For Starters #26: The First Pancake Still Eats the Same
...and is still better than what your customers have today.
I’m drafting this while drinking my latest homebrew - a bright, delicious mashup of a traditional Norwegian raw ale and a hazy IPA.
Over my last 15 years of homebrewing, I’ve had five different systems.
The first was a 3 gallon kettle I had lying around the kitchen and a plastic bucket fermentor.
Then I upgraded to an 8 gallon kettle I found on the clearance at Target, added a propane burner, and moved the brewing outside.
A few years later, I enlisted an Igloo cooler for a mash tun and swapped out the 8 gallon kettle for a 15 gallon kettle. Along the way I added a few more plastic bucket fermenters and a few glass fermenters. It was about this time I started winning awards at local homebrewing competitions.
Some homebrewers spend their entire hobby on this kinda system. But, I wanted something easier to maintain, more purpose-built, more flexible, and that could easily make 10 gallon batches for splitting with friends.
My current system - imagine the system at your local taproom shrunk down to fit inside a two car garage - I’ve had for six years. Even after six years and 110 batches, there’s things that surprise me and things I’d like to improve - both in it’s capabilities and my operating of it.
It would have been a bafflingly, outrageously, financially irresponsible, over-investment for this to be my first system. Even if at the time I could have imagined it as a possibility.
I didn’t let the possibility of a more perfect system keep me from making beer along the way. #JobsToBeDone
Founders too often focus on the long-term, fully polished, wildly successful vision of their product - to the detriment of getting an initial, rudimentary solution in the hands of their customers today.
Coincidentally, the most recent quote I received for a fully fledged iPhone app was equivalent to the budget needed to open a commercial brewery.
I find this a nice reminder of:
opportunity cost
all the different investments that make sense (or don’t) based on a given investment goal.
iPhone apps are so often over-investments.
“Make it work. Make it right. Make it Fast” - Kent Beck
However there are lots of ways you can help your customers can solve their most persistent frustrations, without waiting for your to both raise the capital, negotiate with the engineering team, and then the App Store approval team.
Like my first couple homebrew systems, this likely means cobbling together readily accessible components:
Google Forms + Google sheets
WordPress + Formidable + Woocommerce ( + Stripe)
Texting each customer individually and manually entering their data into your own calculator built with Shoes.
Placing yourself in the middle of the problem and manually solving it (no, it’s not scalable - that’s the point).
All of these have a massive ROI in both time and money - at least over the next week.
As an example, I once built a web-based workflow for a client that filled out PDFs based on data collected by a Google Form, with no custom code - just wiring together readily available web-based services. We put it in front of customers within a week and it worked, iterating from there.
One objection I’ve heard to this approach is, “But those aren’t my platforms?”
This is absolutely true. I’ve written about the inherent problems with geeks bearing platforms. However, I’m not advocating for using these platforms forever. I’m advocating for using these platforms as a way to get the desired customer outcome (e.g. paying customers) faster - in days not months. Presuming that’s successful, those revenues can be invested into building your own platform.
In Noah Kagan’s new book ‘Million Dollar Weekend’ he advocates for taking days to get your first version into the world. Multiple times he demonstrates how the first version is an email or a phone call. Spoiler: he doesn’t actually acquire a year’s worth of beef jerky let alone create a sophisticated beef jerky supply chain before selling a year’s worth of beef jerky.
Some people are concerned that this releasing of an unpolished, half-a-product will immediately put off customers. That just means the put off customers don’turgencly want help. Or we released the wrong half of the product.
It would be worse to hold off on launching for so long that customers solve the problem without you. Wait long enough and they will.
I get especially feisty on this topic when I’m talking with Founders going after problems in the mental health and family caregiver space. These people especially don’t have time to wait.
What can you put in front of you customers yet this week that will help both of you?
If it’s not obvious and you’d like some ideas, let’s grab a beer.