The Minimum Viable Product from our lean, bootstrapped startup - comments?
Published in 2010, this chronicle by @andrewstuart details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 22 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 31 comments
I felt bad for my observation of your title, so felt I should leave some feedback as well, I apologize.
Your primary message: "PowerGrabber is an invitation manager. It captures the addresses from your inbound and outbound emails, so you can invite the people you email to join your LinkedIn™ network."
I don't know what an invitation manager is, captures sounds non-friendly. How about: PowerGrabber ensures the people you email are connected to you via LinkedIn. No more lost connections.
I'd also drop all the trademark symbols, whilst probably more legal it looks very corporate and almost scammy as it breaks the line flow.
I'd put the benefits above the "What is PowerGrabber" (you duplicate your appropriate primary marketing message, only with more detail)
In reality your benefits are that the people you email are your linkedin contacts. I'd spell this out by a short scenario about losing a contact that would be really valuable in the future. The benefits you list are complex and scary and marketing speak. "Systematically".
From the application point of view - the most useful data is who do I email the most that I'm not connected to? do you offer that? A video would help. The "how it works" image isn't clear as to how it works. Your best bet is to make a few screens in PowerPoint and record them as a video.
Your privacy policy is a pdf, i'd put that as html.
I'd also consider changing the logo as when I see that logo I think of the soviet union which is uhm, probably not appropriate :)
It's a neat idea and I'd use it if it worked with GMail and Mac. It solves a problem and is of clear value to the user, I'd make sure your marketing messages were similarly clear.
Just my $0.02
I think the MVP here would be a comma separated list of email addresses harvested by sniffing in/out going emails.
That product appears to be probably more useful too. The linkedin stuff moves to a particular use whilst simple CSV email list doesn't - linkedin allows you to invite by pasting a CSV list of email addresses, but here's the clincher, so do many other sites.
Fair enough, have a button to open up the browser and paste in the list (rather than use the linkedin API this seems most adaptable to other sites, indeed the config could probably be a page address and div ID pair per site and users would most likely adapt and upstream their configs).
Yes I expect this is badly flawed.
Benefits sell software, not features. Don't tell us what it does, tell us the concrete improvement in our lives we'll experience from using it. (Hint: the things you have listed under benefits are not actually benefits. Nothing that starts with "Systematically" is a benefit. To normal people, systematically says "sounds a whole lot like work.")
Your button does not look like a button to me (CrazyEgg will tell you if I'm nuts or not) and is off to the side. If your customers are like my customers, I'd suggest supplementing that with a button in the main content.
You will have tough competition from i.e. Xobni. They are free to use, well integrated with Outlook and let you display LinkedIn info about every email address that you are dealing with. http://www.xobni.com/social-outlook
How about a platform independent version (i.e. web)? There are a lot of people that either don't use Windows, or don't use an email client ON Windows.