product Archives - LunarLincoln

Oct

Sunk Cost Fallacy: Don’t do it.

So what happened?!? What did you do with all the research? Did you make the feature list?

We did take a few more steps post-market research.

First, with all of the info we now had from talking with ACTUAL USERS, we redefined our audience size and attributes in our TAM. And discovered that even though we were now focusing on two audiences (meetup organizers and conference organizers) we needed to further segment them into novice organizers and smaller conferences – which made our target audience much smaller.

Second, I listed out all the features needed to make the platform appealing to each audience. Then I took away anything that might not be quintessentially necessary. This list was still really long.

Let’s look at those two numbers:

Tiny audience
Giant feature list

Wait a minute…those should be flipped for a successful business, right?

This is the part of the process where you start making mental excuses even though your gut and rational brain are pointing elsewhere.

“I mean…it could work….we already put in a lot of time…people said they liked it…we can just charge less till we get more users…maybe we don’t need to target both audiences…man, we have this cool name already…everyone is going to ask what happened after our meetings…let’s just build it and see.”

And off you go to the wonderful graveyard of failed startups, because you couldn’t bear to kill you idea-baby during the research and validation stage.

It’s okay to admit that some ideas aren’t the right fit. It’s totally okay, even if you’ve put a lot of time into it.

Sunk cost fallacy is real y’all. Don’t be a part of it.

So off we go back to the drawing board, looking for a concept where the numbers make more sense and the build-out to MVP isn’t months long.

Aug

Sifting your User Research

So last we left you we were meeting with every meetup or conference organizer in the Metro-Nashville area. And then I emailed some in San Francisco for good measure.

When we’d meet, I had a giant list of questions that I’d generally attempt to cover during our chat. If we veered off into an uncharted area, no problem, but I typically tried to cover some of the same topics with each and every person I spoke with so that later I could compare and contrast responses. After each meeting, I’d “brain dump” everything we talked about into a text document. At the end of this I had over 20 pages of “notes” from organizers here in Nashville.

Welcome to Jennifer’s crash course in user research….

Did everyone say the same thing? Nope.
Did everyone have exactly the same issues? Nope.
Did you really expect every single person, to have the exact same needs? Well, no…but that would definitely have made this easier.

So how do I take all of this broad feedback and use it to come up with meaningful answers?

First I looked for trends…

What is something I heard from more than 3 or 4 people? Something that kept coming up without my asking or prompting?
What was the response when broadly outlining my idea? Tepid, interested? People will rarely, if ever, ACTUALLY tell you they don’t like your idea. They’ll just…kind of nod and make noncommittal statements about the idea instead of discussing how they, themselves would use it.

Now what are the trends amongst the people who offered similar suggestions or had similar responses?

Is it one specific kind of person or kind of meetup/conference?
Are issues noticeably split amongst different groups?
Are these suggestions/trends actionable, solveable, and from large enough demographics?

I discovered that those who, in a previous life, held a job that required them to be more social didn’t have as hard of a time going out there, hitting the pavement, and offering the right information to potential sponsors. I also noticed that organizers who had been doing this for a while succeeded through trial and error, or through helping with other local efforts like tech conferences where more experienced people gave advice.

All of a sudden our market for organizers who needed help with how to ask for sponsorship was smaller. It was looking like just newbies and those whose core competency was more solely focused on code versus people .

But, I DID have one piece of feedback that came up over and over from this more experienced group – “Once we’ve used up our personal connections, we don’t know who specifically to ask to grow our sponsorship” …not what to ask, or how to ask but WHO.

This was different from our initial assumption. (And why you do this process to begin with). And this isn’t feedback that we can easily solve with a simple solution. Which makes sense—usually the hardest problems are the most prickly. After some internal discussion we did determine that there were a few potential ways to tackle the “who to talk to” problem but none of them are super easy.

So now what?

We have to ask ourselves, can our potential product not only provide help to those with the “how to ask” problem (early stage meetup organizers), but begin to seed data and insights for those organizer-pros who have trouble with the “who to ask” part (veteran meetup organizers and larger conferences). Will our actual “value” be on the back end of the product and not where we initially thought?

In assessing your own user research ask yourself:

Are there still problems I can solve?
Can we still reach users with these pain points?
Is this still profitable? (Are there enough users with this pain point, is the solution reasonable to build, and will those users pay for it?)

For us, it’s time to go back to the business model and adjust our numbers. If not as many people are within our initial demo or willing to pay for the proposal product, can we get enough users in there to build data for a sponsorship leads product which seems more valuable to experienced organizers?

