Running a Concierge MVP (Part 3 of Starting a Startup Live On The Pod)

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Why This Episode Exists + Nerdy Stuff Not In The Pod 💡

Part Three of starting a startup live on the pod goes deep on setting up a Concierge MVP. The Concierge MVP is often the make-or-break moment for early-stage founders. It's where theory meets practice, and where many entrepreneurs face their first real test of resilience. This episode exists because I've seen countless founders stumble at this stage, not because their ideas were bad, but because they weren't prepared for the emotional rollercoaster.

I love the episode and am excited for you all to hear it, but, since you’re here, you probably want some background stuff the casual listeners wouldn’t get value from (but you will). Here are four bullets I think might be interesting that didn’t make the episode cut:

1. One thing we didn't dive into in the episode is the psychological aspect of pricing your Concierge MVP. There's a fascinating phenomenon called "effort justification" where people value things more when they've paid a significant amount for them. By charging $1,000 for the workshop, our doctor friend isn't just testing price sensitivity - he's potentially increasing the perceived value and engagement of his participants. This can lead to better feedback and more committed early adopters.
   

2. The "Find Your Frank" concept has roots in a marketing technique called "persona-based marketing." Most businesses create fictional ideal customers - what we call a “Frankencustomer” at Tacklebox (a combination of people), I've found that basing your persona on a real person you've spoken to leads to much more accurate and actionable insights. It forces you to think in concrete terms about real problems and solutions, rather than getting lost in hypotheticals.
   

3. We touched on the importance of specificity in messaging, but there's a neurological basis for this that we didn't get into. The human brain is wired to pay attention to details that feel personally relevant. When you describe a problem in hyper-specific terms, you're not just building trust - you're literally hacking your audience's attention. This is why the Chekhov-style repetition of details can be so powerful in landing page copy.
   

4. The concept of the "wedge" is something I just can’t stop talking about. For our doctor friend, the productivity workshop is more than just a first product - it's a strategic entry point that could lead to all sorts of other businesses - consulting, software tools, a larger training program. A wedge opens doors. Here’s a full episode on it, if that’s interesting - The Law of the Startup Wedge.

Pod References

• Episode 1 in the series: The Idea

• Episode 2 in the series: Acquiring Customers

• Tacklebox

• Idea to Startup Newsletter

• One Person Landing Page

Timestamps:

00:30 Intro - The Last 15%
03:41 Episodes 1 + 2 recap
07:02 Smooth Jazz
07:30 The Concierge MVP
08:56 The Four Ingredients of the CMVP
10:17 Ingredient One: Pick Your Frank
13:01 Ingredient Two: Find, and Convince, More Franks
15:30 The Landing Page
16:35 Champions and Risk
18:19 Ingredient Three: The Wedge

Transcript - Feel Free to Read it Like a Long-form Article:

Today, we’re jumping into part 3 of testing a startup idea live. This is my favorite of the three parts so far because it puts us firmly in the scary part of life - what I call the last 15%. The place where things get worse before they get better. The place most people avoid.

Nearly everyone is good at the first 85% of life. The last 15%, though - that’s the hard stuff. The first two episodes talked through things like customer interviews and ideation, which are certainly uncomfortable but most people can rev themselves up enough to speak with a few dozen strangers. That’s the first 85%.

Today, we’re talking Concierge MVPs. This is the last 15%. This is the place where we lose nearly all of our entrepreneurs. It’ll be the first time you’re actually on the hook for producing something valuable. You’re going to try to help someone solve a problem and, ideally, they’ll pay you for it. If they don’t get value, they’ll see you as the fraud you always knew you were. Kidding. Sorta. Because that’s how most of us think.

While there’s nothing objectively scary about the individual ingredients of a Concierge MVP, when they’re combined they get intimidating. Which is why we’ll tease the steps out today so that they’re manageable. And, it’s why I’m trying to do a bunch of concierge mvp episodes - so you get familiar with an unfamiliar thing. We need to train the fear out of you with repetition.

