

Getting A New Product Off The Ground: Part Two - timf
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/11/16/getting-a-new-product-off-the-ground-part-two/

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swombat
_Things are looking fairly slick thanks to jQuery UI and a lot of AJAX, but it
has been a bit of a handful to test. If you have suggestions for doing so, I’d
love to hear about them in the comments. Mostly I have been doing unit testing
for models which are likely to have failures, and then doing manual testing to
verify that the UI works how I expect it to._

I have suggestions. Use Capybara with Selenium, driven by either Cucumber or
Steak (Steak is just rspec + some extra syntactic sugar; I prefer it, myself).

You won't be able to test _everything_ , especially complex user interactions.
However, you should be able to test about 80-90% of the site functionality,
and, importantly, you should be able to test the purchasing functionality (the
balls of your app, so to speak) since that should always be simple.

One of the decisions we've ended up leaning towards on Woobius is that we
think twice about implementing UIs that can't be tested. If it can't be tested
as designed, we spend some more time trying to figure out whether it can be
redesigned in a way that can be tested but is still clear to the user. It's
just one more design constraint, basically - can it be tested. If it really
cannot be done in a testable way, at least we provide an alternative method
that doesn't use fancy javascript and/or flash. For example, for the flash
uploader, we also have a basic uploader. This means everything else can be
tested, just not the multiple upload.

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brlewis
If you don't have time to read the whole post, at least read the "Speaking To
Customers" section. It has great illustrations of the eye-opening ideas you
get from listening.

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lionheart
This is great. Hits several things in completely different areas that I've
been dealing with too. (Namely setting up Rails in production and talking to
customers on the phone.)

I think the best thing about these kinds of posts is how down-to-earth they
are.

I mean, I do love the posts about the successful startups that are now running
with 5-man teams, scaling their production environment to handle millions of
visitors, etc. But those posts are a glimpse-of-the-future to me and probably
to most others here.

This post on the other hand is basically about the exact situation I find
myself in right now with my product.

Thanks for posting!

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robfitz
I appreciate the simplification of a lot of lingo from lean/custdev down to
something closer to "you make fewer mistakes when you talk to customers." Much
less intimidating and great to see some tangible results already.

Will be interested to see how you keep utilizing the virtual assistant. I have
a terrible habit of hiring them with a particular task in mind, getting all
excited, and then letting them idle for months.

~~~
patio11
The single best thing I've gotten from Lean Startup is the concept of doing an
MVP. I released AR's (a functional demo of the core interaction -- it rings
your phone and talks to you, then echoes your input onto your browser, that is
it) about six months ago, after about two weeks or so of hacking on Twilio.
That is close to my best spent two weeks ever from a learning perspective,
since people have spent six months telling me "Yes, THIS, I want THIS." I
thought AR was a good idea, and the people I talked to certainly had a raft of
appointment/scheduling problems, but even a one-screen crystallization of my
vision for the solution helped me move it from "something people might
theoretically be interested in" to "something I have a high degree of
confidence will sell."

If I had spent the last six months getting no emails about it, no signups in
the post-demo form, and whatnot, I would probably have reevaluated whether AR
was really what I wanted to be doing next, prior to spending a month writing
real code for it.

Talk to customers, though -- if you need to call it Lean or not call it Lean
to talk to customers, whatever, just do it.

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sourc3
Having a similar product (well somewhat) in the market it is great to see that
there is quite a bit of interest in the market. I particularly liked the use
of outsourcing part of your post. It is very obvious that the dream of one-
man-shop is over.

One suggestion though, I think focusing on a single type of customer (mobile
services that travel to the customer) might be more effective for the obvious
financial loss they face for a customer who is not home at that time.

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cpher
I'm building a product now that focuses on "services that travel to the
customer" (house cleaning), but for some services it might not be as big an
issue as for others. For example, a house cleaning service might actually
_expect_ them to not be home regularly. Kind of depends on whether interaction
with the client is required.

In our client conversations so far, missed appointments (not home) hasn't been
brought up, so it will be interesting to see if that continues to hold true.

Patrick, thanks for sharing your process!

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sourc3
This is actually very interesting. Because you can just turn this around make
sure that the person at home leaves their house at that time because someone
is coming :) Out of curiosity are you also working on an appointment specific
service?

~~~
cpher
Yes, appointments are part of it, but also simple timekeeping for hourly
employees, managing schedules, etc. So, a cleaning might be scheduled for 3
hours, but it may take 5 hours--this needs to be accounted for. We may also
integrate scheduling based on spatial analysis of available employees.

We're still early in the process (much earlier than Patrick is w/ AR), but
we've also explored the idea of integrating Twilio. It's nice to see how it's
being used.

Edit: it's not a general purpose appointment manager and reminders are not
central to my product. More of a basecamp-like app for cleaning services, of
which appointments are a part. What are you working on?

~~~
patio11
I cannot stress enough how much value customers will perceive from a few days
of work with Twilio. You can have remote crews punch in and punch out on their
cell phones. This reduces paperwork and saves labor costs.

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sachinag
I'm really curious to know how you found the people to do your phone
interviews with. AdWords? FoFs?

~~~
patio11
Ranking for a small batch of organic search terms gets me prospects, though I
have also done friends, acquaintances, and the old "Hey you have a sign
outside that says a buck buys a minute of your time, here is twenty, let's
chat."

This was partially reinforcing my preconceptions, though. Talking to too many
beauticians and massage therapists because when I asked for referrals they
never seem to know HVAC repairmen as well as they know other beauticians and
massage therapists.

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rgrieselhuber
I love reading these kinds of posts, and Patrick always does a particularly
great job at explaining why he makes the decisions he does. It's like
usesthis.com for startups.

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r00k
When I clicked through to your Wufoo form to sign up for launch notification,
the visual change was quite jarring--from soothing green to washed-out grey.
It felt very alien. Maybe if you carried over the same green background over
it wouldn't have had the same effect.

 _I_ know what Wufoo is, and that it'll be safe to give them my email. But
your less-savvy customers might wonder where the heck they've bounced to.

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scalyweb
Patrick, Thanks for sharing so much about your new service and what it takes
to get off the ground. I'm curious if you plan to use a true merchant account
for handling credit card payments since AppointmentReminder orders are
probably going to be larger in value than Bingo cards.

Also, do you plan to form some kind of business/formal entity? I see reference
to Kalzumeus but is this just a placeholder? I'd love to hear thoughts on
those aspects when launching a new service.

~~~
patio11
I'm going to be using Paypal and Spreedly. I have received e.g. consulting
paychecks through Paypal before, without incident. They were rather bigger
than any of the subscription plans I am currently contemplating.

Kalzumeus is formally organized as a yago -- basically, it is the Japanese
version of a DBA. People paying me money for things are really paying _me_
money for things at the moment. I will probably formally incorporate some time
next year.

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iuguy
Glad to see Patrick's aiming for a November launch. Patrick, have you
considered adding Appointment Reminder to the startups at
<http://www.startupmonth.org/> or joining the facebook group?

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Kilimanjaro
Remember, code will always be 70% complete.

