medium-sized business, so here are the segments I hypothesize will be our early adopters. They are:

1. SMBs that were established in the last 5 years that already use other cloud based applications, like SalesForce and Quickbooks to run their business
2. SMBs that use Quickbooks but would like more analytical and reporting capability
3. Consulting companies with analysts and data scientists that need a software platform to deliver their results to their clients
4. SMBs with more than 3 resources running their operations (non-technical)
5. SMBs comfortable using online marketplaces and app stores to source applications for run their business
6. SMBs whose employees have begun to use mobile technology day-to-day, whether its a smartphone or a tablet
7. SMBs that use social media as a source for business news.

With these hunches, the next step is to confirm or deny that these are my customers in the most cost efficient way.  Since we are only in alfa, I cannot just prove usage of by these groups, I will need to try out the concept of “concierage MVP” also taught at the workshop.