There are a lot of things I envy about my tiny son, but at the very top of the list is how little repetition he needs to remove fear. I assume he’ll need more repetition as he gets older, but for now, he’s pretty good.

We went to the beach in south carolina for my…gulp… 40th birthday last week, and it was the first time he’d seen the ocean. You’d think this massive, roaring, vast, salty bath tub would scare him, and it did. For about 30 seconds. Until he realized it was OK and then we spent the rest of the trip chasing him up and down the beach like we were in the beach football scene from Top Gun. Or point break. Pretty identical scenes, really. I’ve always been a Keanu guy so let’s say the football scene from Point Break.

Anyway, there’s something oddly inspiring about a 30 pound kid careening down the beach and in one 30 second span trying to catch a seagull, then running directly up to a 90 pound dog that towers over him like a grizzly and belting out ruff ruff, then flying into the waves only to get knocked on his butt and crack up laughing.

At some point we lose that laugh when we get knocked down energy, but fearless, optimistic energy - get knocked on your butt and laugh energy - is essential for a Concierge MVP. Remember, you’ll likely be 90% wrong initially. The goal is to pivot quickly, finding the 10% that works so that we can lean into it.

Startups are a race to five pivots, and to get to five you gotta start with one.

Enough of that. Let’s get to it. Let’s run a concierge MVP with our Doctor friend.

And, if you missed the first two episodes in the series, feel free to go back and listen to them, but, as always, this episode will stand on it’s own. I’ll start with a quick update of what you need to know.

Last week, I kicked off the update with the… previously, on 24 clip, and a few people reached out to say their favorite previously on show clips. And one guy reached out to say that Fargo’s, which was apparently, “erstwhile on fargo,” always bugged him and was, quote, pretentious, just like that stupid show. That cracked me up. This guy has been holding on to that anger for years, just waiting for the right place to release it. Embrace to heal, my friend. So, for you,

Erstwhile, on idea to startup.

In episode one, we met our founder. They’re a doctor who’s become disillusioned by being a doctor. They spend more time in portals responding to messages and inputting information than they do with patients. Plus, their patient load has exploded, with many doctors shouldering thousands of patients.

This doctor said that they, and the majority of doctors they know, are burnt out. They’re considering either leaving medicine or joining a concierge md model. So, he wanted to build a business that helped them do this - coaching, community, courses, placement services - a smooth path to change career trajectory.

We talked through the idea using the 90% Wrong Principle, then laid out a Four Question Story framework to pull out the assumptions we had to test. Finally, we figured out the viability of early customers with the Committed vs Interested Test.

The Dr landed on two potential customer personas - one leaving to join a healthcare startup, one looking to shift to a concierge model. I noted at the end of the first episode that I hated both. You need a customer that’s already committed, not one you have to help commit. But, we moved on anyway, because most people need to touch the stove before they believe it’s hot.

Episode two was focused on helping this founder find these customers and understand what value he could actually provide for them. We talked through brute force customer acquisition and delta 4 and our founder did a great job of finding and speaking with all sorts of doctors and learned that… the customers he’d chosen stunk. The stove was, in fact, hot. He couldn’t find anyone who’d actually left to join a startup, and people leaving for concierge MD didn’t need help. The behavior he was out to help, didn’t exist.

But, through those customer conversations, we learned something else. That a segment of doctors had become obsessed with productivity. They were reading books like atomic habits and watching youtube videos on the GTD method and learning about Notion and actively trying to become more efficient. Lots of doctors thought this was their path back to career sanity and enjoyment. We also found out our entrepreneur friend, the doctor, was into the productivity stuff, too.

So, a new hypothesis emerged. We could teach the doctors who really want to become more efficient how to be more efficient. We could turn the 20 hours of weekly portal outreach into 5.