Next steps? We’ll attempt to broadly scope and estimate features for supporting the two types of users in order the reach profitability instead of just one. We’ll need to talk with organizers again now that we have firmer features in mind. And we should put some infrastructure out there to test the interest beyond Nashville (Product Hunt, Beta List, etc).

Aug

Testing the Waters – A New Product Idea

So you know how we were trying to “magic” an amazing idea last month? We made lists. We read books. We drew on the white board a lot. We looked at everything from Product Hunt, Beta List, and YCombinator. I even scrolled way back in the @BoredElonMusk Twitter handle (There are some great product ideas in there…that we’re not interested in building).

Well after weeks of being super negative about everything and thinking that we were never going to find anything good, we went on vacation to NYC. Then I went on a walk to lunch – gotta get my Turnip Truck Hot Bar fix – and I had an idea….

We host Nashville Cocoaheads. They have their meetings at our office. Sometimes we buy pizza or beer for them. One of their challenges has been finding sponsors. Mostly because they’re busy with their day jobs, not to mention sourcing the actual speaker part of the events. And this isn’t the only group. We’ve also had emails from friends who needed money for chairs for their usergroup. Like, a lot of chairs. Their event is super successful, hundreds of attendees successful, but we still ended up sitting on the floor one time. (We did give money for chairs the time we were asked and now they have amazing venue sponsors who have their own chairs).

This sucks.

My friends are trying to create wonderful things for their peers and shouldn’t be worrying about these small things. We’re sitting on the floor. Or drinking water instead of beer. Or rushing from the meetup to dinner because the organizer only bought 2 pizzas instead of 6 because they were paying for it out of pocket and now it’s 8pm and I’m super hongry.

Now I know the point of usergroups is not pizza…or chairs. But these things help. You’re tired at the end of the day, and you’re taking that little bit of energy left to go to a thing and learn something new. It would be nice if there was sustenance there, or even better…free tickets to a conference or a free pass to a new software tool. Congratulations on doing something extra – here’s another piece of help.

So, I got to thinking…wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a tool to help my friends find sponsors for their usergroups quickly and easily? They wouldn’t have to cold email. They wouldn’t have to figure out how to make a pdf with their sponsorship packages when what they care about most is being a really good software developer. They wouldn’t have to buy the pizza themselves or email their friends for help (even though we like to help).

But wait….

is this a real problem? Or are my friends just bad at organizing meetups?

So I sent quick emails to friends who are organizers along the lines of “What do you think about a sponsorship tool for usergroups…” I got responses back that were practically epistolary novels about how YES. YES WE WANT THIS. OH GOD. YES. and then 1,000 ideas of what it could look like.

Well then….let’s proceed.

So I wrote some more emails… a ton of emails actually. And I had coffee, and beers, and Slack convos. And… it seems like a problem a lot of organizers have. Maybe not always on the same dire level but it’s still a task no one likes but everyone needs.

Sidebar: I LOVE OUR LOCAL TECH SCENE and how amazingly patient and helpful all of the Nashville organizers and sponsors are. You guys make me want to build this thing immediately, if only to give back to those who have already given Nashville so much.

Currently, I’m still in the process of having meetings with the Sponsor side of the equation but I’m looking forward to it.

I think we might have found a winner you guys. We’re passionate about our local tech community (and other ones like it), this is something within our grasp to build (sorry, massive email sentiment analysis idea), and maybe just maybe it can be profitable (sponsorship help for podcasts, for school clubs, for little league teams, for any grassroots organizer of anything).

Next up. More meetings. Competitive Research. TAM and monetization. What does this idea look like in feature form? We’ll keep you posted.

Jun

Another large leap…

Four score and seven years ago…scratch that…just five years ago we took one small step for ourselves into the great unknown expanse of entrepreneurship and started our own company. We’ve done so much in that time, it has really flown by and instead of doing a “State of the Union” this year like we usually do, we thought we’d dig a little deeper for a “Where do you see yourself in 5 years” recap of where we went, followed by a peek at where we’re headed next.

We are now going to force you down our own cute LunarLincoln memory lane. Come watch these photos of our vacation – or rather our development shop.

Year 1: Jennifer and Wiley conceive of the LunarLincoln brand, and Jennifer designs our logo in 2 hours (startups are nothing if not efficient, right?). Wiley sits at home in the same soccer shorts he’s been wearing since 6th grade, and lands LunarLincoln’s first client. Throughout the year he builds an app for festival goers, for our favorite email marketing company, healthcare startups, photo sharing services, and more. He talks to the cats. A lot. We get temporarily Internet famous! We build things, but sometimes want to build bigger things and need extra hands to do that.

