We didn’t want to rush an MVP by focusing on users first, but investors weren’t buying it

Photo credit: Pixabay.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting down with an investor to get some advice on our product management community called Product Cafe. And as someone who is very active in the startup scene, I was fairly surprised that we had completely different expectations on how to make progress with a product.

So, I reflected on the conversation.

Money vs experiment

Me: “I’ve seen a lot of startups struggle and our own team also had problems, so I wanted to understand why and find a way to build better products. This is why I created Product PH. We started organizing meetups and talking to people. Then, we wanted to scale our insights, so we conceptualized Product Cafe, a Growthhackers.com-style community.

“We just launched the community a few weeks ago and started getting our first users and followers using multiple channels. Our goal right now is to increase traction on our site and start analyzing people’s interests on product because we want to build a SaaS for product, something like a JIRA for product teams, with a focus on collaboration and communication of product strategy.”

Investor: “So, what product are you building exactly?”

Me: “We don’t really know yet. We have an assumption about what we want to build and we could start building that next week. But we deliberately decided not to build a product and try to understand what we should build first.”

Investor: “So, how do you make money?”

Me: “We’re planning to use Product Cafe as a small cash cow by running ads. Our site is based off a common model with relevant, non-disruptive ads to target an audience. We’re basically just applying this to our niche. Of course, our long-term goal is to make money with SaaS via a subscription fee. Our strategy is that the community will help us stay afloat while building the real product.”

Investor: “I don’t get it. What product are you building?”

Me: “We don’t know yet. We’re talking to people and observing what they are doing in order to figure it out.”

Investor: “So, how do you make money?”

The conversation went nowhere. To me, it seemed obvious that you have to focus on the customer first and understand their problem before building something based on your own assumptions. I’ve been there and everyone gets it wrong all the time.

The investor, however, did not care about the team’s approach. He just cared about the perfect pitch.

Understanding uncertainties

Embracing the uncertain

After getting advice from more investors