Which brings us to part three. Today. We’ve got a customer. We think we know the story they’re the lead character in. We think we know what success looks like and we think we can help. So, it’s time to put it all together and see.

It’s time to bring reality into the situation. Enough of what we think. We need to see how people actually act.

It’s time to run a concierge MVP.

And we’ll do it. After… a little smooth jazz

And we’ll do it. After… a little smooth jazz, with a brand new ad today. Because we’re releasing a new product.

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Back to it.

The Concierge MVP

A Concierge MVP is the simplest version of your product, where you, manually, solve your customers problem. I like to picture myself in a butler getup for concierge MVPs - tux, white gloves, all of it. There to roll up my sleeves and solve problems.

The point of a Concierge MVP is feedback.

It isn’t to build a product or to perfect your internal process or do something you can raise money on, although those might all be side effects. The point is to get as close as possible to your customer while they interact with the problem. To watch them struggle, and to help them succeed.

To answer the first question that pops in your head, yes, we’ll want the customer to pay for this concierge MVP, for two reasons:

• First, the only way to get honest feedback is to have a customer pay. If we aren’t helpful, we want them to be pissed. If the service was free, they won’t be.

• And second, we want to start understanding how much a customer will pay to have this problem removed from their plate. And that’s always the way to frame it. People don’t pay to buy their way into something. People pay to buy their way out of something. And we need to understand the value of the hassle we’re getting them out of.

Your instincts will be to give away the concierge MVP for free, but that’s just the lizard brain talking. Putting yourself on the hook with a price tag is uncomfortable - lean into it.

There are a few core ingredients for running a Concierge MVP.

• First, we need to define our Frank. This is our best customer, who we’re building the test for - the name Frank will make more sense later, but like any good experiment, we need to be precise. If you have a few customers you’d like to test, do them separately - specificity will be important.

• Second, we need to find these customers and build trust with them. We need to describe the specific problem they have and exactly what their life would look like if that problem were removed.

• Third, we need a wedge - a smaller piece of that big success we described. This will ideally convert the customers we find in step two.

• And finally, we need to execute the actual test. To build our concierge product, with a huge focus on the feedback loop. We need extreme visibility with our customer.

The first three are the hardest. If you nail them, the solving part is nearly always straightforward, though I know you’ll be skeptical about this.

So, we’ve got to find customers, build trust through specifics, promise to solve a subset of that big problem, then keep that promise.

Let’s bring our doctor friend back into the mix and get it done.

Ingredient Number One: Pick Your Frank

Step one of a Concierge MVP is defining who, exactly, you want to target for this test.

When you’re targeting customers for the MVP, you want to target the people that already believe what you believe. The ones on mile 25 of the marathon who just need a little push. Your job isn’t motivating or convincing, it’s guiding a ship that’s already left the port. That’s a lot of metaphors so I’ll throw you the one I’ve used 1,000 times on the pod.

For your first customer, you don’t want to convince someone to leave their apartment to get an iced coffee. You want to intercept someone who already left their apartment and is on their way to get an iced coffee and offer them something better.

We target pros, not amateurs.

Also, again, our persona is based on a real person. At Tacklebox, we always call this customer Frank. This started during cohort one, where a founder had an actual perfect customer who happened to be named Frank, and they’d constantly shout about how much Frank would love this or that, and it stuck. Your Frank is a real person who exists, someone you’ve spoken with, someone you understand deeply. The core idea is that if your Frank doesn’t want this thing, no one will.

If you ever speak with a Tacklebox alum, they’ll ask you about your Frank. Be ready.

So, I had our doctor pick the best potential customer they’d spoken with and then use that person to create the initial persona they’d target with three questions:

1. What problem are they trying to solve?

2. What have they tried to solve it already?

3. What would wild success look like?

Here’s how he answered. His Frank happened to be a doctor friend named James. James was…

1. Frustrated and dismayed with the amount of time he spent answering portal emails

2. He’d recently had a big bump in patients due to other doctors in his practice leaving after a PE firm bought the hospital and it was overwhelming.