Year 2: We staff up with the addition of Jennifer and Travis (you have to see Travis’ cover letter…pure gold). Jennifer freaks out about the lack of formal business “stuff” like…you know…getting around to invoicing your clients. We add design offerings and Jennifer immediately designs the worlds most complicated UI – though it does work really well for the end goal. Travis learns all of the ways to build mobile apps. We build apps for Magic the Gathering aficionados, innovative health data visualizations, gocarts you summon via app, real-time audio syncing, custom PDF display, and much more. We get a real, fancy office in Germantown. We give talks to college and middle school kids where we pretend we know what we’re doing. We add more people and sometimes have to fire people. We almost have to sue a client for payment. We fly a drone in the office. We are in the running for a local tech competition. We set up some snazzy internal tools like a build server and a service to pull invoicing reports from JIRA. Everything is new, and we are doing a lot of googling to learn how this business thing works.

Year 3: More people, more clients, more work. We have our first sales slump and start building some products ourselves in addition to having to have some “real talks” with ourselves about sales and failure. Then we get crazy busy again, leave those products to languish in their internal repos (sorry product babies) and throw ourselves back into the work. We build apps with Research Kit, with bots, with video streaming, app for kids, for shopping, for cameras, for speakers, for ticketing, for doctors visits, for mental health. We give even more talks to more kiddos and adultos. We start hosting Cocoaheads at our office and have to take our tv off the wall each month and screw its legs on and move it to the main room and then reverse that process. each. and. every. month. (why did we do this, we must really love you guys). We deal with a rollercoaster of work and being overbooked. We come to terms with the work-shortage-fear from Year 2, and learn that you don’t have to take all the work that shows up at your doorstep. We’re making money, but have no time to enjoy it (or sleep).

Year 4 & 5: We’ve got this. We have a proposal process, we know what clients are good fits, we know better how to hire and when to not. We are getting better at estimating and saying no and questioning assumptions. We build apps for real estate agents, for healthcare goliaths, for pesticide companies, for veterans, for mobile homes and a lot of those people from Year 1, 2, and 3 come back because they like us for some reason and want to build new things. But despite smoothing of some of the roadbumps through experience and learning, others just never seem to go away. Do we grow bigger and add more support roles? Do we focus on specific markets? Should we reach for more sales outside of the southeast?

So pulling back out to a 50,000 ft view. I don’t think we had any idea where we’d be when we started all of this. I know that starting out we had some initial desires/ideas: “This will be awesome.” we said. “We’ll get to build what we want, how we want it.” we said. “We’ll get to have a flexible schedule and a relaxed work environment.” we said. “NO. MORE. MEETINGS!” we said.

Oh boy.

It didn’t exactly go that way. We did get to do a lot of this. We built things. All sort of things. We made new friends, met new people, helped tons of businesses. It was fun. It was interesting. We shipped apps! A lot of them.

But sometimes, it was frustrating. It was confusing. It. was. so. exhausting.

This isn’t to say we weren’t successful. We were. Very. We are even today (often in spite of ourselves). We ran LunarLincoln as we wanted to see an agency run. Lean, kind, trustworthy, and talented. But honestly, after 5 years of building other people’s dreams, we want to build our own as well.

Now, in June of 2018, five years after we started, we will commence a new era of LunarLincoln that is a bit more product-centric. We’ll be devoting 80% of our time solely to building our products and the other 20% to select client work. Wiley is jokingly referring to it as our Project Apollo Moon-shot.

Come along for the ride as I chronicle the search for the good product idea(s). See if we take our own advice, or stubbornly ignore it. And, for the first time, we’ll be giving you a detailed peek into what it takes to build a product from scratch (without signing up for an ideation engagement with me). I’ll be dusting off this old blog and checking in much more often with you guys. (You may even get tired of my gif-laden, terrible punctuation and inane rambling. Who knows?). I’ll be posting some signups for some weekly blog series on small business bootstrapping, as well as product ideation.

But. But what about your agency work? Can I still call you?
We’re not entirely out of the running for projects outside of LunarLincoln products. We will be taking a few select projects each year and are seeking clients that are a goldilocks fit for our skill set and size. We want to be more focused and purposeful and really look for those projects that are made for us.

To all of our clients, colleagues, family, and friends: We love you, like, so much. We couldn’t have done this without you, and we’ll likely be calling on you even more often in the future for advice and pep talks.

Commencing moon-shot in five, four, three, two, one…