I was at an board meeting yesterday morning for a new seed deal that we’ve done that will be announced next week. I love the product vision – it’s in an area that I’ve been working in for a while across a variety of companies and will take a new approach to a very old and persistent problem.
The entrepreneurs have been living the specific problem for a long time and believe they have a unique and very informed way to solve it. Given that the company has had no funding to date, the founders have been scrappy and have cobbled together a really impressive prototype that they’ve been using to get early customer feedback. It’s an ambitious product vision that will take a while to fully roll out.
In lean startup language, they’ve got a minimal viable product. However, they are faced with two choices. The first is to polish and release the current prototype. The second is to use the prototype to continue to explore and understand the specific customer fit while building a production version from scratch that incorporates much of what they learned during the prototype development.
In their case, the customer is a business customer rather than a mass market consumer web product. Consequently, having 100,000 free users is not important in the near term – I’d much rather see them have 100 paying customers which might translate in several thousand users across all of these customers, as our premise is that organizations will have between 1 and 100 early users of the product.
We spent a lot of time in the meeting talking about this choice as well as overall product cadence. We left it up to the founders to figure out what they wanted to do and what they wanted the cadence to be, but we encouraged a one year top down view, rather than a quarterly bottoms up view. We encouraged them look at where they want to be in a year (remember – this is a seed deal, so we have plenty of ability and desire to continue to fund as they make progress, with or without new investors) and work backwards to a product cadence that works for them.
I don’t know if they’ll have a once a week, twice a month, once a month, or once a quarter release cycle. But I’m fine with any of them as long as they pick the cadence and stick with it. Given my deep belief in an agile development approach, I don’t really care what’s in the actual incremental releases at this point as I fully expect the furthest out they’ll be able to see is one quarter.
It reminded me of something I often tell TechStars teams – “slow down to speed up.” I see so many startups rushing to just get stuff out, without thinking hard about “what that stuff is and why anyone would care.” Part of this is lack of understanding of what you are trying to accomplish, but some of this is a lack of product cadence. When you have a clearly defined cadence (e.g., a monthly release) you can focus on “what’s next” while in parallel explore “what’s after next.” But in the absence of a cadence, you are always working on “what’s next” and never looking out any further.