3. To Try to solve the problem, he’d watched youtube videos on productivity and read Atomic Habits, and he’d tried to implement simple batching and timeblocks to move through the portal quicker, but he hadn’t seen results.

4. Wild success, for him, would be cutting portal time down significantly. Right now, he spent sporadic time in the portal each day that he estimated added up to 20 hours a week.

Everything in the test now keys off of this persona. We’ve defined our Frank. Step two, then, is to try to find some more Franks to get into our concierge MVP.

Ingredient Two: Find, and Convince, Some Franks

Our doctor friend didn’t actually need too much help finding customers for his concierge MVP. He’d already gone to coffee shops next to hospitals in the morning and chatted with people in scrubs and gotten a bunch of emails. He also… is a doctor, so he’s got a bunch of doctor friends.

Ideally, by the concierge MVP you aren’t doing a ton of cold customer acquisition, though it isn’t a huge deal if you are. It makes the test more authentic and we’ll obviously need to get customers eventually.

But, even if you have people who might be interested, you likely need to build more trust with them before they’re ready to fork over their hard earned money.

The way to build trust is specificity. Lots and lots of specificity.

I’m reading a book on Russian literature as I’m figuring out how to write a novel, which is absolutely the most 40 year old person thing I’ve said to this point, and there’s a part in the book dissecting Chekev’s writing that stood out. He writes in a way that constantly reinforces the feeling he wants to create. He drums the reader over the head with it. So, when he describes a tavern he wants to seam bleak, in one paragraph he weaves in that it’s dung-strewn, noisy, smelly, loud, banging and a few other negative words all crammed into like three sentences. And you feel it as a reader. There’s no confusion.

That’s the way we want our messaging to be. Chekev-like. Not subtle or clever. Obvious and specific.

There are a bunch of potential flows here - you might be sending cold emails or showing up physically in a place to speak to your customer or maybe getting on a call, but the core theory is the same. Specificity about where your customer is, and where they’d like to be. Current problem and wild success, all geared towards our Frank.

Our doctor friend wanted to send an email to a group of 10 doctors they thought might be interested, and they wanted to build out a landing page so it felt more substative. I love a landing page at this stage, and I’ll link to the one person landing page episode in the show notes if you want more detail on how to build one out.

The cliff notes are to make a landing page that speaks directly to our Frank - almost as if we were sending that person a direct email trying to convince them that we can help solve their problem. It should feel too specific - you should be uncomfortable with the amount of detail. That’s when you know it’s ready.

Here’s how our doctor’s page turned out:

The H1 - the main header - read:

You became a doctor to help people, but now you spend more time in the portal than with patients.

The H2, or subheader, read: We help you build productivity systems that’ll cut your portal time in half.

Then, a paragraph below really leaned into the Chekev thing.

You’ve watched productivity videos on YouTube, you’ve read James Clear, you’ve learned about GTD and PARA and have a Notion template at home. You’ve tried to implement time blocking and batching at work, but it’s hard to translate - what works at a consulting firm won’t work in the medical field.

We are productivity experts who are also doctors. We’ll help you build productivity systems within the boundaries of a hospital.

We’ve spoken with doctors frustrated enough to leave the field, but we know that’s not what you want. You want to help people. We’ll give you the time and mental space back to do it.

Then, there’s a call-to-action, which will be the thing we’re selling. That’s part three, the wedge, which we’ll get to in a second.

But first, I want to briefly talk about Champions. Because a huge part of any great Landing Page is the risk section and a huge part of any successful concierge mvp is a champion.

Humans are not apex predators. Evolutionarily, we’re squirrels. Foragers with predators. When we see something new, our instinct is to find the risk in it. And that’s a critical part of your landing page. Predicting the initial risk that’ll pop up in your customers mind, and assuaging it immediately.

The best way to find the risk is to have a perfect customer, a Frank, point it out. That means we need someone on the inside - a champion.

Our Doctor’s Frank, the guy named James, is a close friend and happy to help with the project - he’s a champion. So, after drafting up the landing page, our doctor got on a zoom call with James to show it to him in real time. After a few seconds, he asked James the key question;

“Why wouldn’t you do this?”

Basically, what’s the risk.

James thought for a split second and responded -

“Two things. First, do I need to implement this with my whole team? Because that’d be a nightmare. And second, is it compatible with all the medical software and HIPPA and all that?”

Great. This allows us to tweak the landing page and add in the risk. The H2 now reads:

“We help you build productivity systems that’ll cut your portal time in half. We’re HIPPA compliant, don’t require any integration with hospital software, and don’t require you to get your team involved.”

Champions are worth their weight in gold.

On to part three: The Wedge

Ingredient Three: The Wedge

Now that we’ve got a landing page that builds trust, we can sell something.

For concierge MVPs, we want the product we sell to have a lightning fast feedback loop so that we can iterate. This often means we need to solve a subset of the bigger problem you’ll eventually solve. Or, what we call a wedge. Something that’s painful and urgent and expensive and growing, but confined. Something we can handle.

For our doctor friend, the long term vision is to help doctors build out a comprehensive productivity system that minimizes portal interaction while still providing excellent care. That’s a huge promise. Too big for a concierge MVP. Businesses need to balance the big, long-term vision for the customer with short, achievable, believable wins.

Often, wedges come directly from customers. In this case, it came from our champion.

When I asked our doctor friend what a wedge might be, he reached out to James again - his Frank - to hear more about how he’d tried to improve his productivity in the past. James said the big struggle was sticking to a plan. He’d time block and create boundaries, but they’d always get broken by something unpredictable. Hospitals are a tough place to plan ahead, he said. He really wanted an expert to help.

So, after a bunch of deliberation, our doctor landed on a three day workshop as their wedge product.

Day one would be an hour-long session teaching participants how to track their time so that they could do a full audit. Day two, a week later, would help them implement a system based on that audit to batch and timeblock, with rules and contingencies. Day three, a week after that, would be a recalibration of the system after a doctor had tried it for a week to fix anything that’d broken.

The promise was - three weeks to shave 5 hours of portal time off their week.

It cost $1k dollars, and - at the suggestion of James - had a form to submit it to the hospital to pay for as part of their continuing education credits.

This was put on the landing page with a date - just 10 days away - for the start of the first session. The button that said “buy” automatically populated an email to our doc that said in the body “I’m interested in the productivity workshop” and noted that payment would be collected prior to the first session.

Our doctor emailed the landing page to the 10 doctors he thought were good leads, then ended up sending it to a group of 25 other friends in the healthcare space and asked them to forward to anyone else they thought might be interested.

After he sent it out, he sent me an email saying he was absolutely terrified.

Here is an actual quote from that email:

“What if no one signs up? What if $1,000 was too much? What if I can’t actually save people the three hours? Why did I do this? What was I thinking?”

There was a laughing face emoji at the end, but I didn’t buy it. He was stressed. Which means, he’s on the right track.

The last 15% is hard. That’s exactly why most people avoid it and exactly why you shouldn’t.

We’ll talk through the details of the Concierge MVP and how it went - if anyone signed up, if anyone paid, if he was able to deliver any value, if that smile emoji was right and this whole thing was a mistake, and if Point Break or Top Gun is a better movie… next week, on Idea to Startup.

In the mean time, start thinking up concierge MVPs and email them to me. Maybe we’ll talk about one or two of em on the pod.

This was the idea to startup podcast brought to you by Tacklebox. If you’ve got a startup idea and a full time job, head to gt dot com and either apply, or, join the self-paced program - no application necessary - and get serious with your startup idea today.